NSF Award
9906115
The Computer Science Department of the College of Staten Island, in collaboration with the Computer Center for Visually Impaired People of Baruch College, proposes a Research and Development Project over the course of three years. It will produce a set of teaching materials including audiotactile graphics to enhance access by visually impaired college students to the quantitative disciplines in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET). The computer assistive methodology for the project has been developed at the participating institutions and deployed in the development of a precalculus unit on coordinate geometry. The specific goal is to further extend access to the calculus as rapidly as feasible. In the three-year period, the project will create computer assistive course materials for basic differential and integral calculus for functions of a single variable and as much of the applications as time and resources permit. In each year, the deliverables will consist of text coupled with more than forty graphics plates captioned in both audio and braille with supporting computer files. The text will be produced on audio tape, as ASCII text to be read by a screen reader, and on CD-ROM. There will also be a print text for sighted advisors and tutors. Insofar as possible, the materials will be freely disseminated on the web sites of the participating institutions. The larger goal of the project is to enable students with visual impairments to read technical graphics directly with little dependence upon sighted assistance. The project is unique in deploying the technology to an extended course of study planned explicitly and in detail to meet the needs of students who are visually impaired. The methodology can be used to incorporate graphical materials in any course at any grade level. The general accessibility of SMET to people with visual impairments would be greatly improved by deployment of this project's techniques to all grades, K-16. Although the specific materials of this project are developed with the needs of college students with severe visual impairments, they should be useable by anyone with the requisite background in elementary algebra and geometry at the secondary or higher level and with any degree of impairment. Moreover, the core elements, text and graphics, of the course will not be specifically bound to the current state of the art in computer technology but will be designed so that they can be adapted to technology as it evolves. The specific course content will cover at least the conventional first semester of a calculus in a SMET curriculum: differentiation of elementary functions, their compositions, and implicitly defined functions, with application to rates of change, maxima and minima, and sketching graphs: integration of elementary functions with application to calculation of area, volume, mass, arclength, and the like. As feasible, such topics as numerical methods, techniques of formal integration, differential equations, and infinite sequences and series will be added.
