[Blindmath] JAWS and Nemeth - Newbie question

Birkir Rúnar Gunnarsson birkir.gunnarsson at gmail.com
Fri Feb 18 00:35:33 UTC 2011


This is very true.
For a braille code that has been around for almost 50 years, it is
more than a little surprising that it does not get any type of support
from screen readers.
Though I said that there are technology challenges associated with
displaying Nemeth math in web pages, or other documents, these are not
something that cannot be overcome.
So I echo Steve's point here.
I hope to be able to post suggestions for temporary work arounds, but
let FS know that this feature is needed.
Thanks
-Birkir


On 2/18/11, Stephen L Noble <steve.noble at louisville.edu> wrote:
> By the way, there's a crucial subtext to this issue which is often
> overlooked: that vendors of assistive technology need to hear as much
> input from customers as possible. I often have conversations with
> developers about something they need to support, and I am told that I am
> the one of the few (sometimes they say I am the only) persons who has
> ever said anything about the need for math support.  Case in point, I
> specifically asked the product manager of a widely used screen reader
> about supporting Nemeth in their refreshable braille display output and
> I was told, "We have never heard from any of our customers that they
> actually want to use Nemeth braille with our product." Believe it or
> not, that is a quote.
>
> So, the moral of this lesson is none of us should be satisfied with the
> response that "our product cannot do what you need." I suspect everybody
> on this list believes that braille support for mathematics is a vital
> issue, so if everybody on this list started sending emails or made phone
> calls to tell the company that makes the products he/she uses that
> supporting math (including Nemeth braille) should be considered
> mandatory.
>
> --Steve Noble
> steve.noble at louisville.edu
> 502-969-3088
>
>>>> "Kodeswaran, Balaji" <bkodeswaran at air.org> 2/17/2011 3:32 PM >>>
> Jose,
>
> Thank you for your response. However, I am unclear on how I get Nemeth
> to the RBD through JAWS? On our website, say we are rendering the
> content as MathML. I am told (by JAWS tech support) that JAWS cannot
> convert MathML to Nemeth. Also, since our users are primarily Firefox
> users, they won't have the benefit of MathPlayer (although it is not
> clear what this provides for IE/JAWS users in this regard). Our thoughts
> were to see if we could transcribe to Nemeth (Grade 1), stick into the
> web page in a hidden DIV next to the MathML and see if there are any
> ARIA (or JAWS specific markup tags) that we could put on the page to
> send this Nemeth to the Braille display.
>
> Thanks
>
>
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