Raised Math Project

In 2018, I was surprised to find out that there was no reliable automated resource for translating mathematics texts into Braille. Essentially, the only option a to communicate mathematics to a blind student in real time was through audio means: screen reading or voice. Screen readers are also not all math-friendly: some of them just skip mathematical formulas without alerting the user that something was skipped. Even when the formulas are not skipped, imagine listening to something like a Vandermonde determinant formula! I do not have any background in accessibility; I was drawn to the project when I realized that math professors have very few options to engage blind students in mathematics.

This has led to a multi-year open-source Raised Mathematics Project that involves specialists from the US as well as other English-speaking countries. We are now able to automatically produce Braille versions of several open-source college-level mathematics textbooks. The produced versions still require some editing. But a Braille specialist told us that 90% of work that had to be done manually before is now done by a computer. This work has been supported by the American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults and by the NSF through the American Institute of Mathematics.