[Blindmath] Questions Regarding Formula Reading With JAWS

Thu Mar 19 04:17:12 UTC 2015

Hello Trevor,

For many years LaTeX has been the primary mode of interaction with formulae for blind people and advanced mathematics.

While many of us might like writing long documents in LaTeX, I expect that we mostly also know that it took a long time to get to this level of comfort with it.

Thankfully, many other systems now use a reduced set of LaTeX commands for the formulae and means that mere mortals can use the best parts without needing to write their entire documents using LaTeX. Perhaps the best example that is talked about on this list has been MathType which works with MS Word. 

The standard MathType interface used by my sighted colleagues is very mouse-driven. If you learn the sufficient LaTeX codes to generate the right symbols you can get MathType to convert them into the attractive graphics sighted people want to read. The opposite is also true. You can convert the MathType objects into LaTeX so we can read them. That doesn't mean the results are all that readable though as the way the LaTeX reads can often be quite obscure to the novice reader. 

A useful tool that I do use is LEAN which is a small application written by John Gardner. LEAN aims to convert the MathType objects into more readable form.

Another tool mentioned here is MathPlayer. Personally, I don't use MathPlayer much as I am comfortable using LaTeX, but I imagine that some folk will find it invaluable for reading the content from webpages where MathJax and MathML have been used to display equations.

That's the short list of items worth looking into further.

With respect to JAWS scripts, I've seen people think they've developed a set of scripts that can interpret various symbols. Given the thousands of symbols that exist, and the various fonts that these can be extracted from etc. this notion really seems impossible unless you can guarantee the way an author created their content. Use of LEAN circumvents the need for jaws scripts, but relies on the mathematical objects being MathType objects.

Finally, The R list is functional but hasn't had too much traffic as yet.

Hope that helps.
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Trevor Attenberg via Blindmath
Sent: Thursday, 19 March 2015 2:50 p.m.
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: [Blindmath] Questions Regarding Formula Reading With JAWS

Hi Blind Math List,

As the subject line suggests, I am interested in relatively simple means of reading formulas with JAWS. Unlike many emailers whose messages I explored in archives, I am not interested in editing formulas into LaTeX or the like at this point. I am however curious how one would non-visually comprehend formulas that appear only as graphics in an MS Word, PDF, or HTML file. For instance, in an attempt to gain greater understanding of ecologically relevant entropy usage, I ran across an article from Jost (2006). The article contained tables I could largely comprehend-the sort I could easily compose; but whole formulas in the article were all determined to be shapefile graphics by JAWS; thus I could not fully understand the principal messages of the paper. Such a thing has happened to me many times. What would one do in such a scenario, when there is an ad hoc scientific query that requires understanding of formulas? One idea I've tried is to run the entire document through an OCR recognition program (I have OpenBook with its "Freedom Import Printer" on my machine); but the results are usually far from satisfying. In addition, I do not have JAWS scripted or set up to recognize all the appropriate symbology: Greek letters etc. Actually, I've never monkeyed with JAWS scripts before. Would anyone here be able to advise on how to execute this for mathematically relevant symbols. If there are clear materials and directions for this online, feel free to direct me. 

Finally; I know there's been much talk of LaTeX on this list going back a long way. Perhaps I've been living in a cave; but I've only just come to understand (thank you Wikipedia) that LaTex is a markup language for representing mathematical content; apparently for the principal purpose of aesthetics and ease of visual comprehension. For those of us with no current need to edit LaTeX files, is there a simple means of translating LaTeX rendered formulas, such as those so often presented on websites like Wikipedia? I saw the Website "latex-access", witch directed me to "SVN"
related websites for scripts. For one thing, I do not know what SVN is; another thing is I was not sure what to look for once I clicked on the links; nor was I assured that the "On the Fly" tools I thought might help were here. It is also not entirely clear if what this latex-access website discusses is quite what I'm looking for; though it sounds like it is and more. I deeply apologize if this is all old-hat and juvenalia to most of you. 

If this does indeed sound like topics that have been thoroughly covered on the list before, or it is below most of us; do then contact me off list
(tattenberg at gmail.com) , and consider directing me to an archival discussion on these exact issues.

One more thing: has the Blind User's list been used as yet? I haven't gotten any messages in my inbox since signing up; and I do indeed have a couple R questions; perhaps I will need to poke through my ample spam collection.

Best to all of you; especially if you read this far!

Trevor A           

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
http://www.avast.com
_______________________________________________
Blindmath mailing list
Blindmath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for Blindmath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/a.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>