[Blindmath] mathspeak

[Sina Bahram]

Totally agreed RE MathSpeak. I encourage you to check out clearspeak
instead. also, MathPlayer 4 can read MathML out to you or your student.

Take care,
Sina

President, Prime Access Consulting, Inc.
Twitter: @SinaBahram
Company Website: http://www.pac.bz
Personal Website: http://www.sinabahram.com
Blog: http://blog.sinabahram.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Lukasz
Grabowski via Blindmath
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 11:19 PM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Łukasz Grabowski <graboluk at gmail.com>
Subject: [Blindmath] mathspeak

Hello,

I am a professional mathematician (with unimpaired vision). Recently I
became responsible for preparing lecture notes for mathematics courses for a
legally blind student (she is able to use magnification software at very
high zoom level, but it's not relevant).

I generally try to prepare notes in mathml, via conversion software latexml.
So far this has worked okayish, but not great, since the lecturers haven't
been using simple enough latex.

Also, probably partially because of my inexperience. I have trouble setting
up NVDA on the student's computer in a satisfactory fashion.

This led me to the idea of recording the lecture notes for the student.
I started to design a grammar for that purpuse and to practice reading
mathematics using it.

But then I discovered mathspeak. Since I generally like following standards
I thought I'd use mathspeak instead of my (quite similar) grammar. However,
I can't help feeling that idioms in my grammar seem to sound more natural.
For example
mathspeak:
Absolute Value 4  End Absolute Value + 3 my grammar:
absolute value of 4 + 3 

mathspeak:
Absolute Value 4 minus 7 End Absolute Value + 3 my grammar:
absolute value  4 minus 7 end absolute value + 3

mathspeak:
ModAbove x with caret
my grammar:
x hat

mathspeak:
Root 2 End Root
my grammar:
root of 2

mathspeak:
d equals Root left-parenthesis Upper X minus x right-parenthesis squared
minus left-parenthesis Upper Y minus y right-parenthesis squared End Root my
grammar:
d equals root bracket cap X minus x end bracket squared minus bracket cap Y
minus y end bracket squared end root

So the main two differences are 1) having a short notation for when there is
only a single symbol inside root, absolute value, etc., because this happens
very often., 2) using standard idioms such as x hat, x tilde, x prime, x
double prime, x check, etc.

So my expressions tend to be shorter and they seem to me to correspond
better to the way mathematicians speak. Also, in the standard at
http://www.gh-mathspeak.com I didn't see some important things, for example
how would one denote the set of real numbers in mathspeak (i.e. "blackboard
R").

Hence I would like to ask: how popular is mathspeak among blind users which
study/use university-level mathematics? Is it an established and popular
standard?

Also, do you think that perhaps I am naive to think that such a recording of
lecture notes would be useful to learn mathematics, be it using mathspeak or
my own set of rules? To my untrained ears both mathspeak and my grammar seem
very complicated even for moderately long equations.

Best,
Lukasz

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