[Blindmath] Missing and unwanted pauses in MathPlayer output

[Stephen L Noble]

Hi Jonathan,

MathPlayer doesn't do anything with the text on the page, it only pays
attention to MathML islands on the page.  In your example - "number of
ways to arrange 9 books" - that should just be plain HTML markup, there
would be no reason to mark up that text within a MathML island, so I
don't understand the connection. Not sure about your other example, but
I assume that is from a simple addition problem where perhaps it is
indeed marked up as MathML. It is possible that different voice families
will impact some aspects of the reading of a series of numbers,
regardless if it is within a MathML island or just plain text on a page.
Since I do a lot of conversion with MathType and routinely listen to
lots of pages with synthetic speech as part of the quality assurance
process, I have certainly noticed this. 

Neil Soiffer from Design Science usually monitors this list. You might
want to send him a copy of one of the pages upon which you found the
problem. His email is neils at dessci.com 

Best regards,

--Steve Noble 

>>> J.Fine <j.fine at open.ac.uk> 4/14/2011 5:01 AM >>>
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

-- 
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an
exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland
(SC 038302).


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