Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Are you interested in maths, science, or programming as a blind or visually impaired person? We're Grapheel, and our mission is to help you study STEM (self.Blind)
submitted by GrapheelTeam
Hi /r/Blind!
We're Grapheel: a non-profit charity organisation from England, UK and our mission is to create ways for blind and visually impaired people to study science, maths, programming, and any other STEM subject that they want.
As many of you may have experienced, screen readers can only go so far when reading text with visual aids -- phrases like "as seen by figure 1.2" are not particularly helpful. That's why we started an online service called IRIS, which is currently in testing but due to launch formally fairly soon.
IRIS allows students to upload illustrations, graphs, diagrams, and any other STEM study images to our service along with a description of what they want to know about the image -- be it a full image transcription explaining exactly what the image is of, or just a minor detail that needs clarification. This gets uploaded to our pool of experienced volunteers who provide the transcription before sending the image back to the user, so that you can receive image transcriptions whenever you want, wherever you are.
At the moment, we only need help with one thing: we need some feedback from prospective users by asking you to fill out a survey for us. It's short, easy, and targeted at anyone interested be it a BVI person who is interested in using IRIS themselves or teachers/parents who are curious on someone else's behalf. The reason is that we are thinking about launching a sister service to go along with this, which instead would transcribe notes such as handwritten notes from teachers. We want to know what people want and how they would want it, and we would really appreciate your feedback.
The link to the survey is $1.
I've tried to keep this short, so of course, I am happy to answer any and all questions here. You can also read more about us on $1 and follow us on $1.
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Grapheel
We're Grapheel: a non-profit charity organisation from England, UK and our mission is to create ways for blind and visually impaired people to study science, maths, programming, and any other STEM subject that they want.
As many of you may have experienced, screen readers can only go so far when reading text with visual aids -- phrases like "as seen by figure 1.2" are not particularly helpful. That's why we started an online service called IRIS, which is currently in testing but due to launch formally fairly soon.
IRIS allows students to upload illustrations, graphs, diagrams, and any other STEM study images to our service along with a description of what they want to know about the image -- be it a full image transcription explaining exactly what the image is of, or just a minor detail that needs clarification. This gets uploaded to our pool of experienced volunteers who provide the transcription before sending the image back to the user, so that you can receive image transcriptions whenever you want, wherever you are.
At the moment, we only need help with one thing: we need some feedback from prospective users by asking you to fill out a survey for us. It's short, easy, and targeted at anyone interested be it a BVI person who is interested in using IRIS themselves or teachers/parents who are curious on someone else's behalf. The reason is that we are thinking about launching a sister service to go along with this, which instead would transcribe notes such as handwritten notes from teachers. We want to know what people want and how they would want it, and we would really appreciate your feedback.
The link to the survey is $1.
I've tried to keep this short, so of course, I am happy to answer any and all questions here. You can also read more about us on $1 and follow us on $1.
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Grapheel
Marconius 3 points 5y ago
Hi there, so I'm not directly interested in the description service, however I'm very interested in your plans for making programming accessible for the blind. What are you working on in regards to that? I've tried a variety of serpices to find accessible training, from Lynda, Treehouse, General Assembly, to Learn Code the Hard Way. I managed to learn a decent amount of Swift but once the actual courses in making the apps started, they quickly became inaccessible. I managed to learn enough code in Python to make my own games that run in the Terminal, but have also hit a bit of a snag on that front. Would love to learn or help in making learning programming accessible for everyone.
GrapheelTeam [OP] 1 points 5y ago
Hi there — apologies for not replying sooner, we’re currently having a hard time keeping up with all the excitement around preparations for the closed beta testing that we’re launching of IRIS.
I can absolutely understand where you are coming from. Even though writing code in a text editor is doable, the mainstream IDE tends to quickly prove to be inaccessible. It's a shame as they are meant to provide good UX, convenient functionality; not only to write apps, but to learn programming while doing. What is your top 3 difficulty you run into in most major developer environments? Any killer feature you'd like us to address in the future? At the moment, most of our resources are spent on kicking off IRIS which is for learning and teaching, including descriptions of figures used to teach programming concepts; this would be helpful for programming in the sense that if someone’s programming and is “stuck” with a specific problem that is happening on their screen rather than an overall frustration, they could take a screenshot and upload it to IRIS to get a sighted volunteer to explain what’s going on. However, in the future we might start projects around specific tools to make programming a more inclusive experience. Either developing our own tools, or working with larger providers and communities. At the moment, the only code related consultancy & training job we are working on is creating training material on how to use LaTeX and its workflow to write accessible maths, but that's more of a markup language rather than programming. I'm sorry can't be more specific at the moment, but suggestions are welcome for future reference. Meanwhile, have you heard TDSR, a command line screen reader for Mac? I found it recently and it’s been very helpful to me (fully blind), so thought to share. https://www.grapheel.com/2018/02/19/nanotip-command-line-screen-reader-for-the-vi-geeks/
Thanks for your input!
I can absolutely understand where you are coming from. Even though writing code in a text editor is doable, the mainstream IDE tends to quickly prove to be inaccessible. It's a shame as they are meant to provide good UX, convenient functionality; not only to write apps, but to learn programming while doing. What is your top 3 difficulty you run into in most major developer environments? Any killer feature you'd like us to address in the future? At the moment, most of our resources are spent on kicking off IRIS which is for learning and teaching, including descriptions of figures used to teach programming concepts; this would be helpful for programming in the sense that if someone’s programming and is “stuck” with a specific problem that is happening on their screen rather than an overall frustration, they could take a screenshot and upload it to IRIS to get a sighted volunteer to explain what’s going on. However, in the future we might start projects around specific tools to make programming a more inclusive experience. Either developing our own tools, or working with larger providers and communities. At the moment, the only code related consultancy & training job we are working on is creating training material on how to use LaTeX and its workflow to write accessible maths, but that's more of a markup language rather than programming. I'm sorry can't be more specific at the moment, but suggestions are welcome for future reference. Meanwhile, have you heard TDSR, a command line screen reader for Mac? I found it recently and it’s been very helpful to me (fully blind), so thought to share. https://www.grapheel.com/2018/02/19/nanotip-command-line-screen-reader-for-the-vi-geeks/
Thanks for your input!
fastfinge 3 points 5y ago
This looks like a really useful service. Unfortunately, I'm long out of uni myself, with no prospects of ever returning. But I do wish something like this existed 10 years ago.
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