[Blindmath] Reading and Writing Math

[John Gardner]

Hello all, sorry to be slow in joining the recent threads on reading/writing
math -I've been travelling.  In my view, the fundamental difficulty in
"making math accessible" is that there is no compact user-friendly linear
format for doing so.  Latex is widely used but is certainly not compact, and
MathML is nearly impossible to read/write in raw form.  A good braille math
code may be great for reading math (provided of course you are one of that
small minority who can read it) but all current codes are too fragile to use
for authoring.  After years of talking about this problem, I have finally
decided to try to do something about it.  I call it LEAN Math. LEAN is
actually an acronym for Linear Editing and Authoring Notation.
 
In essence LEAN defines a set of special unicode characters for special
things like start-fraction, middle-of-fraction, end-fraction, sub-, super-,
under-, over-script indicators, etc.  One can view it as a very compact form
of Latex or MathML.  It is inspired by Triangle and Lambda notations but
fully unicode based.  I have written a MathML to LEAN and LEAN to MathML
translator and, and it is possible now to display and author anything that
can be written in MathML 3.0 (presentation format only for now).

When fully debugged, the LEAN system will be introduced first in combination
with MathType in MS Word as a fully audio-accessible reader/editor.  I
intend to make it available within a few months.  And it will be free and
open source.  Presently  it is useful only in audio, but one could develop
8-dot braille notation that makes it braille accessible too.  

I am writing a paper on LEAN that will be available in preprint form within
a couple of weeks.  I hope that some people on this list will be willing to
have an early look at this new notation and provide feedback before the
paper is submitted.  It sure would be good to get the notation right at the
very start!  You can find a zip file at
http://www.access2science.com/mathml/LEANMath.zip that contains a Word file
with explanations, a Windows font, and screen reader speak files for
Window-Eyes and NVDA.  I'll be happy to make a Jaws file if somebody can
tell me the location of the speak file in Jaws.  I'll be looking for alpha
testers of the translator soon as well, but I still have some polishing and
debugging to do first.

John Gardner