WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Math and the most accessible way to mark it up

for

From: Isabel Holdsworth
Date: Sep 12, 2018 3:06PM

Hi all,

I'm a bit late to the math party, but we're struggling to figure out
the best way to mark up math operations like fractions, indices, Greek
letters, and even the Minus sign.

We have the Wiris MathML editor plugged into one of our text editors,
and it seems to do a really good job of encoding raw characters into
MathML. For the most part it works well with JAWS, but NVDA misses
some vital information, such as the "divided by" between the numerator
and denominator of a fraction, or the "to the power of" between a
number and its index. And VoiceOver isn't speaking anything at all for
some reason, although it's apparently supposed to work with "simple"
math expressions.

Is there a newer and/or more robust way to express math that works
well with more access technologies than MathML seems to?

As always, I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this. Accessibility
is becoming a higher priority in the company I work for, and I want us
to get it right first time wherever possible.

Cheers, Isabel