[BlindMath] JAWS or NVDA? Which is better with mathematical texts?

[Tony Malykh]

Hi,

I can tell you about math support in NVDA. I don't know much about Jaws 
- maybe others will comment about that.

NVDA supports reading formulas in two ways. There's MathMLReader - a 
separate program you'd need to install, but NVDA knows how to interact 
with it. And there's also Access8Math add-on, which is roughly 
comparable. But Both these options will only work if the formula is in 
MathML format. For example, you can read formulas on Wikipedia, they all 
seem to be accessible.

Now the bad news is that formulas in PDF files are typically not 
accessible. In my experience, screenreaders can read you all the parts 
of the formula, but the formatting is lost, which in practice means you 
can guess the formatting of the simpler ones, but more complicated 
formulas turn into gibberish. I have heard other people using program 
called InftyReader, which can OCR your PDF document and turn formulas 
into a readable format, but this program is pretty expensive....

As for DJVu format, as far as I know it is not accessible. You might be 
able to OCR it into some accessible format using the same InftyReader 
for example.


For creating math content, I know you can use LaTex (MikTex), since it 
is plain-text format, you can use any text editor for that.


HTH

--Tony



On 10/29/2019 1:39 AM, Saaqib Mahmuud via BlindMath wrote:
> Hi BlindMath mates? Hope you're fine.
> My name is Saaqib Mahmood, and I am a visually impaired (i.e. partially sighted) person from Abbottabad, Pakistan; I have got an MPhil degree in Mathematics and work as Assistant Professor at a mainstream government college.
> Although I at present can read printed materials and ebooks in PDF or DJVU format by turning on High Contrast (Black), I still need to be able to use JAWS or NVDA properly in creating and accessing mathematical materials in case my eyesight deteriotates too much in future.
> Besides, just yesterday, a student of the MSc in Mathematics program of the University of Peshawar contacted me and told me that he is losing the ability to read print as his eyesight is declining steadily.
> In this backdrop, I request the help and support of the BlindMath community and enable people like me and that student to better access mathematics books using the commonly available computer screen reading software programs such as JAWS and NVDA.
>
> My first query is which of these two programs (i.e. JAWS and NVDA) allows better accessibility when creating or accessing mathematics content?
> How accessible using either JAWS or NVDA is  the task of creating mathematical content using MikeTex, for example?
>
>
> And, how accessible is each one of these programs when accessing mathematical content using programs such as Adobe Acrobat Reader (for PDF documents) and WinDjView (for DJVU files)?
> I hope the members of the BlindMath community will take time answering my queries in detail.
>
> Regards.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Saaqib Mahmood,
> Assistant Professor of Mathematics,
>
> Government Postgraduate College No. 1,
> Abbottabad, PAKISTAN
> Phone: 0092 334 541 7958 (for mobile and WhatsApp calls & messages)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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