[Blindmath] JSMath

[Neil Soiffer]

I was away on a nice long vacation; I'm just getting to this now.  Since the
vacation wiped my memory of what I made have said earlier on this or
MathJax, here's a summary:

1.  MathJax is written by the same person who did jsMath.  Basically,
MathJax is  version 2 of jsMath.

2.  MathJax 1.0 was released a couple of weeks ago, and its getting lots of
attention.  Many places are picking it up, writing modules for it, etc.
Many sites that use jsMath are switching to MathJax. My guess is that all
sites that are "active" will probably switch to MathJax over the course of
the next year or less.

3.  MathJax can be set using the right button context menu to use the native
MathML renderer if it is available.  Choose Settings:Math Renderer:MathML.
This sets (I think) a site wide cookie so that you only need to do this
once/site (not page).

4.  If you do choose the MathML renderer and are using IE+MathPlayer, then
MathPlayer will work with your screenreader, etc.  This is true regardless
of whether the original source is MathML or TeX.

You can try out some examples on the main MathJax page:  mathjax.org.  There
is a page of TeX samples and another of MathML samples if you want to try
out more examples:
http://www.mathjax.org/demos/tex-samples/
http://www.mathjax.org/demos/mathml-samples/

For those that don't like IE, I do hope to get MathPlayer working with other
browsers by the end of the year.  It will take a little time for the screen
readers to then make use of MathPlayer.

In the shameless plug category:  check out my blog post of MathPlayer 3
(later this year) reading some 2D math problems including a long division
problem:
http://accessiblemath.dessci.com/2010/08/accessible-elementary-math-with-mathplayer-and-mathml-3.html

If you have suggestions for improvements, post a comment on the blog.

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



On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Roopakshi Pathania
<r_akshi_tgk at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
> Hi Alastair,
>
> I was thinking about the same problem for some time. Sagemath.org
> <http://sagemath.org/>
> also uses JSMath and I have been wondering if the problem was only on my
> PC.
>
> This is why I asked Neil in a previous mail about MathJax because it also
> uses JavaScript and from the website, it looks that it is going to be used
> by a lot of people. Plus MathJax is a kind of successor to JSMath.
>
> MathJax is capable of rendering both LaTeX alt tags as well as MathML, and
> it seems to me that both forms are unreadable with a screen reader.
> Frankly, this is quite alarming at least for me since I rely upon many
> sites to clear my concepts and even solve problems.
>
> I was thinking about contacting the developers.
>
> --- On Sun, 8/1/10, Alastair Irving <alastair.irving at sjc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > From: Alastair Irving <alastair.irving at sjc.ox.ac.uk>
> > Subject: [Blindmath] JSMath
> > To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" <
> blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> > Date: Sunday, August 1, 2010, 10:12 PM
> > Hi All
> >
> > I've just been looking at http://mathoverflow.net which uses JSMath
> > to represent mathematics.  I was wondering if anyone
> > knows of a reasonable way to access JSMath using a
> > screenreader?  If I open the webpage's HTML source then
> > I can read the mathematics easily as it's written using a
> > syntax based on LaTeX.  However, it would be better to
> > be able to access this LaTeX source directly when reading
> > the webpage rather than having to open the HTML.
> >
> > My only idea so far is to stop my browser from loading the
> > JSMath javascript files, so that the LaTeX-like syntax will
> > be shown directly, but this seems rather clumsy.
> >
> > Many thanks
> >
> >
> > Alastair Irving
> >
> >
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