[Blindmath] Introducing myself

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
Firstly welcome to the list, I hope you find some useful information 
from being on this list. I would imagine you may have some more specific 
questions over time, however it may be worth just giving a little more 
background (eg. what do you already know about making maths accessible 
on the web, might you want to evaluate whether a resource is accessible 
before recommending it to a student, etc).

Here are some brief notes on various document formats:
* PDF: Generally poor for accessibility, for math content extremely poor 
to inaccessible. I have had occasions actually where PDF has been 
useful. The first is that PDF does still maintain the printed layout, 
therefore when a reference is given to a page in a document I can find 
it easily (it actually has been a problem when I was using a book on 
safaribooks for an OU course and a TMA gave a reference to a page but 
not the chapter in the book). The second case where PDF has been useful, 
is when I desire to know the layout of the text (I use linux and so have 
used pdftotext with the -layout option, however this only works for 
text). These benefits are of little advantage if the other options are 
used properly (eg. if giving a reference ensure that it can be located 
without access to page numbers, like the case is with HTML, give chapter 
and section/subsection numbers).
* HTML with images for math but alt-tags set to the LaTeX source: The 
big advantage of this is that it doesn't rely on any specific package, 
about any web browser will allow access to the math. The big 
disadvantage is that the reader needs to know enough LaTeX to read this 
and also it is possibly not the most optimal way of reading maths (IE. 
there is mark up which may not be natural to the reader, there is no 
structural navigation of an equation). Also the image of the equation 
will not follow the visual settings the user has set on the computer 
(eg. colours and font size).
* Documents containing MathML: I feel this may have the greatest 
potential, however the biggest disadvantage is that it makes the user 
much more heavily dependent on tools to access the content. What I mean 
by this is that on Mac and Linux, there is no screen reader which works 
with a browser to make mathml accessible. Also on windows, as I 
understand it, while mathplayer makes it accessible with a screen 
reader, there is still a lack of any sophisticated navigation of the 
equation.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, J.Fine wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm not blind but I know mathematics and I work at the Open University on technical aspects of mathematical content.  Lately I've been doing a lot related to accessible mathematics on web pages, and if you don't mind I'll be asking some questions on this list.
>
> For what it's worth, my mathematical interests are in the geometry and combinatorics of convex polytopes, and in knots and braids.  My PhD was in algebraic geometry.  But I'm here so that you can help me make web pages more accessible.
>
> Best regards
>
>
> Jonathan Fine (Technical Developer at the Open University)
>