[BlindMath] Math Speak

[Neil Soiffer]

A little more info to add to what Bob said...

MathSpeak was developed by Dr. Nemeth so that he could communicate math
well with his assistants. In its pure form, it has a one-to-one
correspondence with the braille code for math that he developed and is
named after him: Nemeth code. You can find some more details at the
seewritehear
website
<https://www.seewritehear.com/accessible-mathml/mathspeak/examples/NemethBook/>.
Because MathSpeak does not speak math the way it is normally spoken in the
classroom in many cases (e.g., "x superscript 2 baseline plus 1" vs "x
squared plus 1"), GH (now seewritehear) has options to add semantic
interpretation along with verbosity options.

If the student is proficient in Nemeth Code (which he should be), MathSpeak
might be a reasonable option. I'm not an expert in Nemeth code, but I'll go
out on a limb and say that a general guideline for the teacher is that
he/she should explicitly name any greek letter and make sure the beginning
and ending of any 2D notation is obvious when speaking it. When doing that,
you won't be too far off from what MathSpeak says (exceptions would be for
nested radicals, fractions, powers, and superscripts, but those are
complicated to understand by just speech in any case). E.g, "fraction 1
over n end fraction"; "chi squared" is fine; "x bar" is ok after (probably
a few times) saying that "x bar" is written as "x with a line above it".

Neil Soiffer

On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 12:57 PM Bob Mathews via BlindMath <
blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Hello Mary,
>
> MathSpeak is one of the 3 speech styles of MathPlayer, the free math speech
> plugin from Wiris. MathSpeak is described in the MathPlayer User Manual:
> https://docs.wiris.com/en/mathplayer/start. If you don't have MathPlayer
> yet, there's a download link to MathPlayer 4 in the manual.
>
> It could be you were thinking of ClearSpeak. This was a joint project
> between the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Design Science (now
> Wiris), under a US Department of Education Grant. You can find out more
> about ClearSpeak from its documentation:
>
> https://docs.wiris.com/en/mathtype/mathtype_desktop/accessibility/clearspeak
> .
>
> Regards,
> Bob Mathews
> Wiris
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 2:34 PM Anderson, Mary Fran via BlindMath <
> blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
> > Dear Blindmath,
> >
> > I am working with a blind student enrolled in statistics. I am trying to
> > help her teacher describe the statistics problems in a way that my
> student
> > can understand. I have heard of something called math speak, but I
> haven’t
> > been able to find any information regarding this. Can anyone help with
> this
> > issue?
> > Thank you.
> > Mary Fran Anderson
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>
> --
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