Hey there. I'm getting into computer science and I've very recently realized what a pickle I've put myself in. Weeks of research,, diving into 15-year-old mailing lists, and trying different solutions have been problematic at best and useless at worst.

I'm the idiot who posted about Braille displays not long ago, naively thinking I could just Braille out some UEB math no problem. Yeah I can't do that.

So if you don't feel like reading my whole post, the tl;dr is how can I do math without sight when I am technologically gifted and don't know a lick of Nemeth? Maybe LaTex? Suck it up and learn some Nemeth on a Braillenote?

So here's the long version. Since computer science requires a lot of math right up through Calculus, I figured I needed something better than learning a couple of MS word keystrokes for superscripts and funky symbols. I started learning UEB through uebonline.org and was taking the advice of the AT specialist at my college to use Mathtype which can output to UEB but after some research I've realized that UEB math adoption in the US is dicey at best... oh and Mathtype doesn't actually fully get along with my screen reader. So after some back-and-forth we decided I try my hand at LaTeX. Apparently you can type LaTeX into Word and convert it into beautiful math equations with the Mathtype plugin. I don't like this as the Mathtype app itself is not accessible (I can't even enter a product key on my own) and it also does not have any debugging capabilities available to me through a screen reader so if I typo somewhere and forget a bracket then I'm probably SOL.

I like the LaTeX approach since it's widely used and I rather enjoy markup languages. I could also most definitely Braille out LaTeX with minimal training.

That leads me to another problem. I cannot find an accessible LaTex editor for Windows. NFB had an article where they suggested Texnic Center but either it doesn't work with JAWS and NVDA or I was too dumb to set it up properly.

I could do it through Mathtype on MS Word, but again, no debugging and I can't even register the damn software without help.

I've learned Braille my whole life and recently transitioned to UEB but I never learned Nemeth since I had enough sight to do most of my work visually during grade school.

I went to a tech conference today where I got to try a bunch of Braille stuff. The HIMS rep straight up told me the Braillesense Polaris doesn't do well with high level math and the Humanware rep was only able to show me that Keymath on the Braillenote Touch could insert high-level symbols like differentials and integrals. I guess that's something but 6 grand is an awful lot of cash to drop on a rep's seemingly questionable knowledge.

So I've been tearing my hair out the past few weeks with no good answer to be found. Or not one satisfactory to me, at any rate. Anybody know how to get a good sightless LaTeX workflow set up? Hell, I'll switch from Windows if there's something good on iOS or whatever. Should I suck it up and learn Nemeth and go for the Braillenote? Something else? I'm really not sure what to do and I'm not really sure where to go when I've already gone through mailing lists recommending Windows XP programs that don't exist anymore.