[Blindmath] Translating documents with MathML into Nemeth (CORRECTION)

[Neil Soiffer]

MathPlayer only translates the math islands.  That will lead to some
strangeness/problems, but hopefully the problems will be minimal and not
disruptive.  If you can get the screen readers to support Nemeth, I'll have
to bow and kiss your shoes as your powers greatly exceed mine :-)

MathPlayer does pass along in its interface to liblouis whether an equation
is an inline or display equation, but I don't remember whether liblouis does
something different for those cases.  I don't believe liblouis is very good
with 2d display/alignment at the moment.  John Boyer is very proactive about
fixing bugs in liblouis, so if people start using it, it will get better
quickly.

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, Equation Editor ~




On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Susan Jolly <easjolly at ix.netcom.com>wrote:

> Neil,
>
> Thanks for pointing out my mistake.
>
> I'm still not positive I understand what MathPlayer 3 will be doing. My
> specific question is whether MathPlayer 3 will convert just the math islands
> (math expressions in MathML) or the entire document.  If the former, then I
> understand why the screenreader needs the capability to accept mixed
> content, i.e. print text it needs to translateto braille plus braille math
> (or braille anything really) that has already been translated and needs to
> be passed through unchanged.
>
> However, if MathPlayer is only translating the math islands I have a
> concern. Nemeth is actually a complete braille system with its own rules for
> formatting and for translating non-math text as well as math.  The rules for
> translating non-math text are similar but not identical to those for
> standard contracted English braille (EBAE).  The reasons for these
> differences in the translation of text, many of which differences depend on
> context, are necessary in order to avoid ambiguity.
>
> Also, Nemeth treats embedded and displayed math somewhat differently, just
> as MathML and LaTeX do.
>
> BTW, I've discovered a potential source of a variety of tests of Nemeth
> translation capability.
>
> The BANA June 2001 UEBC Sampler 2 can be downloaded from this page.
> http://www.iceb.org/ubcbhdr.**html <http://www.iceb.org/ubcbhdr.html>
>
> The ubcb2brf.zip file contains the braille math translations.  You'll have
> to do a bit of sorting as the braille on the lefthand pages is Nemeth while
> that on the righthand pages is an older version of UEBC.
>
> The ubcb2wpd.zip file contains WordPerfect files.  I discovered that if I
> changed the file extension to .doc and opened the file in Word 2007 (under
> Vista) that the print source appears in text boxes.  I imagine that it
> wouldn't take too much effort for a sighted person who is facile with
> MathPlayer to convert at least some representative examples to electronic
> print math.
>
> Susan
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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