[BlindMath] Fwd: [orca] MathCAT needs translator love

[Neil Soiffer]

I'm very excited by JoanMarie's port of MathCAT to Orca. MathCAT supports
several languages, several more are in development, and I'd like to add
many more. If you are interested in helping out, visit
https://github.com/daisy/MathCAT/issues and see if there is an issue
already open for a language you can help with. If there isn't an issue for
a language you can help with, please create one.

I am very fortunate that DAISY has decided to help with MathCAT, so (as you
can see from the issue URL), MathCAT development has moved under the DAISY
umbrella. One good thing about that is that there *might* be some money to
help support language translations. Details are still being worked on. If
you put your name on a translation issue, you'll be notified if funding
comes through.

Note: to help out, you need to know the language and math terminology in
that language, or at least well enough to know the right way to say things.
All the translations start with at least computer translations, but this
remains an area that AI is not that good at. If you use AI to help with a
translation, you need to review the results and know enough to know when
something is not good or is incomplete. For example, always saying
"fraction xxx over yyy end fraction" is not a good translation. You need to
add cases for numbers (e.g., one half), units (4 meters/second), etc. The
special cases for each notation vary by language and AI likely won't tell
you all of them.

To see what languages are already translated, visit
https://github.com/daisy/MathCAT/tree/main/Rules/Languages (it might be a
little confusing: a zh-tw exists, but not zh-cn).

    Neil


On Sun, Mar 22, 2026 at 5:57 AM Jonathan Fine via BlindMath <
blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Anyone here interested in helping?
>
> Best wishes
> Jonathan
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Joanmarie Diggs <dmarc-noreply at freelists.org>
> Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2026, 11:02
> Subject: [orca] MathCAT needs translator love
> To: orca at freelists.org <orca at freelists.org>
>
>
> Hey all.
>
> A number of people have requested that Orca use MathCAT for its MathML
> support. I was hoping someone would contribute that, but it hasn't
> happened so I'm looking into doing it myself. Which brings me to what I
> stated in the subject. Taking a look at
> https://github.com/daisy/MathCAT/tree/main/Rules/Languages, switching to
> MathCAT means a lot of you are going to start hearing English. If any of
> you are familiar enough with spoken math and could contribute
> translations to the MathCAT project, that would improve things
> tremendously.
>
> --joanie
> _______________________________________________
> Orca mailing list
> orca at freelists.org
> https://www.freelists.org/list/orca
> General information: https://orca.gnome.org
> Orca documentation (English):
> https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/orca/help/
> Orca documentation (translations):
> https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/orca/
> _______________________________________________
> BlindMath mailing list
> BlindMath at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> BlindMath:
>
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/soiffer%40alum.mit.edu
> BlindMath Gems can be found at <
> http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>
>