[Blindmath] Making Mathtype documents in Word accessible

[Michael Whapples]

Yes the touch screen could offer things for reading maths but I would almost question how good it would be for efficient reading, the concern of have you found everything/did you move slightly wrongly and so not quite where you should be. Therefore I could imagine it could be slow and may be for some difficult, although something is better than nothing and may be there would be times when it would be good.

I take more inspiration from the Mac an voiceover for how maths might work. Ideas like equations being made of elements (eg. a fraction) which to get more detail of its content you interact with the element (similar to standard tables on the Mac with voiceover). Also the use of positional audio to indicate things would be useful, possibly particularly when doing continual reading.

Michael Whapples
On 3 Dec 2011, at 22:56, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:

> 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
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blindmath mailing list
>> Blindmath at nfbnet.org
>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> Blindmath:
>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/birkir.gunnarsson%40gmail.com
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blindmath mailing list
> Blindmath at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for Blindmath:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/mwhapples%40aim.com