2016 Equation Editor CogLab2016

Executive Summary

The CogLab consisted of a usability test conducted with 10 high school and college students and 4 middle school students who are blind. The high school students tested the Equation Editor and provided their preferences for alternative screen reader voicing of math items (referred to as “audio guidelines”). The middle school students only tested the audio guidelines. Testing took place during the 76th National Federation of the Blind annual convention held from June 30 – July 5, 2016 in Orlando FL.

The results indicated that many of the issues identified during the usability test conducted in October 2015 have been resolved, including:

  • Providing a Nemeth reference in the form of “palettes” that students can navigate to from within the Equation Editor’s entry area in order to select the math symbol they need.
  • Using Dot 8 to mark the part of an expression or equation that has been completed; for example, when entering 3 y 2 , after entering the closing root symbol, Dot 8 appears under the open root, four, and close root to indicate that the next entry, greater than two, will be placed outside of the square root.
  • The use of Dot 8 also helped students to know when they had successfully entered a required closing symbol (e.g., for square roots, parentheses, absolute values, etc.), as well as Dot 5 (e.g., to indicate the end of a fraction).

As identified in this usability test, there are still some issues that need to be addressed. These are categorized below as “Equation Editor Issues,” Screen Reader Voicing Issues, and “Tutorial Issues.”

Equation Editor Issues
  • Learning style Students with visual impairments, like students in the general population, have different learning styles and different preferences. Some are auditory learners; that is, they perform best when they can listen to content, including math. For these students, it is important that the Equation Editor be able to voice math as the student enters it on the Braille display.

Other students are tactile learners, and having a screen reader voice the tutorials (and math) gets in the way of their comprehension. It is therefore important that the use of speech be optional, allowing students to read the tutorials and enter their math using only the Braille display.

  • Screen reader voicing. Similarly, students who use screen readers have different preferences for how they want math to be spoken. As observed in the study, with just a few exceptions, some students prefer more verbosity and some students less verbosity, e.g., “sine” vs. “sin,” and how complex fractions are read. The take-away is to allow students to choose how they want math to be spoken, e.g., ClearSpeak vs. MathSpeak. There were two exceptions to the above individual differences for listening to math:
    • Signs of operation – students overwhelmingly understood and preferred hearing the actual signs of operation (e.g., times, minus) over the ASCII counterparts (e.g., star, dash).
    • Where not voicing something would create ambiguity, e.g., end root, close parentheses, etc.