Making Math Accessible

Mobile math accessibility stays at home for now

Android is Google's mobile operating system designed to run on smart phones.  Google announced that Android 1.6 adds accessibility features designed to make Android apps more widely usable by blind and low-vision users. It includes a screen reader and text-to-speech engine. The announcement was made by T.V. Raman, a Research Scientist at Google.  His PhD thesis pioneered work on math accessibility, so there is hope that a future version of Android will support accessible math.  But for now, you'll need to stick to using MathPlayer or one of the DAISY-based solutions on your computer.

Google's new accessibility effort...where's the math?

We've been seeing Google in the news a lot lately. There has been a new challenge to the original Google books settlement and an upcoming hearing is about to take place. Accessibility has always been an important aspect of Google books so it is not surprising to see Google stepping up their overall focus on accessibility just prior to the hearing.

On Google's official blog, they recently announced, A new home for accessibility at Google, where they are collecting all of their accessibility projects into one place. At www.google.com/accessibility you can follow the latest accessibility updates from their blogs, find resources from their help center, participate in a discussion group, or send them your feedback and feature requests. They even provide a feedback form where you can suggest accessibility improvements to their products and services.

Google is making millions of books electronically available, but so far they haven't made the math in them accessible. This could be a huge source of accessible material, but they need to hear from you that you care about accessible math. Now's the time to let them know!

News: MathML usage keeps growing!

Just in case you don't read the Design Science New blog, I am repeating this article here because it will be of interest to this blog.

Every so often, we take a look at how MathPlayer is being used. In the last 22 months, MathPlayer 2.0 and 2.1 have racked up nearly 500,000,000 MathML expressions viewed -- that's one half billion expressions. That's a lot of math!

MathPlayer V2.1 introduced accessibility features when it was released less than two years age. In that time, over 1.8 million expressions were spoken aloud by screen readers and other assistive technology. That pales in comparison to how much math was viewed, but that is 1.8 million expressions that would likely have been unreadable without MathML and MathPlayer. These numbers are a reminder why the NFB recommends using MathML and reinforce the importance of using MathML for representing math expressions so that everyone can have access to math.

You can learn more about MathPlayer from our MathPlayer web site, including how to download MathPlayer for free. You can also learn more about MathML and accessibility from there and from our math accessibility web site.

AMATYC article on creating accessible DAISY math documents with Word

The American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges' August Newsletter published an article I wrote on how to create accessible materials from Word [PDF]. The AMATYC article presents a short summary on how to use MathDaisy and MathML-enabled DAISY players to go from a Word document to the fully accessible DAISY equivalent.  The DAISY format is the gold standard for accessibility, allowing players to provide a rich multi-modal interactive reading experience.  If you want an introduction to creating accessible materials that contain math, this article is a good place to start.  Check out our website if you want details about  MathDaisy and creating accessible materials that contain math for MathML-enabled DAISY players.

A Flexible Design for Accessible Spoken Math: HCI2009 Conference, July 22-24, 2009

This year at the Human-Computer Interface (HCI) International conference I'll be giving a talk about some novel aspects of the forthcoming MathPlayer 3 design such as rule-based speech and user control over speech. HCI is a large research-oriented conference with several tracks that deal with accessibility issues. Talks cover a huge range of topics from physical aspects of human computer interaction, such as lighting to accessibility issues for those with various disabilities. It is a great opportunity to see what what ideas people are exploring. If you will be at the conference on Thursday, please stop by my talk.

To see other conferences where Design Science products and technology will be demonstrated, refer to the Events page on our website.