Project Math Access DVD 04 - Graphing Part 2- Part 07
Transcript Start

Audio Description: Part seven; AGC and Tiger braille embosser, producing tactile graphics.

KAPPERMAN: Well as you know that tactile graphics are very, very important in mathematics and I would like to have you show us how a teacher of visually impaired youngsters might use the Viewplus software and the Tiger Max Embosser to develop his or her own tactile graphics to illustrate certain mathematical concepts for blind students or for example, to develop exercises or problems or homework or whatever to include in that certain tactile graphics that the youngster could use in studying mathematics. And I'd like to have you show us the steps you‘d go through to develop a rectangle for example; we‘ll make this very, very simple and if you would just do this for us please? 

ROB: Sure, so I'm just going to use Microsoft Word. The program to draw in really isn‘t crucial to our printer. It's whatever the TVI feels comfortable with or has on their computer, which these days, most people have Word, so it's a good kind of common program to talk about. So right now I just have a blank document open and at the bottom I have a drawing tool bar, which are all the drawing tools in Word. And they‘re pretty robust; all the professional transcribers, that at least use our product or are doing things with Thermoform or swell paper, tend to do their graphics even in a program as simple as Word, which is actually where I learned how to do it. So the rectangle tool is one of these drawing tool buttons down here on the tool bar, oval is there, so I could also be doing circles. And if fact, in this “auto shapes menu“, there are basic shapes like triangles, trapezoids, rhombus and etc., so there‘s lots of things that are kind of “pre-cooked" into Word to draw really fast math shapes. You asked for a rectangle, so we‘ll click on that tool and I'm going to click and drag this shape out and make a big rectangle in the middle of my page and that part‘s done. And then Iet‘s say we want to label the side too, for example, like an area problem, calculate the area of this rectangle. One of the tools that‘s great for labeling in Word is this text box tool, so I'll just click and drag to draw a text box. I will mention that by default text boxes use the default font in your document, so most people probably have Times New Roman size 12. And the second thing to remember about text boxes is by default the have a black border, so people who can see the screen right now will see that there is a black border around this text box. And that‘s pretty distracting for a label; you really don't want a box around a label. So I'll show how to take that off too. So right when I first created this text box, it's selected, I'll just go down to this little paint brush, which is my line color and right now my line for this text box is black and I'll just click the “no Iine" button. And now I have a nice, plain text box. And when I click inside I'm going to change my font size to 29 just like I change my font size anywhere else in my document and then I'll just type my label in. For this label, let's make it 10 centimeters or 10 cm and then that's done. I will mention for teachers who do prefer six-key entry for braille, Viewplus has a free program called Six-Key that you can six-key into any Windows program. All that we'd need to do is select a braille font here and run our Six-Key program and just tell it that I want to do that into Word and just six-key away. I could do all of my labeling; I could write documents in here; you can even six-key your e-mail if you wanted to. Anyway, that's just an option to remember. For folks who don't know braille, we also can translate this and that's how I'll show this. I'll label the other side of the rectangle so we can calculate area and since it's a little shorter, we'll make this one 6 centimeters, so I'm just going to change that 10 to a... oh, what I did Gaylen, so you can follow along. I copied and pasted another, that same text box, so instead of reformatting one over and over again, I can just copy and paste this and then just click in there and change the text inside. It saves a few steps. So I'll run our translator, just to translate these. And this is a literary translator, so folks doing math will probably want to hand-key some Nemeth in there. And anyway, there's my rectangle, you know, if I wanted to drop another text box in I could to that to label this “Problem #1." And again, make sure my line is turned off; I didn't copy and paste this one. I changed my font size larger and the reason I did that is so I know my text box is big enough for my label; that's a crucial part of the process. So there now I have a label for #1 and I can go ahead and just print this off on my Tiger.