[Blindmath] Proposal for making math more accessible

[Paul Wright]

Hi Ken,

You raise some good issues, as did Kevin Chao in his e-mail yesterday
evening.  I don't know about Octave, but Maple absolutely will give you
LaTeX output if you ask for it.  MATLAB, which I use extensively, will
give you LaTeX-formatted output on demand.  

My main point is that there is already a standard in the world of
serious mathematics, science, and technology for writing math equations
in ASCII code.  The standard is TeX, often seen through its variants. 
(For example, from the website of MacKichan Software, the makers of
Scientific WorkPlace, "In Scientific WorkPlace, you can typeset complex
technical documents with LaTeX, the industry standard for mathematics
typesetting. Because of its superior precision and quality, publishers
and writers of scientific material use LaTeX extensively.")  Trying to
use anything other than TeX automatically cuts you off from the vast
majority of the technical writing done today.

The biggest difficulty in trying to make STEM documents accessible is to
get everyone in the technical writing world to use one standard, and
that problem is already solved.  I know that for more basic mathematics,
such as 3x+5=12, Microsoft Word is used by some individuals, but it is
never used by publishers or serious technical writers.  Furthermore, I
don't think basic algebra equations are what we are really discussing,
and for the more complicated stuff, Word is just not used. 

The second difficulty is that this standard, TeX, was designed for
converting the ASCII code people write into pretty images, which are not
accessible.  However, in the earlier '90s, T. V. Raman developed AsTeR,
and later Emacspeak, which converts LaTeX documents into speech in an
intelligible way.  So, the second problem is also solved.

What remains?  Well, the documents generated using TeX that are
distributed currently obliterate the ASCII code used to generate the
equations, and replace them by images.  I am no expert in this area, but
I don't think it would be that hard to modify the process so that these
images retain tags with the original ASCII code.  The software makers
would have to do this, but, once done, the end users would not even know
the difference.  Everyone could make accessible documents without even
knowing it!

Finally, a plug-in for screen reading software programs, based on AsTeR
would be needed to decode the embedded tags into speech.  Again, this is
not a trivial issue, but I don't think it is too hard.

I'm afraid that efforts to make STEM documents accessible that don't use
TeX as their starting point are unfortunately destined to leave us in a
separate and very unequal world.

Best,

Paul

 

On Fri, 03 Jun 2011 21:11 -0400, "Ken Perry" <kperry at blinksoft.com>
wrote:
> The only problem I see with this idea is it assumes people use Tex,  with
> mathml, and other xml document types I think this needs to be wrote more
> as
> a math standard for publishing so that the output includes speech output
> as
> well as any other accessibility needs.  For example what does Maple,
> Octave,
> and others save their formulas in I don't think it's Tex.  Also Microsoft
> Word saves its stuff in some XML format that is now docx
> 
> Ken
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Paul Wright
> Sent: Friday, June 03, 2011 5:08 PM
> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [Blindmath] Proprosal for making math more accessible
> 
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> Sorry for getting in a little late, but I wanted to respond to the
> discussion from last week regarding making math more accessible.
> 
> I have limited experience with MathML, and so I can't critique it
> directly, but it seems to me that there might be better ways of at least
> substantially addressing the current difficulties.  Furthermore, I agree
> with Ken:  True accessibility means that the math documents everyone
> creates are automatically accessible.  Otherwise, we are trying to live
> in a "separate but equal" universe, and I personally don't want to be
> there.
> 
> Here are the relevant points to what I have been thinking about:
> 
> 1.  Virtually all serious mathematical typesetting is done using some
> variant of TeX.  Implementations such as LaTeX are not hard to use, and
> these days you can plug TeX equations into many standard word processing
> documents. TeX is the basis for everything from advanced physics papers
> to most of the math textbooks.  If you want serious math written by the
> general population to be accessible, you have to deal with TeX based
> code.  Furthermore, TeX is open-source and free.
> 
> 2.  TeX was written to convert ASCII code into beautiful math equations
> on paper and screens.  However, the problem of converting the same code 
> into speech has also (more or less) already been solved by Emacspeak. My
> understanding is that this is also open-source.  However, Emacsspeak
> must deal with the original .tex document, because math equations
> usually end up as images in things like PDF files.  This is highly
> inconvenient, because most people don't distribute their source files,
> which can look quite ugly and come in many pieces. 
> 
> 3.  Here is what I would like to see happen:  TeX implementations need
> to be slightly rewritten so that, when they generate, say, a PDF file,
> they include the source code of each equation as a tag.  Then a plug-in
> for screen reading software, based on AsTeR (the basis for Emacspeak),
> could be made.  When installed, whenever your screen reading software
> came to an equation, it would switch to AsTeR and read the equation in a
> pleasant way.
> 
> I know that I am leaving out some details, but to me this seems like the
> simplest and cheapest way to make most of the math documents being
> generated today accessible.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Paul 
> ----------------------------------- 
>   Paul Wright
>   Department of Mathematics
>   University of Maryland
>   http://www.math.umd.edu/~paulrite
> 
> 
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----------------------------------- 
  Paul Wright
  Department of Mathematics
  University of Maryland
  http://www.math.umd.edu/~paulrite