[Blindmath] Mathematical document accessibility

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
The last two were of greater interest. I am primarily looking to create 
a solution for standard maths documents (eg. notes, maths on the web, 
etc) to make it accessible for the blind. I suppose the questions I 
really was looking for answers to were things like what document types 
(eg. LaTeX, mathml, etc) is greater accessibility required in, how do 
people really want to read it, etc? When I was at university I recieved 
the majority of notes in LaTeX, I wanted braille (BAUK) and nothing else 
was really meeting my needs (the university did have duxbury braille 
translator (DBT) but we never could get DBT to produce good BAUK maths 
output from standard LaTeX, I believe DBT just couldn't do it at the 
time I don't know if duxbury have tried to resolve the issues).

May be I need to consider some of the stuff at the last link you gave to 
try and answer some of the questions I have.

I have my views on back translation from Braille, the short of it being 
I feel its not the way to go, really we could do with producing work in 
a standard form, may be through a special interface/editor (eg. 
chattyinfty), then we can work on documents with sighted peers.

Michael Whapples
On 13/03/09 05:30, Sina Bahram wrote:
> Maybe some of these resources might help you.
>
> Nemeth Back translator on this link:
> http://www.accessisoft.com/nemetex.htm
>
> Another back translator:
> http://www.logicalsoft.net/TransBraillemanual.html
>
> General information spanning the topic of forward translation, on this link:
> http://sachachua.com/notebook/emacs/nemeth-trans.htm
>
> Nice short blurb on latex on wikipedia and so on:
> http://accessgarage.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/tools-for-accessible-math-conve
> rsion/
>
> Anyways, didn't know if any of that is useful to you.
>
> Take care,
> Sina
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Michael Whapples
> Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 12:29 PM
> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [Blindmath] Mathematical document accessibility
>
> 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
>
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