[Blindmath] "Spoken Mathematics on the Web" - Chromevox

[Susan Jolly]

Thanks, Kevin, for pointing out this video.  I watched (mostly listened) to 
the whole thing although I stopped and started quite a few times as I found 
it pretty boring.

If I'm understanding correctly, Chrome is an operating system developed by 
Google and ChromeVox is their competitor for Apple's VoiceOver screenreader. 
There is also a Chrome browser which can be installed on most other 
operating systems and ChromeVox can then be used on these operating systems 
as an extension to the Chrome browser.

The latest version of ChromeVox can speak math represented by either 
presentation MathML or by alt tags associated with pictures of math.  Since 
it is not always possible to infer the semantics of presentation MathML, it 
is not necessarily an optimal electronic representation of math intended to 
be spoken.  The ChromeVox developers have addressed this issue by providing 
an API that lets MathML content developers annotate their MathML expressions 
with semantic enhancements intended to make the corresponding math spoken by 
ChromeVox more natural and also to make the expressions easier to navigate. 
For example, a developer can choose to have the numerator of a fraction 
spoken using a different pitch from its denominator.

(It wasn't possible for me to tell from the video how the API actually works 
and I haven't been able to find any documentation.)

I was not impressed.  In the first place, I don't think it is reasonable to 
expect authors to provide non-standard annotation that is only recognized by 
a particular browser. In the second place, none of the ideas for making 
spoken math easier to understand seem to be new.  Researchers have long 
proposed various schemes that use prosody for this purpose.  It is my 
opinion that none of these have caught on because understanding spoken math 
is intrinsically difficult.  I realize that there are many people for whom 
this is the only option and the fact that the user can apply some level of 
customization to ChromeVox spoken math may turn out to be valuable.

Another purpose of spoken math is as a way of dictating math to a person or 
app that converts the math to written form.  Dr. Nemeth's MathSpeak was 
designed for this purpose and researchers at ghBraille demonstrated a few 
years back that persons listening to MathSpeak are less likely to 
misunderstand what is being said than persons listening to other forms of 
spoken math.  Dr. Nemeth found that it typically took no more than 15 
minutes for him to train a sighted person with no background in math to read 
all levels of math to him using MathSpeak.  Since MathSpeak is essentially a 
spoken form of Nemeth braille math, Dr. Nemeth was able to braille what was 
being read to him as it was being read.

Nemeth braille math is effectively a very efficient shorthand for entering a 
large portion of presentation MathML and I think that is one of its many 
advantages over other alternatives for writing and reading math in braille.

Sincerely,
SusanJ