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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

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

--------------
Disclaimer: The opinions and comments made in email are those of the
author, and do not necessarily represent the official position of any
organization unless explicitly stated.


>>> 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


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Stephen L
Noble
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 12:50 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Screen readers, math symbols, and Word

The preferred solution is to use web documents using MathML (i.e.,
XHTML+MathML). At this juncture, native accessibility to mathematical
content within a Word document has not been solved.

For a broader discussion, see NCAM's Accessible Digital Media
Guidelines:
http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/accessible-digital-media-guide/guideline-g-math

Technique G2.1 / Use MathML to provide access to scientific and
mathematical expressions
"MathML is the best choice for a markup language for expressing math.
The advantage of MathML is it provides mathematical information in an
open, standard format that can be exploited by a wide range of
assistive
technologies."

Best regards,
--Steve Noble

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

--------------
Disclaimer: The opinions and comments made in email are those of the
author, and do not necessarily represent the official position of any
organization unless explicitly stated.


>>> Cliff Tyllick < <EMAIL REMOVED> > 11/17/2010 11:55 AM >>>
One of our authors who has tested Word documents in JAWS 9 has
doscovered that the "greater than or equal to" symbol (Unicode
character
2265) is announced as "greater than."

In some cases this might be a minor annoyance, but the difference is
important in documents that tell people how to comply with
environmental
regulations. Is there a good solution to this problem?

If not, we're thinking of just replacing the character with an inline
graphic of the same size with appropriate alt text. Thoughts?

And is this just a JAWS thing, or do other screen readers do the same?

Cliff


Cliff Tyllick
Usability assessment coordinator
Agency Communications Division
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
512-239-4516
<EMAIL REMOVED>