[Blindmath] Making Mathtype documents in Word accessible

[Ben Humphreys]

Hi folks,

I've been struggling with a problem all semester that may very well 
have a much better solution than the one I've been using.

Briefly, here's the scenario:

My instructor types all her material in Microsoft Word using 
Mathtype.  Unfortunately, when I convert from Mathtype to Latek, it 
produces such a jumple of gobblygook that even my best perl parser 
can't turn it into something simple to have read by my screen 
reader.  Latex is just not a format you want to work math problems in.

So I've resorted to having a human re-type the problems in a text 
editor using my own simple format, as mentioned previously on this 
list.  Example:

Integral x^2 - 2x dx

So I'm always at the mercy of rapidly finding someone to type things 
in at the last minute, especially for exams and quizzes.

if converting to Latex doesn't produce clean or easily understandable 
results, then I was thinking perhaps MathML might be a better option.

When I visit the page:

http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathplayer/tech/accessibility.htm#Some 
Sample Equations to Speak

with Mathplayer 3 and IE 9, all the equations read wonderfully.  So 
I'm not sure what the issue is with Mathreader and screen readers 
under IE9 but this page seems to work great for me.

Now for my question.

If I have a Word document typed up by my instructor in Word using 
Mathtype equations, such as the folllowing:

http://personal.bhent.com/calc/review4.doc

Is there a procedure I can use to turn these equations into something 
readable by Mathreader, similar to those sample equations from Design 
Science on the above web page?

Or is the MathML going to suffer from the same gobblygook that seems 
to plague my instructor's Mathtype equations when converted to Latek?

This would be so huge if I could get to the bottom of it.  It would 
mean I could do Calc II and Calc III with much less assistance and frustration.

Any help from those of you more initiated than me with Mathtype and 
MathML would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Ben Humphreys