[Blindmath] JAWS and Nemeth - Newbie question

[Susan Osterhaus]

Steve,

I have heard exactly the same line from vendors: "We have never heard from
any of our customers that they actually want to use Nemeth braille with our
product." They have also told me that I am one of the few or only person to
request math support. I wonder how they got us confused; we don't even look
alike! I'm sure that many of you have heard the same quote. Every time I
give a presentation, I beg each and everyone in the audience to speak out
because of this, and I sure hope that there are a lot of "us" speaking up. 

Susan 

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Stephen L Noble
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 6:24 PM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] JAWS and Nemeth - Newbie question

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
 

_______________________________________________
Blindmath mailing list
Blindmath at nfbnet.org 
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org 
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
Blindmath:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/steve.noble%40lou
isville.edu




_______________________________________________
Blindmath mailing list
Blindmath at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
Blindmath:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/susanosterhaus%40
tsbvi.edu