[Blindmath] WinTriangle

[John Gardner]

Hi, I am the person who developed the original WinTriangle application, 
so it would be good if I gave an explanation of what it is and is not.

First of all, it was developed more than ten years ago as "the best we 
could do at the time".  I never had any intention of it being the final 
best way for blind people to read and write math.  In my opinion, 
WinTriangle has now been supplanted by things like ChattyInfty as the 
best way for blind people to read and write math.

WinTriangle is based on the RTF format, and math is written as 
quasi-linear equations.  Basically the syntax is Latex but much more 
compact.  For example there is a single character for "open fraction", 
another for the middle of a fraction, and another for "close fraction. 
Greek characters are in the available character set, and one can write 
sub and superscripts either as "real" sub and superscripts or by using a 
sub or superscript indicator.  The Triangle application is nothing more 
than an RTF editor with a lot of hot keys for inserting all these 
special characters.

Several people made some conversion applications that converted Latex 
to/from WinTriangle, but as far as I know, none were ever really 
perfected.

To answer your specific questions,
> 1)  Is it possible to read specific portions of the equation or does the program only allow the entire equation to be read at once?
JAG: One can read character by character or line by line in the usual 
way using any screen reader.
> 2)  Does the program work with old versions of JAS (e.g., 4.51 and below)?
JAG: Yes., Triangle is also old.
> 3)  If switching to a computer that has JAWS but does not have WinTriangle,  will the equations be at all accessible to JAWS?
JAG: The computer needs to have the WinTriangle fonts installed to 
display correctly visually.  The screen reader needs to have the 
WinTriangle speech dictionary installed.  Blind users should just 
install WinTriangle, but sighted users need only to instll that font set.
> 4(  Does the program read things such as Greek symbols accurately and is there a way to change how such things are read? For instance, if some notation is identified by an uncommon name in a specific discipline, is there a way for the JAWS user able to change how the notation is read?
JAG: Yes.

Hope this sets the record straight.

J. Gardner