Two useful spreadsheets to help a blind student access statistics tables
Following a request from TechDIS (http://www.techdis.ac.uk/) for advice on helping a blind student to gain access to statistics tables the Maths Stats & OR Network received advice and practical help from Sidney Tyrrell from Coventry University. This came in the form of Sidney liaising with TechDIS and then agreeing for the Maths Stats & OR Network to disseminate two spreadsheets she successfully developed and used with a blind student.
The first spreadsheet offers blind students access to chi-squared normal and t distribution tables. Sidney commented:
“…The blind student I taught used JAWS as her screen reader. Her sighted helper explained how any tables we used were laid out and then she could navigate using her screen reader which would read out the numbers.
In this example I have constructed a simple Excel sheet which JAWS can read which gives the critical value of Chi squared if you enter the significance level and degrees of freedom and also provides a normal table and a t table...”
The second spreadsheet offers further normal distribution features for single and two “x” values. Sidney commented:
“…A blind student could use JAWS as a screen reader to get values calculated in this spreadsheet. A sighted helper could potentially explain and help the blind student visualise he graphs for the normal distribution created...”
The Maths Stats & OR Network would like to thank Sidney for contributing developing and allowing us to make the spreadsheets available to the MSOR community via our web pages at: http://mathstore.ac.uk/access/index.shtml
