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

[Sina Bahram]

This seems rather strange to me. If you're willing to make the PDF
available, then make the latex available to the student on a contingency
basis that they do not share it with anyone else.

It definitely seems to violate the true spirit of open courseware not to do
so.

Take care,
Sina 

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Rich Caloggero
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 5:32 PM
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics'
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Press Release: MathType 6.5 for Windows is
available

I work at the MIT adaptive tech. center, and we have a request from a
student to make some of the mathematics associated with a particular course
accessible.  The course in question is part of the Open Courseware Project
(http://ocw.mit.edu) and the student is not an MIT student. Therefore,  the
professor does not want to give the student the latex source (I assume
because of copyright and intellectual property issues).  Typically, OCW
makes their materials freely available on the web, however all the course
materials are made available in PDF.  

Does anyone know if MathType could be used to convert a mathML
representation into latex, which a screen reader user could then read?  If
so, then the professor may be willing to convert the latex source to MathML
and make it available to the student.


 


-- Rich 
-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Michael Whapples
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 2:16 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Press Release: MathType 6.5 for Windows is
available

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

On 03/12/08 17:22, Neil Soiffer wrote:
> As John and Theodor wrote, the WYSWYG part of MathType is not 
> accessible -- we still hope to do that some day if we can get a grant 
> to fund the work (there is no way we could ever recoup the development 
> costs with sales and we are a very small company, so budgets are very 
> tight).  However, as both John and Theordor wrote, with this new 
> feature, you can collaborate with your colleagues that use Word and 
> MathType or Equation Editor.  You only need to learn the math parts of 
> TeX, not all of TeX, so that is much less to learn.
>
> This won't solve everyone's access problems, but I hope it helps make 
> math in Word more accessible.
>
> Neil Soiffer
> Senior Scientist
> Design Science, Inc.
> www.dessci.com
> ~ Makers of Equation Editor, MathType, MathPlayer and MathFlow ~ 
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