my experience beta testing the MAVIS program

From: John Miller (jmiller@ucsd.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 23 1999 - 06:13:20 PDT


Hello gang,
Recently Chris Weaver from NMSU spoke at the Science and Engineering Division
meeting about the MAVIS program. Many of you remember the NSF funded program
took Latex source and created braille in the Nemeth Braille Code.
My readers are using Scientific Notebook 3.0 available from
www.mackichan.com to typeset the professor's handwritten notes
and a classmate of mine's lecture notes.
The program runs under Windows NT Work Station just fine.
Here's what I do with my readers to get Nemeth braille code notes.
I give them the handwritten notes, they typeset it with a WYSIWYG software
program Scientific Notebook, and they e-mail me an attachment of the
Scientific Notebook generated latex version 2e output.
I run this through the MAVIS filter and send it to my braille embosser.
The amazing thing is that my readers know absolutely nothing about braille
and the Nemeth braille code. I give my readers a 5 minute training session
in how to typeset mathematics which involves bringing up Scientific
Notebook and encouraging them
to typeset the equation for a parabola like y=x^2.
Scientific Notebook allows a sighted user to pull down the symbols
desired and preview the typeset output.
BTW, Scientific Notebook appears at first blush to not be very accessible
for the blind user.
Anyway, I thought I'd send the braille readers out there a sampling
of my lecture notes. My 4:40 to 6:00 Wednesday course notes were given to a
reader
Wednesday at 9:00 pm and at 10:00 this a.m. I got the following material
for my
reading pleasure.
note: Noone is forcing you to read this.
And if you read print only, just stop reading now!
The following is formatted for 30 cells per line, 25 line per page
braille embossing. The source latex file is available if you would
like it.
Enjoy!
John




*******************************************************************
* John Miller *
* CMRR-0401 *
* University of California, San Diego *
* 9500 Gilman Drive *
* La Jolla, CA 92093-0401 *
* *
* phone: (619) 822-2326 *
* fax (619) 534-2720 *
* email: jmiller@ucsd.edu *
*******************************************************************



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 02 2012 - 01:30:04 PST