OK, I did not take one detour on my path to my certiciate. I took two!

In hindsight, which is always 20/20, my first detour was probably more of a catering for my need for validation than an actual practical need on my education journey.

This second one? I 100% believe I needed it.

Admn 100 – or, as I have affectionately dubbed it, “Business Math for Dummies.” – was both incredibly useful and incredibly frustrating for me. I re-discovered my hatred of fractions, and that I am surprisingly good at graphing equations non-visually. But there were some difficulties that I didn’t know about, and wouldn’t have known until partway through the course.

First off, my textbook was an etext. I’ve written before about the etext book. This one was easy enough to navigate, though I can’t say I was a big fan of the chapters and units in the textbook collapsing, and needing to expand them, rather than going and moving seamlessly and directly from one unit or section to another. Using a braille display was absolutely essential for me to quickly read any formulas, though this was not completely seamless either (it was almost impossible to tell if a numerical value was a fraction). But overall, the textbook experience was relatively simple.

The practice exercises in the textbook were doable, but I found myself going back and forth between the textbook and my computer’s calculator. The same for using the practice exercises online – with the added fun of the exercises being technically accessible (I could do them, but not without a bunch of frustration and scrolling up and down on my screen).

Enter the veritable needle in a haystack experience that was finding a talking financial calculator.

I did find one, which does much of what I needed to. However, there was only one distributor I could find in North America, which meant I paid a small fortune for shipping, plus the exchange rate. I am only now (as of about 24 hours ago) finding a couple of shortcomings with the calculator that, again, I would probably have known had their been more accessible options out there.

And the quizzes… did I mentioned I hate fractions?

Join me tomorrow when I tell the whole story behind the “it’s just a few things” inaccessible quiz experience.