[Nfb-science] Math Accessibility and LaTeX

[Chelsea Cook]

Hi Amy,

I’m glad you posted on here about math accessibility. while I am not at all in your particular situation, I feel I can help a great deal. I agree with you that the MathML standard is still not being fully utilized or implemented. I’m involved and watching it, but don’t use it on a regular basis.

What I do use, all the time, is LateX. This is a text-based mark-up language that can be used to render and understand complex mathematical equations—with a braille display and some trial and error, I completed a cosmology course this semester with it. Most physicists and mathematicians that I know almost exclusively work in LateX. the barrier to entry can be high if you want to start out with something like differential equations, but if you work up to them, I’ve found the language to be a lot like Nemeth in that you continually learn new things. Here is a good overview article written by Al Maneki and Alysha Jeans in the Braille Monitor:
https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm12/bm1207/bm120704.htm
It is primarily geared toward students, but hopefully it will help. If you want some reading practice, the best way I’ve found is to go on Wikipedia to math articles you know something about. The alt-tags for their equations have LateX code describing those equations.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me! I followed your cruise blog last summer and found it very insightful.

Chelsea cook