[Blindmath] Reading and Writing Math

[Ryan Hemphill]

This is very interesting.

As I stated on this board upon getting in, I am working on a Browser/Screen
Reader/Platform (Win/Mac) compatible reader that also translates into
Braille (unicode).  While I like your idea, do you plan on providing any
open source that will do your translation in JavaScript?  If so, we could
consider eventually dove-tailing your work into our product at some point
and would be happy to give it a shot.

Ryan

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 2:54 PM, John Gardner <john.gardner at orst.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
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