[BlindMath] Microsoft Office Mix and math update

[Doug and Molly Miron]

Good day,

The math parts of LaTeX are not that hard to learn.  I am 76 and just 
started and am doing useful work with it.  However, the conversion process 
to MathType is a little limited.  I requested a couple of source files from 
a journal author so I could render his equations accessible.  The papers 
have a lot of fancy formatting LaTeX which I either ignore or delete.  There 
are a couple of good sources for LaTeX on Wikipedia Some with examples.  If 
your students are smart enough to learn math, they are smart enough to learn 
LaTeX in short order.

Regards,
Doug Miron

-----Original Message----- 
From: Karen Sorensen via BlindMath
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 12:06 PM
To: The EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Constituent Group Listserv ; 
athen-list at u.washington.edu ; blindmath at nfbnet.org ; Rondi Schei ; Andy 
Freed ; Jessica Bernards
Cc: Karen Sorensen
Subject: [BlindMath] Microsoft Office Mix and math update

Hi A11ys,
Here's a video of how a math instructor creates an Office Mix
<https://youtu.be/WKfq1-ycOqU>. (6:30). She is using MS Office 2013, 64 bit
professional plus edition. You can see the actual LaTeX in the video of the
math instructor creating the Office Mix, but there's no way to edit it or
use MathType.(Thanks for the idea though Steve Noble!)
Our screen reader tester is using Windows 10 laptop, NVDA 2017.1, Firefox
45.7 ESR plus has MathType and MathPlayer installed and configured to read
for blindness (Thank you Brian Richwine!).
But as you can tell from the earlier video I shared
<https://youtu.be/GTZXRitnZ6g?list=PLy073wx7B4jLBAZlO0wtnGLujTsPlg_n1>,
NVDA cannot read the math. We did test our configuration to make sure it
could read MathType in a word document and it did with no problem.
We also tried Windows Narrator screen reader just for kicks, but it can't
read it either nor could it read MathType in a word document.
>From what Gaier Dietrich (Thank you Gaier!) said, we tested NVDA on LaTeX
in a word document by toggling the mathtype to TeX and NVDA could read
that, but it was LaTeX code which most of our math students don't know, so
it wouldn't be helpful even if that's what Office Mix output, which it
doesn't.
So I think that's' the crux of the problem. .
The Office Mix interactive editor creates LaTeX for input but the output is
a display math version that's not accessible, so that seems to be the
problem. I called the Microsoft Disability Answer Desk
<https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/disability-answer-desk>
and they told me that Office Mix is still being tested and they welcome
feedback <https://officemix.uservoice.com/>. I encourage any and all to
give them some feedback about this, because otherwise Office Mix is
accessible to screen readers, assuming the instructor narrates the slides
well or provides the actual PPT.
There are other types of interactive quizzes that can be created for Office
Mix too that should also be tested.
Thanks everyone!
Best,
Karen

Karen M. Sorensen
Accessibility Advocate for Online Courses
www.pcc.edu/access
Portland Community College
971-722-4720 <%28971%29%20722-4720>
Twitter: @ksorensun
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