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Re: Screen readers, math symbols, and Word

for

From: Stephen L Noble
Date: Nov 17, 2010 12:12PM

One easy way for developers is to simply write the calls to let
MathPlayer handle the MathML. MathPlayer includes speech rules for any
commonly used symbol. The nice thing about using MathML is that the
software would be able to change the speech string associated with a
given symbol by simply modifying the speech rules. That is exactly what
I am doing in my research project using MathML content in the classroom.
Here's a link to a past Education Week article on the SMART Project:
http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/mNxMhMrCCAbpzhoCQV
I have a speech rule which has been tweaked for middle school students
with learning disabilities. For blind students, who need much more
information verbalized, there are other speech rules available. One
could also easily develop discipline-specific speech rules for
chemistry, trigonometry, statistics, etc.

--Steve

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-- Steve Noble
Chair, National Technology Task Force
Learning Disabilities Association of America
<EMAIL REMOVED>
502-969-3088

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>>> Andrew Kirkpatrick < <EMAIL REMOVED> > 11/17/2010 1:27 PM >>>
I'll answer my own question. There are lots of tables of symbols (e.g.
http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/isoamsr.html). I guess my question is
whether there is a prioritized listing - I assume "almost equal to"
being more important than "geometrically equal to" (I'm not doing much
geometry), but I imagine that most every one is important to some
discipline. It's hard to imagine that all of these and other symbols
will be supported widely anytime soon. There must be a better way than
each assistive technology or TTS voice needing to recognize these...

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility