Methods to produce flexible and accessible learning resources in mathematics: overview document: Staff view

2.2 Staff view

Whether staff and departments are willing to use a method to create learning resources is a key concern. To increase the uptake of any proposed methods it is ideal if they reflect those already in use and provide much of the same functionality. We sought input from teaching staff but also from staff employed in producing accessible versions of mathematical documents.

Teaching staff

A survey was directed at teaching staff in mathematics at three institutions to ascertain the type of mathematical resource they typically produced, the underlying format in which they worked (and their minimum requirements for this), the formats in which they provided resources to students and their experience, if any, of supplying accessible notes.

We additionally asked if staff would be willing to share representative samples of their resources with us for research purposes and, with their permission to be anonymously quoted (fully or partially) in any resultant guidance.

We received 45 responses 16 of which also provided representative samples; 12 of the sample sets are available for us to quote from and we hope to provide guidance on working with legacy documents in the future.

Staff produced a wide range of mathematical resources (figure 1). The majority of staff are using a mixture of handwritten, L^aT_eX and Microsoft Office formats in which to encode their resources (figure 2).

$\includegraphics[width=\textwidth , angle=0]{notes-create-graph.png}$

Figure 1: The type of mathematical resources respondents produce.

$\includegraphics[width=\textwidth , angle=0]{notes-sort-graph.png}$

Figure 2: The format in which staff produce mathematical resources

Staff used a very wide range of methods to create images (there was little duplication) and so there appears to be the need to cater for the inclusion or conversion of multiple image formats. This includes catering, if possible, for images created within using L^aT_eX using the picture environment and packages such as xypic,pb-diagram and pstricks.

A variety of L^aT_eX packages were in use for learning resource production. Respondents listed the following packages (group loosely by purpose) as being packages without which they would not be able to produce resources:

amstex, amsmath, amssymb, amsfonts, amsthm, amsbsy, eucal, mathtools,
beamer (class),
graphics, graphicx, epstopdf, xy, epsf,
color,
enumerate, fancyhdr, listings, natbib,
ifthen,
latexsym, stmaryrd, bm, esint, xspace,
fontenc

One respondent his own packages and class files.

We were able to view the preambles of the sample documents and the above does not capture all the packages actually used. The exceptions were (in no useful order at all):

epsfig, verbatim, url, paralist, array, calrsfs, mathrsfs,
psfrag, lscape, pstricks, cancel, cases, geometry, keyval,
multicol, babel, inputenc, times, pgfpages, newlfont, 
datetime, makeidx, ulem, mathdots, hyperref

Staff tend to provide students with handwritten or PDF documents (figure 3), this latter appears to include resources which were created in Word. One sample set of resources did include Word documents and exported PDF versions.

$\includegraphics[width=\textwidth , angle=0]{notes-students-graph.png}$

Figure 3: The format in which staff provide mathematical resources to students

In response to the question “Have your mathematical learning resources been converted into/produced in any output formats specifically for a disabled student by you or your department?”, 15 respondents said yes, 9 were unsure and the rest had not. Only 1 respondent was able to create the resource format required automatically from their usual production format.

Support staff

A small group of ’expert users’ employed in producing accessible mathematical documents at two institutions were identified. The ’expert users’ could not produce the required output formats from a single master though each could produce some of the specific formats to requirements. This included various large and clear print formats in PDF and hard-copy, provision of raw L^aT_eX or ’human readable’ L^aT_eX directly to students and MathML enabled formats to permit screenreader and text-to-speech access, created using on-the-fly translation from L^aT_eX snippets in web pages (using LaTeXMathML, MathJax and ASCIIMathML). Staff were also aware of full document transformation and the benefits of MathType but notes were not produced using Word locally.

The cost of producing inflexible learning resources was noted. These require costly adjustments to be made in reaction to individual requirements and this may be the work of specialist support staff. In the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath, over the last seven years, support staff have produced full notes of courses in a variety of accessible formats.

Staff found it difficult to reuse old versions of resources though sometimes they found it possible to produce a single version which was acceptable to all the students requiring notes on a specific module. However, this was not always the case, new versions of resources were sometimes produced for each specific set of requirements. Staff found that the versions they created for particular students are not updated by teaching staff. As a result new formats for some modules were produced three times in the seven year period.

There were examples where students accepted a format that was not completely to their requirements because a better format could not be created e.g. Speech but no useful Braille output, non-editable format.