[Blindmath] Mathematical document accessibility

Mon Mar 16 20:34:33 UTC 2009

I think you have hit a very good point, the difference between reading 
the source of a document and using viewer software. A well designed 
viewer should be better than viewing/reading the source for any format, 
however for LaTeX there is no really good accessible viewer (may be 
emacspeak helps, I haven't tried it for LaTeX). For mathml you have an 
accessible viewer in the form of mathplayer (I believe the accessibility 
of that could be improved, I will discuss this point later). If for both 
you had to read the source then LaTeX would certainly be preferable.

My problems with mathplayer (these can be applied more generally to what 
I feel a good accessible viewer should provide) are to do with the 
amount of navigation users have of the equation. Having everything spelt 
out and just revealed as one long string makes it hard to work with. 
What happens if I have a long equation and want to jump to say the 
denominator of a fraction (as that might be the important part for the 
working at that time) currently I have to scroll through loads of text, 
ideally I could do with a hotkey to jump to particular elements of an 
equation (like most screen readers do for things like headings, tables, 
etc in web pages). In saying this I don't mean to do down the work done 
on mathplayer, I know that to enable all I would like to see requires 
work from the screen reader manufacturers, and this is why we should 
remind the developers of our favourite screen reader that math support 
is important to us.

I know Neil has mentioned that PDF could support tagging of maths and 
when this is properly supported then may be you will be as happy reading 
output from LaTeX as you are when viewing mathml with mathplayer. BTW: 
you can always convert LaTeX to mathml then view that with mathplayer, 
this is where a good editor comes in, you can configure more advanced 
ones to launch scripts/tools on the press of a key so you could get the 
LaTeX translated to mathml and then shown in internet explorer all 
automatically at the press of a key. As I remember for windows users 
edsharp supports LaTeX editing and probably fits the requirements of a 
good editor for LaTeX.

Michael Whapples
On 16/03/09 17:34, Roopakshi Pathania wrote:
>
>
> MathML may be hard from the coding aspect, but it is easier to read at least for a beginner.
> Reading LaTeX using a simple editor like NotePad causes the focus to shift from understanding Mathematics to understanding the structure of an expression.
> That is why you like Emacs, because it reads LaTeX in a completely different way. I can't say this from my personal experience as I'm a windows user, but because I have gone through T. V. Raman's (the creater of Emacspeak) thesis.
>
> I wish I was that I was a Linux user only to use Emacspeak.
> But, while I remain a windows user, I respect what MathML has done, not only for me, but for many other blind users who have yet to learn Mathematics.
>
> Regards
> --- On Sun, 3/15/09, Jason White<jason at jasonjgw.net>  wrote:
>
>    
>> From: Jason White<jason at jasonjgw.net>
>> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Mathematical document accessibility
>> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
>> Date: Sunday, March 15, 2009, 3:14 PM
>> Michael Whapples<mwhapples at aim.com>  wrote:
>>      
>>> * MathML is very verbose, you would never want to work
>>>        
>> with the actual
>>      
>>> code itself when creating or reading a document. LaTeX
>>>        
>> is much better in
>>      
>>> that respect.
>>>        
>> [other excellent points omitted for brevity]
>>
>> This is a serious disadvantage. If I run itex2mml (a TeX to
>> MathML converter)
>> and type in the TeX code for the quadratic formula, I get:
>> $x= \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$
>> <math xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML'
>> display='inline'><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo
>> lspace="verythinmathspace"
>> rspace="0em">−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi>
>> <mn>2
>> </mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4
>> </mn><mi>ac</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2
>> </mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></math>
>>
>> Now compare the TeX version on the first line with the
>> MathML version starting
>> on the second line, and consider which you would prefer to
>> read or edit.
>>
>> To generate MathML, you either have to convert it from
>> another format such as
>> TeX, or you are forced to use a wysiwyg editor. Since the
>> second option raises
>> accessibility problems of its own so far as mathematics is
>> concerned, this
>> leaves the first option, which involves writing in
>> TeX/LaTeX anyway, so we're
>> back where we started.
>>
>> I should add that I don't favour wysiwyg editors. After
>> having learned Emacs
>> and Vi, it becomes obvious how painfully inefficient the
>> editors provided by
>> typical word processors are, even the ones with good
>> keyboard support such as
>> WordPerfect 5.1 and 6.0, which is what I was using before
>> moving full-time to
>> Linux.
>>
>>
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>>      
>
>
>
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