[Blindmath] accessible math websites

[Neil Soiffer]

FYI:  I know TeX reasonably well.  I wrote my thesis in it and many papers
in it, but I don't use it anymore (mostly) because I hate the write,
"compile", fix, "compile", fix, etc., loop that WYSIWYG eliminates.  I do
advocate that people going into math or physics and a few other sciences
learn it because many of their colleagues will use it and you will see it
and need to correspond with them using it.  Knowing it doesn't mean using it
though.

The point about actuarial notation is that it is not as straightforward in
TeX as a fraction or superscript is.  As you can see, the "angle" part is
split among the overline and the |, and those constructs break apart the
operands in a semantically unnatural way, making comprehension harder.  If
one were using real TeX, you'd write a macro to do this and it would be more
understandable, but the TeX variant used by Wikipedia (texvc) and most other
web-oriented systems is not extensible and only support a very limited
subset of TeX.


Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, WebEQ, Equation
Editor ~




On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 6:38 PM, P. R. Stanley <prstanley at ntlworld.com>wrote:

> I'm sorry, Neil, what is the point you're making? You may not understand it
> straightaway but with a little bit of work and patience you can get to know
> the system. The benenfits of LaTeX which have been highlighted on this list
> on many occasions surely must make it worth the effort.
> Cheers
> Paul
>
>
> At 00:31 16/03/2009, you wrote:
>
>> If you are willing to deal with TeX, take a look at Wikipedia.  The images
>> use TeX as the alt text.  Unfortunately, TeX is pretty cryptic for
>> actuarial
>> notations.  For example, "a angle n i" is represented as
>> "a_{\overline{n|}i}"  Take a look at
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_notation
>> and see if it is understandable.
>>
>> For more basic concepts (such as Algebra I and II), there are sites such
>> as
>> www.onemathematicalcat.org that use MathML and are accessible via
>> MathPlayer
>> with JAWS.
>>
>> Neil Soiffer
>> Senior Scientist
>> Design Science, Inc.
>> www.dessci.com
>> ~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, WebEQ, Equation
>> Editor ~
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 1:39 PM, <sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi all,
>> > Every so often, I find my math text inadequately explains a topic, and
>> so I
>> > wish to look it up online. However I find many math websites have
>> equations
>> > as images that JAWS won't read. Are there any sites you know of which
>> > explain mathematical concepts that are JAWS-friendly?
>> > Thank you for your help,
>> > Sarah Jevnikar
>> >
>> >
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