[Blindmath] Question about doing math in notepad

[Ben Humphreys]

Daria

I've been struggling with this same question myself.  Here is what 
I've found so far.

On first glance, the simplicity of entering and reading back math in 
Notepad seems compelling given the learning curve, complexity, and 
drawbacks of the alternatives. But Notepad falls apart very quickly because:

1.  It is not a word-processor.  Therefore, support for fonts, 
special characters,equations, and other useful formatting is missing.

2.  There is no agreed-upon structure for defining equations. So a 
screen reader will not read them back to you in the way you'd 
like.  For example: x^2 would not be pronounced "x squared"

3.  Without an agreed upon protocol for entering equations, your 
content is stuck in Notepad forever, never able to be repurposed for 
the web or as a PDF viewable by others.

Another approach, using Microsoft Word with its built-in equation 
editor or the more powerful Mathtype add-in sounds interesting. This 
method has the benefit of producing good looking equations, special 
symbols, pretty formatting, sharing documents with others,  and being 
rendered to MathML for the web.  MathML is interesting because, in 
theory at least, JAWS will read equations like a human, so x^3 is 
pronounced "x cubed" etc.

However, as best I can tell, Equation editor and Mathtype are not 
accessible with JAWS.  And while the MathReader add-in for IE is 
supposed to allow JAWS to read MathML on web-pages, it does not work 
with IE9 (or in my experience IE8) and certainly not with 
Firefox.  That may be changing soon but I wouldn't hold my breath if 
my homework depended on it.


Then there is the Nemeth code.  The problem here is that only a 
fraction of students know it and no mainstream math or science 
teachers know it.  So even if the student can make use of Nemeth, 
it's going to require an extra translation step to convert back to a 
format an instructur can read and grade.

The best solution I've identified so far is called Latex.  It's a 
document markup language that can be run through a document 
preparation program to render output to many formats, such as PDF, 
MathML, your printer, or whatever format comes next. It's used by 
many folks in math and engineering to produce technical documents, 
papers, and textbooks.  It may very well be used by your math 
instructor to render his or her own assignments.

Latex allows you to write ordinary text files containing English 
words for math symbols. For example:

sqrt{4} = 2.

Latex positions and sizes the square root symbol for you when the 
output is rendered.

Latex may be entered in any text editor, including Notepad, but 
there's a compelling reason for blind folks to use the Edsharp 
editor.  Pressing F12 while in Edsharp turns on "Process Latex" mode. 
This mode allows JAWS's SayLine method to read equations like a human 
would, so for example: x^2 is pronounced "x squared."  Cool!

Here's a sample Latex file:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

I am a math homework assignment.

1. I am x squared:

  $ x^2 $

2. I am a polynomial:

  $ 4x^3 + 3x^2 + x - 1  $

3. The circumference of a circle is:

  $ C = 2 \pi r $

4. I am a fraction:

  $ \frac{3}{64} $

5. I am a sample sum:

  $ \sum_{i=1}^{+\infty} $

\end{document}

Note that equations are surrounded by dollar signs so Latex knows to 
italicize them and make other adjustments appropriate to 
equations.  Symbols are preceeded by a \ character.  Parameters to 
functions such as \frac are surrounded by curly braces { and 
}.  Superscripts are preceeded by ^ and subscripts aare preceeded by _.

Paste everything between the \Document... and \End{Document} 
including those lines into edsharp, hit F12, and enjoy having things 
pronounced nicely by JAWS.  Save the file to test.tex for rendering 
in the next step.

To render the above Tex document, you'll want to download MiKTeX, a 
standard Latex distribution for Windows.  Go to

http://miktex.org/2.9/setup

and search for

Basic MiKTeX 2.9" Installer

then tab to the Download link.

Once MiKTeX is installed, run a command prompt, change to the 
directory where your test.tex file is stored and type:

pdflatex test

This should produce a test.pdf file which should be rendered 
beautifully for turning into your instructor or other sighted users.

P.S. I realize this last part about running a command prompt and 
changing directories may be confusing to the typical Windows user and 
I believe there is a drag-and-drop method which can be used 
instead.  More on that another time.

Other areas for research include the possibility of entering Latex 
commands directly into Microsoft Word equations.  And how to plot 
graphs on a cartesian coordinate system for printing and producing 
tactile drawings.  At present, SVG and Iveo seem like only part of 
the solution.

Ben

At 09:48 PM 8/18/2011, you wrote:
>Hi,
>I am about to start school on Monday and I was wondering about doing 
>math in the notepad application that comes with all computers. More 
>specificly how to do things like fractions, square, square-routes, 
>and also how to find a list of the different math signs and how to 
>use them with a regular qwerty keyboard and a computer using Jaws.
>Thanks,
>Daria
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