[Blindmath] Press Release: MathType 6.5 for Windows is available

[Neil Soiffer]

Since Michael opened the door a little, let me barge through and shout once
again that if people (and that means YOU) don't contact your AT vendor
(Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, etc) and let them know that math
accessibility is something that you would buy an upgrade for, they won't do
the work to integrate our and other's products with theirs.  They care about
paying customers and it is up to YOU to let them know that math
accessibility is important.  Developers of open source products need to know
also -- although development may be driven more by what interests a
developer in open source, it is still true that if people say "this feature
will cause me to use your product", that feature is much more likely to be
worked on.

If you didn't contact your AT vendor after my earlier harangue on this
subject, please do so now -- every single message they get  from customers
makes a difference.

    Neil


On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> wrote:

> I had been wondering what it might do, but I came to the same conclusion
> that for those very familiar with word then just learning the math TeX isn't
> such a steep learning curve.
>
> Is this really the best solution, probably not. I am sure that this work
> that Neil and design Science are putting into accessibility will help
> people, but sometimes I wonder whether these work arounds (relying on the
> TeX features of MathType) do improve things in the long term as some AT
> providers might say "well you can use it that way why do we need to do
> anything" without really understanding the problems and how work on their
> side might improve math accessibility. Neil's earlier comment about users
> requesting math accessibility in their AT probably is the way things need to
> go for the long term.
>
> Michael Whapples