Students who are blind are typically one to three years behind their seeing counterparts in mathematics and science. We posit that a key reason for this resides in the inability of such students to access multimodal embodied communicative behavior of mathematics instructors. This impedes the ability of blind students and their teachers to maintain situated communication. In this paper, we set forth the relevant phenomenological analyses to support this claim. We show that mathematical communication and instruction are inherent embodied; that the blind are able to conceptualize visuo-spatial information; and argue that uptake of embodied behavior is critical to receiving relevant mathematical information. Based on this analysis, we advance an approach to provide students who are blind with awareness of their teachers' deictic gestural activity via a set of haptic output devices. We lay forth a set of open research question that researcher in multimodal interfaces may address.
name of conference
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Multimodal interfaces
