[Blindmath] JAWS and MathPlayer issue in IE9 RE: MathType and JAWS

[Neil Soiffer]

As far as I can tell, this is not specific to 32 bit or 64 bit versions.  IE
is really a 32 bit app -- even on 64 bit machines you can not make the 64
bit version the default browser.

In trying to figure where the problem is, I believe it is in IE9.  I have
sent email to the IE team and they are looking into it.  It might be that
applications such as JAWS will need to make a different calls to get the
MSAA interface from MathPlayer, but I haven't heard back from the IE team
yet as to how to work around the problem.  The problem affects XHTML and
HTML5 pages and MathPlayer 3.  It does not affect XHTML pages and MathPlayer
2 because MathPlayer 2 rewrites the pages into HTML4.  MathPlayer 3 defers
XHTML rendering to IE9's built-in XHTML support (not present in previous
versions of IE).  I suppose as a worst case scenario, we'll turn the XHTML
into HTML4 for MathPlayer 3.  I'm not keen on that because our conversion is
far from perfect.

I've have not contacted most AT vendors yet including JAWS because I don't
have a work around to suggest to them.  Hopefully I'll hear from the IE team
soon about a solution.

Thank you very much for contacting Freedom Scientific.  Hearing from users
like yourself is what gets them to take action.

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



On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Maria Kristic <maria6289 at earthlink.net>wrote:

> I thought that this issue affected both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows?
> I
> am referring to the problem where JAWS is not reading MathML content in
> XHTML files in IE9 with MathPlayer 3 installed because JAWS' code hasn't
> been updated to support IE9's new support of CSS3 namespaces? If that is
> what you're referring to as one of the 64-bit issues, , I thought that that
> affected both versions of Windows?
>
> It is not yet resolved. Eric Damery gave an online presentation about JAWS
> 13 a couple of days ago, and I asked him whether they had been contacted by
> Design Science about this yet? He told me that, as far as he knew, they had
> not, and he asked me to send him the info about this. I sent him a
> paraphrased summary of the info that had been compiled here late last month
> and early this month (giving credit to Neil and this list, of course). I
> also expressed my view in that message that this was a major problem. I
> CCed
> DS Support on that message, just to make sure that we were all on the same
> page. I didn't mention anything in that message about it being specific to
> 32 or 64-bit systems because I didn't get the impression from the list
> discussion that this issue affected just one flavor. Am I wrong? Eric
> replied to me today to tell me that this was going to be escalated to the
> right developers for feedback on the problem, so I'm hoping that means it
> will be resolved soon.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Best,
> Maria
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Birkir R. Gunnarsson
> Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 10:39 AM
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] MathType and JAWS
>
> Hi
>
> What system are you using (Windows XP/7, 32 or 64 bit), and what version of
> IE?
> There are issues with Jaws running on 64-bit Windows and MathPlayer, as has
> been discussed previously on this list. As far as I know these are as-yet
> unresolved.
> You need to use IE8 or 9 of course, but I suspect you already are.
> If you know LaTeX (or the person you are preparing documents for), you can
> always just change all equations in the document to LaTeX and deliver it
> that way. It is readable that way for sure.
> hth
> -B
>
>
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