Thank you so much for all this detail. This is very interesting & quite helpful, and it's great you were able to communicate all this with your friend.
For anyone else interested: I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics (actual formulas) for the students that's as automated as possible. There are 1 or 2 commercial products that can typeset math in Braille (I can't remember the names but can look them up) but not priced for individual use. My university had a license to one of them but only for their own use (duh) and they did not have the staff to dedicate to my students (double duh).
My eventual solution was to compile latex to html, which the students could use with a screen reader. But screen readers were not fully reliable, and very, very slow to use (compared to Braille), making homework and exams take much longer than they need to. I also couldn't include figures this way. I looked around but did not find an easy open source solution for converting documents to Braille. It would be fantastic to be able to do this, formulas and figures included, but I would've been very happy with just the formulas. (This was single variable calculus; I shudder to think what teaching vector calc would have been like.)
FYI Our external vendor was able to convert figures to printed Braille, but I imagine that's a labor intensive process.
Partway through the term we found funding for dedicated "learning assistants" (an undergraduate student who came to class and helped explain what's going on, and also met with the students outside of class). This, as much or more than any tech, was probably the single most imapctful thing.
For anyone else interested: I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics (actual formulas) for the students that's as automated as possible. There are 1 or 2 commercial products that can typeset math in Braille (I can't remember the names but can look them up) but not priced for individual use. My university had a license to one of them but only for their own use (duh) and they did not have the staff to dedicate to my students (double duh).
My eventual solution was to compile latex to html, which the students could use with a screen reader. But screen readers were not fully reliable, and very, very slow to use (compared to Braille), making homework and exams take much longer than they need to. I also couldn't include figures this way. I looked around but did not find an easy open source solution for converting documents to Braille. It would be fantastic to be able to do this, formulas and figures included, but I would've been very happy with just the formulas. (This was single variable calculus; I shudder to think what teaching vector calc would have been like.)
FYI Our external vendor was able to convert figures to printed Braille, but I imagine that's a labor intensive process.
Partway through the term we found funding for dedicated "learning assistants" (an undergraduate student who came to class and helped explain what's going on, and also met with the students outside of class). This, as much or more than any tech, was probably the single most imapctful thing.