[Blindmath] Reading and Writing Math: LEAN versus MathSpeak

Sun Apr 15 19:55:32 UTC 2012

Ryan there are elegant ways to browse complex equations, for example Raman's
ASTER LaTeX reader and the MathGenie MathML reader created by Art Karshmer's
South Florida group.  Frankly when I read a long equation using speech, I
get lost pretty quickly no matter how it is represented, so I need to browse
it.  LEAN is not as elegant as a true browser like ASTER or MathGenie, but
it is about the best one can do using a standard screen reader in a standard
application.  At least I hope so.

It is possible to represent math fairly compactly with very few special
symbols - by using lots of parentheses for example.  The University of
Karlsruhe developed an ASCII way to represent math back in the early days of
DOS.  It was the best that they could do at the time.  It is fine for simple
math but gets lost in a blizzard of parentheses for complex things.  Same
for the linear format available with the Microsoft Word math editor.  So I
have tried to take a middle path between defining too few and too many
special symbols.  Since it is usually easier to drop than to create, I've
chosen to err in defining too many.  At least I hope so.

In any case, the answer to your question is that fractions, square roots and
indexed root, and table markup is pretty clear. Subscripts, etc. follow the
Latex convention of requiring no special enclosure if they are single
characters.  Otherwise, they are enclosed in "expression" indicators.  There
are presently many user options permitting one to display equations more or
less verbosely.  

Not sure I have answered your question.  If not, ask again.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Ryan Hemphill
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2012 4:24 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Reading and Writing Math: LEAN versus MathSpeak

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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