[Blindmath] Reading and Writing Math: LEAN versus MathSpeak

[Ryan Hemphill]

One of the things I would like to hear more about is complex grouping of
values, whether it be in fractions or parens/brackets or something else -
how do you handle the more complex relationships?

The reason I think about this is because we are trying to take into
consideration an audience that may be using a one line Braille reader.  If
you have some insights on this, I would love to hear it.


Ryan.

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 6:31 AM, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com> wrote:

> Having spoken with John on this while developing the code, may be I can
> give some ideas as to its benefits.
>
> The first difference I see is that LEAN is a way of representing maths in
> files rather than a user interface language, from what I can tell MathSpeak
> is very much a user interfacing system specific to a particular form of
> communication (IE. speech). This point probably will become more clear as
> this message goes on.
>
> LEAN is compact and character based: Many of the existing systems are very
> verbose and clunky to navigate through, LEAN is unicode character based so
> its much shorter should you need to cursor through it.
>
> An example of this: Take the fraction x/2 in LaTeX written as a proper
> fraction it would be \frac{x}{2} a total of 11 characters, in LEAN it would
> be only 5 characters (one to start the fraction, the x, one for change to
> denominator, the 2 and one for the end fraction). The way mathplayer
> presents such equations to screen readers is even more verbose and clunky.
>
> LEAN builds on unicode: Not really a huge user benefit but LEAN uses many
> of the characters which are already defined by unicode (eg. Greek letters,
> math operators, etc). This means LEAN only needs to define the structural
> stuff unicode doesn't and for that it uses the unicode private blocks. This
> means the user can use any unicode aware editor for LEAN.
>
> Easy to convert to user interfacing formats: One of the ideas was to try
> and make the transformation between LEAN and a form the user can easily
> understand as simple as possible. The plan is to try and have it build on
> existing technologies for the transformation. An example is the screen
> reader speech dictionary files John has produced. It should be possible to
> make other speech dictionaries for other screen readers and other
> languages. Also it should be possible to write Braille tables to enable
> translation into Braille. I would imagine with enough work one could make a
> liblouis table to produce Nemeth from LEAN but I probably would go with
> what John said about 8-dot Braille potentially being a better option (it
> probably does need development of a Braille code).
>
> Also fonts can be used to make it look like some fairly standard linear
> form of writing maths to a sighted person. How intuitive it will look is
> something I cannot fully comment on.
>
> If I were to make any comparison to existing systems, it would be triangle
> or LAMBDA, but LEAN is unicode based, using mostly standard unicode symbols
> where possible. As far as I know MathSpeak is not really dealing with the
> same problem as triangle or LAMBDA.
>
> Michael Whapples
>
> On 14/04/2012 21:29, Susan Jolly wrote:
>
>> Hi John G.,
>>
>> It would be helpful for my (and perhaps others') understanding of LEAN if
>> you could explain the differences between your new LEAN notation and
>> MathSpeak.  MathSpeak, as I'm sure you know, is a spoken form of Nemeth
>> braille that is similar to the "verbal math" option in MegaDots.  (John
>> Boyer knows more about the latter than I do so it would be great if he
>> wants to add some additional information.)
>>
>> MathSpeak was orginally proposed by Dr. Nemeth but over the last few
>> years ghBraille has undertaken a large research effort to test and update
>> MathSpeak as necessary to ensure that the latest version of MathSpeak is
>> comprehensive, easy to learn and understand, and avoids ambiguity.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Susan Jolly
>>
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>
>
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