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The Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award

Letter of Recommendation Form
Thank you for your support of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards program.
Please complete the form below to submit your letter of recommendation in support of the award nominee. Recommendations cannot exceed 800 words. You will not be able to submit your recommendation if the maximum word count exceeds 800 words.
Please note that recommendations should come from someone other than the person who nominated the candidate. Please note that required fields on this form are indicated by an asterisk (*).

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Please enter your letter of recommendation in the text area provided below: Dear Members of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award Committee: I truly appreciate the opportunity to express my support for Sam Dooley's nomination for the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award. I had the pleasure of working with Sam at Pearson, while I was a consultant under Jan McSorley, Vice President, Accessibility for Pearson Assessments Department. Sam was the developer of the math equation editor which was a part of Pearson’s TestNav platform. Jan arranged classroom visits for the TestNav development team so that they could meet blind students and their teachers. We visited schools in three different districts in the Austin, TX area, including the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI), and Sam was introduced to NFB students, including Su Park and Harley Fetterman. He was also introduced to me and several other Teachers of Students with a Visual Impairment (TSVIs). Prior to these classroom visits, Sam had never heard of the Nemeth Braille Code for Mathematics and Science Notation (Nemeth Code) and he was unfamiliar with the assistive technology tools used by blind students to access digital content. After the classroom visits, Pearson hosted a meeting with subject matter experts (SMEs) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education for blind students, including many of the TSVIs who supported the classroom visits. Pearson secured consulting agreements with several of these subject matter experts, including me, and with some of the students that Sam had met. Sam stayed in close contact with several of the SMEs and students as he began to work on accessibility issues related to the equation editor. Within just a few short weeks, Sam taught himself Nemeth Code, and he created a functional solution for instantaneous Nemeth Code Braille translation that led to a patent. Sam had asked me how long it would take for him to teach himself Nemeth Code, and I jokingly said six months after asking him how long it took for him to learn his last computer programming language. As a TSVI and secondary mathematics teacher, I have never seen a tool like the Equalize Editor (EE). I have been in this field for 45 years, and in my professional opinion, the EE has the potential to remove long-standing access barriers to STEM content for blind people that no other current tool can match. I believe the EE can easily be used by TSVI prep programs in universities to train TSVIs. The EE can be used as a self-paced training tool by people who become blind as an adult, parents who want to help their blind students with their STEM homework, and even paraeducators, who have few formal learning opportunities. When I went through my TSVI program, I took braille as a summer class. It was a six-week class and we spent approximately one week on Nemeth. Needless to say, this was not enough time, so like Sam, I needed to teach myself. Because of my STEM background, I was able to do so. However, with a tool like the EE, I could have learned so much more quickly and efficiently while teaching myself and my students at the same time. The Equalize Editor is the only math editor I have seen that provides instantaneous braille translation without the end user having to take any additional steps. It is also the only editor that I have seen that supports both text and math content within the same editing window. This allows a student to explain their math work, which is a very common requirement in math classes. Additionally, the higher cognitive load of having to switch between a math editing window and a text editing window is significant, not to mention the added challenges of trying to do this using a screen reader. Sam has carefully designed the EE with these kinds of user needs in mind. He actively pursues feedback from users and subject matter experts to ensure that he is solving the right problems in the right way. In my opinion, the Equalize Editor is a tool that can effectively support braille literacy efforts in a way that has never been available before. I urge you to choose Sam Dooley as a recipient of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award during the 2024 NFB convention. This would not only be an honor for Sam, but would also allow him to continue working on enhancements. Additionally, this award would raise awareness about the availability of the EE so that blind students can leverage the power of this tool to study STEM and to potentially change the trajectory of their lives and future careers. Sincerely, Susan A. Osterhaus Statewide Mathematics Consultant TSBVI Outreach Program
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The Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award

Letter of Recommendation Form