[Blindmath] Jaws screen reader and missannounced symbols

[Godfrey, Jonathan]

Hi George,

There are plenty of instances where symbols are lost in translation somewhere in the chain that links my ears to the original LaTeX source code,. At least as author I know what was originally intended though.

I do have both JAWS and NVDA on hand and neither is a perfect match for my diverse needs. I therefore have to make a decision about which one gets used most of the time; at present that's JAWS as it happens, so the sacrifice of improved access possible with NVDA has to be endured.

The \epsilon v \varepsilon issue raised today occurs for JAWS users, and I find a large number of expressions present perfectly well for the sighted world via MathJax, but once they get to JAWS they come out as "x". I haven't yet established what the common cause is for this, but it is on my to-do list. Btw: it is not MathPlayer because that isn't installed on all of my computers. 

One simple change I have made is to use italics for content that other LaTeX users might put in math mode. I use markdown with LaTeX for math expressions and so I replace $x$ by *x* to make the content much more readable when it gets converted to HTML. I know that on a semantic level that's wrong, but visually they are equivalent and I have a better outcome on an audible level. 

I'm pleased there are people out there that can fight with the unicode representations and sort out the things that can't necessarily be sorted by a blind user, so thank you Neil and George for your efforts.

Jonathan





-----Original Message-----
From: Blindmath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of George Bell via Blindmath
Sent: Tuesday, 7 March 2017 12:32 p.m.
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Cc: George Bell
Subject: [Blindmath] Jaws screen reader and missannounced symbols

Has anyone experienced cases where JAWS reads the wrong symbol description?

We have had a rather awkward case where JAWS said a sign was "degrees", but the braille output was incorrect.

Both teacher and student blamed the braille software as "JAWS said it WAS degrees"

When I got hold of the file, I found that converting the so called "degrees" symbol to Unicode, it was NOT the expected U+00B0, but U+00BA which visually looks like a degree sign.

U+00BA is actually a "Masculine Ordinal Indicator" which is a superscript letter o (as in orange) and used in certain languages. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_indicator if you wish to know more.)

It seems that as this is a common mistake, FS decided to change the name, and had not realised the impact it could have when a document was converted into braille or certain other foreign languages.

Has anyone spotted any similar instances?

BTW, I have reported this to FS and they have admitted the error of their ways.

George
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