I don't like doing these, but I need to talk about my frustrations with people who actually get it. Maybe some good can come out of it. Maybe some blind math wiz will laugh and tell me I've done everything wrong and send me to a website that let's me do this all with perfect accessibility. so here goes.

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I'm one week away from completing a remedial math course in community college here in the states. I'm tired, stressed, angry, and want it to end... oh, and I'm insane enough to pursue a computer science degree, so I've got years of math ahead. Let me tell you a bit about my math story as a blind woman.

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I was terrible at math in grade school. In retrospect, it was probably because I spent so much effort on squinting at all the weird symbols that I had no time left to actually learn the content. Now that I'm in college and using a sight-free workflow, I'm actually getting it. The most surreal event so far is learning logarithms and understanding it easily whilst vividly remembering sitting in high school and being thoroughly confused.

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So where's the rant? Well, the entire past 16 weeks have been an exercise in misery. So, I walk into class, introduce myself to the instructor, and listen to him talk about math for an hour and a half. I go home to try homework online. What do I find? Not LaTeX, not MathML, but some proprietary code on Cengage's website. It's not too bad at first, but mind you absolutely nobody showed me how to use this website, so the first week consisted of me aimlessly navigating by headings and form fields. Then we hit exponents and quadratics. NVDA straight up didn't read superscripts. Thus begins my first email chain bitching at disability workers and web devs. They tell me to use Firefox and Math Player with NVDA, so that means I have to switch browsers, install software, and count my lucky stars that I know how to use NVDA since they provided no instruction for that. Fine, right? Nope. I have to switch the math renderer on the website to MathML, oh and they had to create a duplicate course where everything had been made accessible. So you know, separate but equal... just like the 60's! But wait, there's more. I couldn't switch the renderer myself. I had to have a sighted person physically right-click on an equation to switch the renderer over. Why MathML isn't the standard, and why this feature is locked behind something blind people can't access (even though it's meant for blind people) is beyond me.

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So the renderer is finally switched over. No longer are fractions simply different sets of coefficients with line breaks in between. No longer must I press an arrow key after typing an exponent with no verbal feedback whatsoever. Great, right? No. Now I can't copy/paste, oh and the math shows up partly as UEB math on my braille display and partly as computer Braille. Listen, I dunno who thought deprecating computer braille was a good idea, but they need to be fired. I write code. I work in command lines. Working in UEB on a Linux bash prompt is insanity, but I digress. So now, I'm in a situation where I can no longer read the problems on my display, can no longer copy/paste them into a text editor, and to add insult to injury each section of each problem uses a level 4 heading, so I can't just jump from problem to problem anymore. Oh, and half the answers once I max out my attempts still read "graphic. webmathematica-generated answer key". This might as well be a picture of a middle finger for all the good it does me.

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So, there I am, punching numbers into my $650 talking TI-84 Plus (not even the silver edition or CE model), reading equations on my $3000 Braille terminal that the government paid for, and... oh, graphs. Great.

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"Sketch a graph using the following function." "Choose a graph below that best matches the following function." "Write a function that best matches this graph." How about fuck you and give me numbers? I hate working with Wikki sticks. They leave a residue on my fingers that I can't possibly imagine is good for my Braille cells, unstick from the bubble paper they gave me, and it's hard to draw precise lines. Sometimes I lose my place on the paper and have to start counting again. Then there are inequality functions. Ah yes, allow me to shade regions of the quadrant plane and create dashed lines with fucking Wikki sticks. Whenever I need to graph a point, I use pins that routinely fall over at the lightest touch, even with a corkboard backing. So, how bout them quadratics? I like them. Really, I do, but if somebody asks me to estimate the vertex from a series of points one more time, I think I might throw the paper in their face. Estimate? Why the fuck would I estimate when I can plug points into a quadratic function in vertex form and do it algebraically? The Sonograph feature on the TI-84 is helpful, but nowhere near precise enough to assist me. Well, I made it through somehow, and I found exponentials to be much easier to understand. I also realized that the table and stat plot functions of the calculator are immensely helpful, and way faster than waiting for the thing to graph them. Not like graphing a radical function with an odd index will do me much good. I need the numbers anyway, so plug that into y=, hit tbl, and tell trace, graph, and zoom to piss off. That said, stat plots in the trace view are really, really helpful for spatial positioning of raw data... provided it's not some insanely complex scatter plot.

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Test day rolls around. Is it on a computer? Nope. It's on paper with a test proctor... that doesn't know math. So, here I am, writing out equations on my braille display, reading them aloud, having them copy it down, going back because they said it wrong, restating it, and finally moving on. Sometimes I come home so exhausted that I literally can't do anything else that day. This is my first math course done entirely in Braille. It's rough. It feels like I'm rewiring my brain. In class, I've a laptop running NVDA and Notepad++ with some Aftershokz on my head to listen to it. I periodically have to restart NVDA because the plugin that prevents my headphones going to sleep breaks. On top of that, I'm also managing a Braille display. On top of that, I've also got a talking calculator chattering into my left ear all while the instructor reads equations out loud that are so long that they don't fit on my display. SOmetimes students break into groups to solve more complex equations on the board. If I step more than 5 or 6 feet from my laptop, the bluetooth connection on my Braille display starts having hiccups. Nice work, Freedom-Scientific. 3 grand and you can't even make a solid connection. Who knows, maybe there's interference or something. Then again, I had to install a custom driver just so I could use the stupid thing with something other than JAWS. One day, I tried using my iPhone to take math notes because lugging around a 5-pound laptop designed for gaming and a glowing snakehead logo is... cumbersome. Well, turns out computer Braille support with a bluetooth hardware display on iOS is shit. Thanks Apple. Back to hauling a spicy pillow around.

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I've had meeting after meeting to discuss what my needs are. I'm so tired of this. I'm so tired of working thrice as hard as everyone else and still be forced to run to catch up. I can do math. The fact I stumbled through this course and somehow enjoyed it shows that blind people can do this. Usually I encounter people who are reluctant to make things accessible. This was a new kind of frustration where they were willing to work with me, but the fact I had to tell these people how to do their jobs is a type of ablism I hadn't quite experienced yet.. I tried taking this course last semester but dropped out because the shiny new MacBook I bought has garbage Braille support, so that was about 2 grand wasted. Thankfully, I sold it and now am much happier with a Razer Blade that I use for school and for audio work.

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I should take a moment to explain why I don't use UEB math or Nemeth code. The latter is because I never learned it, have no resources for learning it, and even if I did, I don't have any software that can provide real-time translation into text. The former isn't for a lack of resources, but for the fact that I find it extremely confusing, and all of the ancillary characters often mean that equations are longer in UEB math than in computer Braille. My ability to solve equations easily drops dramatically if they don't fit onto the Braille display without having to pan. I also find that screen reader support for UEB math is severely lacking once you go beyond basic arithmetic. So fuck it. Programming languages are turing-complete and they manage just fine with qwerty keyboard characters and computer Braille is about as close as I'll get to a 1:1 braille-to-text transcription in real-time. And no, I am NOT taking notes in LaTeX. I need my math to be concise and quick, not pretty. Maybe I can do my homework in it once I get into Calculus or whatever, but that shit ain't gonna fly in the classroom.

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The last big hurdle I experienced was 2 weeks ago when we got to the subject of polynomial long division and synthetic division. It was going all great... right up until I realized I literally could not type this into my text editor. I gave up, faffed around the whole lesson, and didn't come in the next two days because of how depressed it made me. I still don't know how to do polynomial long division, and I probably never will. Actually, this is the first time I've had to take days (yes, multiple) off from class because of how tired or depressing it got to deal with the accessibility bullshit... oh and then I got covid, so I had to study 2 chapter entirely on my own. Ever try to learn math from websites? Yeah, 99% of them are inaccessible. "clickable plus clickable 2 equals clickable clickable clickable clickable. Now we add clickable and clickable to get clickable". Yeah, fuck you too. I did it though. I learned both chapters... somehow.

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So, how does this rant end? Well, the other day, I sent support a message asking about why I still couldn't copy and paste equations. Apparently they just "missed" my email where I sent it. I snapped. I've had enough of this, so I cussed them out and ended the conversation. I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. Angry? Accomplished? Tired? Frustrated? This is basically high school algebra. It's not hard, but I'm still exhausted. Frustration, meetings, long nights, hours doing something it'd take a sighted person minutes. Why do I need 6000 fucking dollars of equipment just to find X or whatever? Why am I not offered these things from the start? Why is it my responsibility to dive through reddit posts and listservs to learn that Wikki sticks exist at all when there's an entire office on campus whose job it is to make things accessible? I've never experienced this much resentment toward sighted people. Not even in the music course I took the previous semester.

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So, how've I managed to get through despite all of this? Well, it probably helps that I'm neurodivergent and I like numbers, but it was mostly trial, error, screaming, crying, swearing, caffeine, and weed. Like, a lot of weed. Thank goodness I live in a legal state.

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Oh right, the book was never made accessible to me. Better hope I was able to learn everything from lectures and the provided videos. We're covering circles and sideways parabolas just before the final. I'm sure listening to the highly verbose captions on graphs that overload my brain with information will be thrilling. Also pro tip, don't listen to their garbage about factor trees? Want to factor a big number? Divide it by prime numbers until you can no longer divide into smaller numbers... or just get a python function to do it for you.