The impact of haptic feedback on the perception of unknown objects (10 without texture, 10 with texture, and 2 complex shapes) was examined. Using a point probe (a PHANTOM), three treatment groups of students (visual, haptic, and visual plus haptic feedback) explored a set of virtual objects. The visual treatment group observed the objects through a small circular aperture. Accuracy of percepti...

A new conversion tool, LaTeX2Tri, makes LaTeX files of physics and mathematics accessible to blind or visually impaired users of WinTriangle. Through a variety of pathways, common file types, such as TeX, Word, and PDF, may be converted to Triangle, the working language of many blind or visually impaired students and researchers. Textbooks, arXiv preprints, class notes, and problem sets are now...

Crowdsourcing has now been used in many areas, including to support people with disabilities. We explored the perceptions of students from two countries with very different cultures (Libya and the UK) of what would motivate them to participate in a crowdsourcing project (DescribeIT) to support their blind and partially sighted peers by describing images in digital learning resources. Students r...

The number of underrepresented minorities (URMs; black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander) among US medical school faculty is markedly low when compared with their respective percent representation of the US population. Women URMs are doubly underrepresented, particularly as the academic rank advances from the ins...