WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: screen readers and notation for science

for

From: steve.noble
Date: Nov 2, 2015 12:09PM

If one is trying to notate things like common chemical reaction or nuclear decay equations within a web page, then MathML can work quite well. In practice, one would likely embed the content in the page in MathML and then use MathJax to do the rendering, which gets around the browser support issues. The screen-reader experience will vary. JAWS 16 handles their own math speech output, but I don't think they are doing anything special to get better reading of chemical formulas. NVDA coupled with MathPlayer 4 will generally generate much better reading. One can even tell MathPlayer whether to generate a more semantic reading (e.g., to speak "copper sulfate"), a spelled out reading (e.g., "C u S O 4"), or to use the Nemeth MathSpeak rules (e.g., "upper C u upper S upper O 4"). Plus, with NVDA and MathPlayer you can get Nemeth braille out of the braille display. So, there are a number of advantages. See the Accessible Image Sample Book section on chemistry:
http://diagramcenter.org/standards-and-practices/accessible-image-sample-book.html

ChemML offers the potential for making things like molecular diagrams much more accessible, but there really hasn't been any substantive work in this area. Perhaps one day...



--Steve Noble
<EMAIL REMOVED>
502-969-3088
http://louisville.academia.edu/SteveNoble



From: WebAIM-Forum [ <EMAIL REMOVED> ] on behalf of Karen Sorensen [ <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2015 1:25 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] screen readers and notation for science

Hi - I have read about a ChemML <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.xml-2Dcml.org_&d=AwIGaQ&c=SgMrq23dbjbGX6e0ZsSHgEZX6A4IAf1SO3AJ2bNrHlk&r=4WMck1ZVLo4tV0IVllcBNKXCSGU6lUERtx_4HD4DqmE&m=ojSELwC-x9y3iCFglzXKnwS40Nv7-Cbp5dm_7DXf2tk&s=zryyFmx5jJjClLEGku4ldTVdPdmNHQqzmDVGnfHmjLo&e= >, but I believe
the W3C recommends MathML <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.w3.org_Math_&d=AwIGaQ&c=SgMrq23dbjbGX6e0ZsSHgEZX6A4IAf1SO3AJ2bNrHlk&r=4WMck1ZVLo4tV0IVllcBNKXCSGU6lUERtx_4HD4DqmE&m=ojSELwC-x9y3iCFglzXKnwS40Nv7-Cbp5dm_7DXf2tk&s”orEaiRYXDFeAcPd9Q4cbeNCxHNjTTnSOygd2Af2Hs&e= > even for science. Does
anyone know any different?
But an accessible way to write math is a huge problem.
Not to mention the varying results of a screen reader + browser + plugin
reading mathML.
Thanks,
Karen

Karen M. Sorensen
Accessibility Advocate for Online Courses
www.pcc.edu/access
Portland Community College
971-722-4720