Technologies in Mathematics teaching: A transcript of the voices of visually impaired students, braille teachers, and screen readers

The study of Mathematics presents several additional challenges for visually impaired students, among them, we can highlight the lack of accessibility of mathematical contents. For this reason, many students are prevented from reaching the desired and possible levels of proficiency in this area. This present research aimed to update the knowledge of the associated media and technologies, besides braille, which has been used for the teaching-learning process of Mathematics with visually impaired students native in the Portuguese language, as well as to know the specific difficulties faced. This study was centered in the reality of Brazil and was divided into two stages, in the first one, braille teachers and visually impaired students were interviewed, and in the second stage, mathematics expressions spoken by speech synthesizers were analyzed. Although, in the English-speaking countries, there are several technologies used besides braille, in Brazil mathematics braille is the most used, because there are no other more agile technologies in Portuguese. We observed that there are still problems in the mathematical expressions spoken by synthesizers, and many of these problems have already been solved in the English language.