[Blindmath] Mathematical document accessibility

Mon Mar 16 23:53:23 UTC 2009

MathPlayer is a work in progress.  I have a grant application pending that
includes work to get navigation into MathPlayer (among many other things).
I hope it is funded... Navigation is the big unfinished feature.  I think
Braille support is at least as important, and that is done in the
development version... except the screen reader vendors haven't made it a
priority to support that.

I've said it before... developers/vendors (and that includes free software
such as NVDA) won't make it a priority unless their users tell them it needs
to be one.  If you want to see good math support in your AT software, if is
up to YOU to tell the vendors it is important.  I'll be at CSUN in a few
days pushing them to do better support, but I'm not a paying customer and I
have an obvious vested interest, so I'm not going to change their
priorities.

If you have not done so, contact your AT software supplier and tell them
you'd buy an upgrade if they enhanced their math support.  Even if you have
done, it wouldn't hurt to remind them.

    Neil

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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