[Blindmath] MathPlayer 3 is available

[Neil Soiffer]

Some answers to questions that have come up about MathPlayer 3...

Braille:  the braille support in MathPlayer is dependent upon screen
readers asking for the braille.  We are trying to get screen readers to
make that call to MathPlayer, but at least for some of them, I've heard
that it is hard because way back when, they never thought that you would do
anything other than convert what is spoken to braille -- a separate braille
code from what was spoken was just not on their radars.  So fixing it would
be a significant amount of work... at least that's what they told me.
Customers such as those on this group determine the priority of features,
so if you want Nemeth code or one of the other codes that is supported (we
are using the liblouis library, so UKMath, Marburg, and a Flemish code),
make some noise with whomever supplies your screen reader.

Context Menu:  the MathPlayer context menu is really hard to get to using
screen readers.  For that reason, we moved all of the important settings to
a control panel and that should be fully accessible.  What is left on the
context menu are some things that are mostly useful for sighted users such
as a zoom setting and the demos that allow one to speak and equation or
*see* the braille for an equation.  It does *not* send the braille to a
refreshable display.  The screen reader writes to the refreshable display
and we don't want to fight with the screen reader for control of the
display.

IE10 and future versions:  MathPlayer is a plug-in to IE and takes
advantage of some IE-only interfaces that allow us to display the math.  No
other browser has interfaces that allow such tight integration between
plug-ins and display, and that's why MathPlayer has been an IE-only
plug-in. For security and probably other reasons, the IE team has decided
plug-ins will be removed from a future version of IE.  Already on the
"Metro"/"Modern" interface (not the desktop) of Windows 8, plug-ins don't
work.  That includes flash, etc.

IE10 has bunch of new bugs in the interfaces MathPlayer uses -- I couldn't
find a work around for them despite a few months of trying -- that
accounted for some of the delay in getting MathPlayer 3 out.  I filled bug
reports long ago on them, but since they don't plan to support the
interfaces in the future, I'm not surprised the IE team hasn't tried to fix
them.  I have some more investigation to do with IE11 to see if I can get
MathPlayer to work with it, but I'm not hopeful. I suspect IE12 won't have
any support for plug-ins (and that includes Flash, etc).

The good news in all of this is that we have a replacement to MathPlayer
that is only geared towards accessibility.  It works with all of the
browsers and Word and Powerpoint and any other application for which you
can get MathML from the math. However, it does require some changes on the
part of screen readers to make this work, so we are more dependent than
ever on getting assistive technology products to work with MathPlayer.  We
are still developing and testing this replacement, and are looking at ways
to make it work in environments other than Windows. When we are ready to
release it, I'll announce it to this list. I'm confident that it will be a
really great advance for math accessibility because it will make many more
applications accessible.

I hope that answers the questions that have come up with MathPlayer 3.

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