[BlindMath] Areas still to work on?

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hi all,

I accept that every typesetting option for mathematical content is slower than anyone who is able to hand-write.

But this is a problem everyone doing math has, not just blind people. That's probably why so many sighted mathematicians are busy with pen or pencils on  paper, or writing on black or white boards.

It's also why I write in a personal shorthand code if I am having to work things out using my screen reader.

Setting aside the inability blind people have to read and/or write like our sighted peers,
The question for me is whether the choices we make are in fact effective (100% accuracy) and then whether they are efficient.

The choice for me was clear. I learned LaTeX before I learned Braille. I am now too long in the tooth to contemplate becoming proficient in any Braille maths code so I am almost certainly going to remain a person who reads his LaTeX in Braille.

One thing I always found frustrating while I was doing my thesis was the inability to find a decent LaTeX editor which would speed up my creation of mathematical content. In the end, I used plenty of LaTeX tricks like user-defined functions which were shortcuts. After all, typing \SumOverAllK{x_k} was much easier than \sum_{k=0}^{K}{x_k}

Even finding an editor which had hot keys for the Greek letters in LaTeX proved so challenging that I developed my own editor which did have those hot keys and many more.

I still use a version of the editor today, over 15 years later. I've tailored it to work better for the work I now do, which is predominantly in some form of markdown. My markdown documents are of course easily moved to LaTeX if necessary.

In effect, I was addressing the efficiency problem and avoided the effectiveness issues associated with Braille maths codes.

At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I'm wondering if just for a moment we imagined a world with no Braille math codes, and we had to decide on the right way for blind people to write mathematical content for a sighted audience, if we'd ever have chosen a code that was only used by blind people.

I know I can force my screen reader to receive input as If I was typing on a Braille display or typewriter, and for the moment assuming I was perfect at entering fault-free Braille math, I don't know if I would be efficient as compared to what I am now doing.

I guess my problem is that learning how to create fault-free Braille math assumes the code itself has complete coverage. At present, it seems to me that the various codes are able to generate a subset of what is able to be created in LaTeX. Surely this means anyone hoping to go onto advanced level maths will ultimately find themselves short if they were restricted to a Braille code. At that point, they'd need to know LaTeX to survive or they'd invent additions to the Braille code that only they understand.

Imagine a world with no Braille mats codes and how we'd be doing. I think we'd be fine, even if the length of the fully laid out LaTeX equations might run off the page (in both directions).

Of course, all this would be so much easier if the \ could be represented in a single six dot Braille cell. <sigh>

Jonathan



-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Sukriti Suri via BlindMath
Sent: Sunday, 31 May 2026 5:07 pm
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Sukriti Suri <surisukriti29 at gmail.com>; blindmath at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Areas still to work on?

In my opinion, typing mathematics is still an area needing refinement. Latex though accessible is combersum and time-taking. While typing through a braille display, UEB can transcribe everything else but spatial symbols like fractions and subscripts. Softwares taking input in Nemeth are still not many and even I wonder if there are any.
Thanks
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