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MathML Usage for Styling

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From: Jamous, JP
Date: Jul 27, 2016 12:32PM

Hi folks,

I just joined this fine group and was wondering about WCAG's take on MathML for styling. W3 suggest in chapter 6 of HTML5 not to use MathML symbols for styling, but there is nothing related to that in WCAG.
http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML2/chapter6.html,

I have been advocating heavily against the usage of MathML symbols by my company's web developers and Copy Writers. However, nothing has been done about it. The issue is that those symbols are read by JAWS and VoiceOver. Some are ones I recognize from college days and others do not make any sense like "SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK" and "SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK".

I was able to find those symbols in JAWS 17 in the following file:
C:ProgramDataFreedom ScientificJAWS17.0SETTINGSSymbolDescriptionsSymbolDescriptions.enu.txt

I turned them off by commenting the symbols that I don't care about, but that doesn't work for web users. Every time the MathML property "›" is used, it causes JAWS to read the link label followed by SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK. This can be so annoying and verbose considering the heavy usage that we have of it on the site.

Has any of you heard any updates to WCAG 2.0 in regards to MathML? Any feedback is highly appreciated.