[Blindmath] Making Mathtype documents in Word accessible

[Birkir R. Gunnarsson]

Hi Andrew

Yes, I just mean that content providers will be more tempted to use
MathML to encode math information, if the end-user devices can decode
it and display the images.
Now MathML support in any hardware is so rare, that if you want your
math displayed you need to submit the math as gif/tif or/bitmpaap
files (images in other words).
This has disadvantages for the user, can't adjust, does not display
well on different displays and  and so on, and has the added
disadvantages there is nothing a screen reader can do with the info,
apart from trying to apply an OcR (expensive and inaccurate at the
best of times, especialy for low resolution images).
So if there is more uniform hardware support for mathml it would
benefit all users and has the advantage that the MathML will be more
freely available in electronic texts, which gives us much more
material to work with, and an incentive to develop better MathML to
speech/braille/other output solutions.
I'd be curious, for instance, to see a touch screen/Voiceover approach
to displaying mathematics. That way you could read non-linearly, since
the touchscreen can be explored. It's not entirely straight-forward of
course, user needs to know relative positions and be able to discern
them with touch/speech combination, but I think it is a very
interesting approach to reading mathematics, and not out of the realm
of "doability".


On 12/3/11, Andrew Stacey <andrew.stacey at math.ntnu.no> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 10:02:10PM +0000, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
>>
>> I am also hopeful that the EPUB3 support and rendering of MathML may
>> cause a revolution in math accessibility, if we can harness it, it's
>> just a bit too early for me to understand exactly how this works, and
>> it depends how those who manufacture devices compatible with EPUB3
>> implement the MathML part of the specs.
>> But, that's way off topic and subject for its own discussion. I just
>> wanted to point out the 4 different uses of Word with MathType, in
>> hope it may clarify some things for some of you.
>
> I just tried converting a random XHTML+MathML page to EPUB and viewing it on
> my iPad and was very surprised to find that the result was readable, enough
> that I'm going to try another one with a little more care.
>
> I don't know quite how this would help with the accessibility issue, though,
> unless it's simply that this would promote MathML considerably.
>
> Andrew
>
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