[Blindmath] Mathematical document accessibility

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
After going quiet for a a bit I have decided as there's not much else 
going on for me I should get back to trying to work on my maths to 
Braille translator (BrlTex), except I've decided to take a look at 
things before diving back into it. In fact this may mean starting 
something new instead of trying to work on the old BrlTex ideas.

The first question is where are things and what is actually needed? What 
is the state of mathml, accessibility of mathml, etc and is there still 
such a great need for LaTeX? I know also people new to LaTeX say it can 
be hard to get started with, so might a simpler authoring system be 
desireable (eg. RestructureText (RST) from the python docutils 
(http://docutils.sf.net)) with may be an extension for math (may be 
using LaTeX inside a math directive, I think that should be possible).

Currently for BrlTex I am using plasTeX (http://plastex.sf.net). This 
seems to work reasonably well for the LaTeX processing (I don't think I 
had any problems with it on well formed LaTeX files except for one which 
was pretty awful to read anyway and did fail even with one of the main 
LaTeX compilers (something like it worked with the latex command but not 
pdflatex or the other way round)). However I feel plasTeX will limit me 
to latex files unless I create an internal representation system for 
BrlTex which might get too much for me.

The alternative, and why I asked about mathml, is that I now know java 
so wondered what TeX/LaTeX stuff is there for java and I stumbled over 
snuggletex (www.ph.ed.ac.uk/snuggletex) which is a LaTeX to mathml 
translation library. Now if I were to create a mathml Braille translator 
then I possibly get LaTeX support nearly for free by using snuggletex as 
an input filter. Any open source java based mathml Braille translators 
worth me looking at to save on my work? Also this design would permit 
dropping the intermediate (between LaTeX and Braille) as a MathML file. 
Also with the correct design then may be other outputs would be 
possible, eg. daisy book format, etc.

Java is also tempting for other reasons, eg. swing and SWT for the GUI 
are cross platform compatible (I haven't found anything which really 
matches either of these in python), other standard interface systems 
such as web applications using J2EE (I know python can be used for web 
applications but I think it depends on what system you choose, there 
isn't a single obvious choice), etc.

So any thoughts on the above or any other suggestions.

Michael Whapples