Section1Generalities

Background and Philosophy

This website considers the question of how to best make mathematics accessible to people with disabilities. While there are many unanswered questions relating to how to make mathematics accessible, many meaningful and hopefully helpful things can still be said. There are clear dos and don'ts. There are several ways to address whether a content is accessible. A tools like the accessibility checker in Adobe Professional can be used to access accessibility of PDF files. The website checker WAVE (found on wave.webaim.org) can be used to point out issues with accessibility issues on webpages. If content passes these checkers this does not guarantee that the content is accessible for all people with any type of disability. But these types of tools are very helpful in eliminating many common problems. A declaration about the accessibility of content is always relative to the audience. Again, this does not mean that there aren't common and clear guidelines. In some ways the following is an expansion of a study conducted at Portland Community College [ref].

The questions of how to make mathematics accessible to people with disabilities is in particular encountered in education. Here a student might be want to take a math course and the instructor (and the university) then has to find the best way to make the material/content in the course accessible to the student. This can initially seem like a hopeless situation for both the student and the instructor. It is emphasized that the first step in a solution to this particular problem is a meeting of the instructor and student with university staff (from a disability services if such exist) to determine the best course of action. As this website will outline there are several approaches to solving the problem, but it is, again, relative to:

  • the specific disability,
  • the tools the student is comfortable with,
  • the resources of educational institution,

and other things.

Moral obligation

As an instructor at an education institution your greatest commitment is to your students. This naturally includes any student with a disability. Making content accessible to students with disabilities is not an overwhelming task and many simple tools already exist that can help you do this.

Legalities

There are a number of laws that speak to accessibility. In the USA two important pieces pieces of legislation are

  • Title II of the Americans with Disability Act of 1990
  • Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973

These pieces of legislation speaks to the rights of anyone with a disability. For out purpose here, they say that content should be made accessible to all students. The question of what is accessible is debatable. One answer is found in an agreement between South Carolina Technical College System and the Office of Civil Rights under the Department of Education:

“Accessible” means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use. The person with a disability must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally and independently as a person without a disability. Although this might not result in identical ease of use compared to that of persons without disabilities, it still must ensure equal opportunity to the educational benefits and opportunities afforded by the technology and equal treatment in the use of such technology.

Not all content can be made completely accessible to the point where they are fully accessible in an equivalent manner to the original content. The legal requirement is comparability to the greatest extent possible. On this website we present avenues to achieve this when it comes to creating accessible mathematics.

This site

This site will provide guidelines for how to best make mathematics accessible. We will focus on how accessible mathematics can be put in electronic document. This will include an overview of tools currently available to the content creator and reader. Note, however, that no perfect one-size-fits-all approach exists.