[Blindmath] mathplayer, jaws, and math in graphics?

[Neil Soiffer]

Alex,

You seem to have lit a fire in this group :-)

I won't comment on the LaTeX vs MathML debate because I don't view it as a
competition -- they each have their pluses and minuses depending on the
application and they both can work together with a few caveats.  The glue,
as a few people mentioned, is MathJax.  It accepts some latex math formats
(LaTeX is a programming language, so there isn't a single syntax) and MathML
and renders them in all browsers.  In IE, if you have MathPlayer, you can
(with some caveats that will go away with MathPlayer 3 later this month),
have it speak well with your screen reader or other AT. It doesn't matter if
the original source is LaTeX or MathML.

For Firefox, there is FireVox which works with MathML, but I don't think it
has been worked on for at least two years and may not be working with the
current version of Firefox.  We (Design Science) hope to have a version of
MathPlayer that works with Firefox out by the end of the year.

At CSUN, I demoed MathPlayer reading Wikipedia pages.  It makes use of some
technology that we are working on that won't be in MathPlayer 3 because
there is too much work left to do before we get that out.  But it is an
exciting future where we look into the alt text and other places to try and
make those images and "HTML math" accessible.  Perhaps that will be part of
a release around the end of the year.

A slight correction to a comment Birkir made:  MathPlayer 3 does make use of
liblouis to generate braille from the MathML.  Unfortunately, we haven't
gotten any screen readers interested in calling MathPlayer (or liblouis
directly) to make use of that.  That's going to take pressure from their
customers (ie, from you) to make it happen.  This applies to commercial
screen readers like Jaws and Window-Eyes and to open source projects like
NVDA (one of the few screen readers that does not support MathPlayer even
for speech).

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