[nabs-l] Math symbols

[Maria Kristic]

It is not really that your screen reader is coming up with a different name
for the symbol. Is this a PDF file? I imagine so--sometimes, when run
through the Adobe Reader tagging process, symbols are not interpreted
correctly by AT (I don't yet know why that occurs); Also, how they are
misinterpreted depends on the specific file, it seems, from my own
experience. I imagine this was an untagged PDF, right, so that you were
asked about its reading order, etc. when you opened it?

As for what you can do...

How much effort you want to expend depends on how much more math you plan on
taking...

If you do not plan on taking more math classes, you might just want to use
your professor's suggestion on how to write things--it is free! Ask your
professor about any other symbols that are unclear to learn how they are
specifically "misrepresented", if you will, in that file; I know that is
frustrating, and I wish that math content in PDFs was natively more
accessible, too.

If you are planning on more math in your life...

What operating system and version of Internet Explorer (IE) are you running?

Does your professor have Word files of these worksheets? If so, and if you
purchase MathType from Design Science (if memory serves, it is about $60 if
you are a student, MT is useful for writing math also, see next paragraph)
and install the free MathPlayer Internet Explorer add-in also from Design
Science, you can export the Word file to something that you can open in IE
and then accessibly read with your screen reader. If running Windows 8 and
IE10, though, the compatible MathPlayer version is not currently available
and should be out in February according to Design Science.

If you buy MathType and type LaTeX code for your math symbols, you can
convert these using a MathType toggle command to MathType equations with
graphical symbols. LaTeX is a text markup language--in your example, for
instance, the Greek letter sigma is written \sigma (that's a backslash
followed by the word sigma)--and you can Google LaTeX primer, but you really
should not need to know *that* much LaTeX for Stats (Greek letters=backslash
followed by the word representing the name of the Greek letter, the fraction
three-fourths is written \frac{3}{4}, the caret (^) is used to indicate
superscripts and underscore (_) used to indicate subscripts with the
sub/superscripted quantity in curly braces (i.e., two squared would be 2^{2}
), and a few more symbols). I like using Word+MathType because you only need
to write out the math symbols in LaTeX, and everything else can just be
written/formatted in Word as you would for non-math documents; you can
instead use a free LaTeX editor and output to PDF with graphical symbols,
but then you would have to write the *whole* document in LaTeX (laying out
the document and all), which is just more work!

A 30-day free trial of MathType is available from the Design Science Web
site which you can play with, so you can see how you like this before you
pay, if you want to go that route.

As for converting those PDFs to something more accessible, aside from
someone manually typing it out as something like a Word document with LaTeX
representations of the symbols (as MathType equations cannot yet be natively
read with screen readers in Word, though Design Science is working on this),
an option would be to convert them to all LaTeX using a program called
InftyReader. I would suggest you only explore this option if you plan on
having a *lot* of quantitative material you need access to during your
studies, and that you have your disability services office do it for you--it
is a US$800 piece of software, and it is quite prone to OCR errors depending
on the quality of the input file, so you generally need someone sighted to
clean up the output...

Hope this helps to get you started. Any questions, ask. Good luck!

Regards,
Maria

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Kaiti Shelton
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 2:56 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nabs-l] Math symbols

Hi all,

I'm starting my stats class today, and the professor gave me some of the
materials to look over before the class to make sure they were accessible on
my laptop.  The worksheets were fine, but I came across a "Macron" symbol
and didn't know what it was.  I took it to my prof and he said it was
actually the symbol for sigma.  Now that I know this, I'm wondering what
other symbols JAWS might have funky names for and what these symbols might
be.  Also, I'm wondering how I would go about writing them in equasions.  My
professor said that if there really isn't a good way to do it he'd be fine
with me writing out something like "Sigma" within the equasion, but if I can
get the
symbols to work that would be great.   Any suggestions would be
appreciated.

--
Kaiti