[Blindmath] Missing and unwanted pauses in MathPlayer output

[J.Fine]

Hi

First, please let me know if this message is not appropriate for this list.

I've found that MathPlayer sometimes gets pauses wrong, even with MathML generated by MathType.  Here's an example, from a sample file Sarah Jevnikar posted to this list on 3 April.

What one should get is - number of ways to arrange 9 books ...
MathPlayer plus Jaws10 gives - numberofwastoarrange 9 books ...

The last example misses the spaces between the words.  Here's another example, taken from a source file for an Open University course.  It has extra spaces, this time inside numbers.

What one should get is - 0.1498 plus 0.0741 plus 0.4293 plus 0.0280 plus 0.2218
MathPlayer plus Jaws gives -  0. 1498  plus 0.0 741  plus 0. 4293  plus 0.0 28 0  plus 0. 2218

Sarah's sample file does not have these problems, even though also produced using Word plus MathType plus MathPage.

That said, from my tests it seems that MathPlayer can do a pretty decent job of generating speech text provided the MathML that comes in is just right for that purpose.  (These tests used an evaluation copy of MathFlow, which Design Science kindly provided.)

In both cases the problems is spaces between characters.  It seems to me that errors here are fairly easy to detect and correct if you can see the text, but not if you can only listen to it.

The rest of this message is a brief technical explanation.  In the first example MathPlayer ignores the non-breaking space characters between the words.  Hence the funny pseudoword wastoarrange, which should be ways to arrange.  In the second example MathType has grouped the digits and decimal point in a strange way and MathPlayer does not correct this grouping.


Best regards


Jonathan

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