[Blindmath] mathspeak

[Łukasz Grabowski]

Dear Sina,

I've just had a look at clearspeak. It indeed seems to be much mroe
reasonable.

On a related issue, does someone know what is the license for
clearspeak? For example if I wanted to implement a mathematics screen
reader for linux, would I be able to use clearspeak without paying any
fees etc.? I couldn't immmediately find any licensing info on
www.dessci.com

Best,
Łukasz





On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 23:46:38 -0500
Sina Bahram via Blindmath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> 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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