[BlindMath] Current strategies regarding accessible mathematics

[Michael Cantino]

I've enjoyed reading through everyone's input so far. I wanted to add a
couple notes.

PreText <https://pretextbook.org/index.html> is another great option for
making accessible documents from LaTeX source files. I'm a braille
transcriber, so I don't have the most sophisticated understanding of this
package. I've been helping improve the braille ready format (brf) output
from this tool. The HTML and EPUB outputs would also be great options for
screen reader users.

Jonathan mentioned the equation editor in Microsoft Word. In the past, this
was absolutely unusable from an accessibility perspective. There have been
some recent improvements, but it still wouldn’t be my first choice.
VoiceOver and the latest version of JAWS can now read equations created
with the (current) Word equation editor, and the speech output is pretty
good. There are a few braille errors, though. For example, ellipses
authored with the Word equation are not correct in braille. The ellipses
should be dot-3 dot-3 dot-3. From Word, JAWS translates these ellipses as a
single dot-3. VoiceOver and the Duxbury Braille Translator translate these
ellipses as dot-2 dot-2 dot-2, which would be read as 111 in Nemeth. I get
better results when using other MathML tools, like MathType or Equatio.

Michael Cantino (he/him)
BVIS Technology Professional Development Specialist
Northwest Regional Education Service District
(503)614-1339
Check out the BVIS Tech website
<https://sites.google.com/nwresd.k12.or.us/bvistech/home> to find helpful
resources!