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

[Kevin Fjelsted]

There was mention in the latest release notes for ChromeVox that  Braille support is being developed.

At this point other than the beginnings discussed for  ChromeVox I am not aware of any web browser for windows or Mac that will present MathML in either Braille, or speech.

THe design science MathPlayer supposedly   does this, for some versions of IE under Windows however my  attempts to get this working have never succeeded.
I definitely agree that Braille is preferred, however this then requires a Braille display which is out of  reach from a cost perspective for many.
My recommendation is that for those who are interested to join the ChromeVox access group that Google has set up and present views on what direction should be taken. Both of the  developers mentioned in the video participate on this list.
The group name is axs-chrome-discuss at googlegroups.com. If we don't participate and provide feedback we are much less likely to have any influence.
I like the IOS approach because I have a Braille display and so far from what I have seen the nemeth translation from a MathML web page is way far ahead of anything else that is in a consumer product. The speech exploration does fine for me and I don't personally get hung up in inflections or anything complex for speech because I know I can resort to Braille.

-Kevin

On Oct 6, 2013, at 11:30 AM, Susan Jolly <easjolly at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> 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 
> 
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