[nabs-l] Math symbols

Fri Jan 18 00:10:40 UTC 2013

Hi Maria,

These arActually, these were html files.  I have text files for the
text portions of my math book, and my professor is giving me
worksheets in word format.  Both of those work great.  I don't know
why but I guess my ds office thought taking the algebra stuff out of
the text file and putting it into html would make it easier for the
screenreader or something.  Anyway, this is the only math class I'm
going to need, and I plan to use my professor's suggestion for writing
out symbols and just ask for clarification on what they really are if
they're not spoken right again.  As for reading it, I'm not keen on
the idea of buying anything since this is just one class and my
professor is so willing to help me find work arounds, but I guess if
all else fails I could google how to write the symbol and put it into
my jaws dictionary to make the macron announce itself as sigma, just
to make reading a little more straightforward.

Thanks for all the suggestions though.  I've heard of latex and it
sounds like an interesting language.
Thanks.

On 1/17/13, Maria Kristic <maria.kristic at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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-- 
Kaiti