[Blindmath] Press Release: MathType 6.5 for Windows is available

[Neil Soiffer]

MathType can convert MathML to LaTeX, but I don't think that is what you
mean.  If the course text is written in LaTeX, then as Michael says, you
really want to use tex4ht or some other translator that will produce
XHTML+MathML. Since OCW's course "18.013A: Calculus with Applications" uses
MathML, you might want to find out what tools were used to produced that.

Another promising translator to look at is LaTeXML (dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/).

Given an XHTML+MathML set of pages, you can use IE+MathPlayer to read it
with a screen reader.

    Neil


On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Rich Caloggero <rjc at mit.edu> wrote:

> I work at the MIT adaptive tech. center, and we have a request from a
> student to make some of the mathematics associated with a particular course
> accessible.  The course in question is part of the Open Courseware Project
> (http://ocw.mit.edu) and the student is not an MIT student. Therefore,
>  the
> professor does not want to give the student the latex source (I assume
> because of copyright and intellectual property issues).  Typically, OCW
> makes their materials freely available on the web, however all the course
> materials are made available in PDF.
>
> Does anyone know if MathType could be used to convert a mathML
> representation into latex, which a screen reader user could then read?  If
> so, then the professor may be willing to convert the latex source to MathML
> and make it available to the student.
>
>
>
>
>
> -- Rich
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Michael Whapples
> Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 2:16 PM
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Press Release: MathType 6.5 for Windows is
> available
>
> I had been wondering what it might do, but I came to the same conclusion
> that for those very familiar with word then just learning the math TeX
> isn't
> such a steep learning curve.
>
> Is this really the best solution, probably not. I am sure that this work
> that Neil and design Science are putting into accessibility will help
> people, but sometimes I wonder whether these work arounds (relying on the
> TeX features of MathType) do improve things in the long term as some AT
> providers might say "well you can use it that way why do we need to do
> anything" without really understanding the problems and how work on their
> side might improve math accessibility. Neil's earlier comment about users
> requesting math accessibility in their AT probably is the way things need
> to
> go for the long term.
>
> Michael Whapples
>
> On 03/12/08 17:22, Neil Soiffer wrote:
> > As John and Theodor wrote, the WYSWYG part of MathType is not
> > accessible -- we still hope to do that some day if we can get a grant
> > to fund the work (there is no way we could ever recoup the development
> > costs with sales and we are a very small company, so budgets are very
> > tight).  However, as both John and Theordor wrote, with this new
> > feature, you can collaborate with your colleagues that use Word and
> > MathType or Equation Editor.  You only need to learn the math parts of
> > TeX, not all of TeX, so that is much less to learn.
> >
> > This won't solve everyone's access problems, but I hope it helps make
> > math in Word more accessible.
> >
> > Neil Soiffer
> > Senior Scientist
> > Design Science, Inc.
> > www.dessci.com
> > ~ Makers of Equation Editor, MathType, MathPlayer and MathFlow ~
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>
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