Making Math Accessible

More Good News from ATIA: Pearson adds MathML to their Textbooks!

At the ATIA (Assistive Technology Industry Association) conference last week one the largest textbook publishers, Pearson, announced that they are going to produce "HTMLbooks" and that HTMLbooks would make use of MathML for mathematical content!  Even better, this is not some "special ed" version of the book, but a universal design book aimed at all students.  This is the news that many of us have been waiting for:  accessible textbooks as a standard product from a large publisher.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the benefits of using MathML for math, there is a summary on our accessibility solutions pages. Now that a major publisher has committed to making textbooks with accessible math, my guess is that we will see some more publishers make announcements.  2009 could be a watershed year for accessibility!

ATIA: Good news for Math support in several products

ATIA was last week and there were many exciting announcements that were made there. The three that that I want to highlight involve new math support in products. DAISY is the common theme for all of the products.

The first product is a public beta release of Microsoft's "Save as DAISY" V2 add-on for Word... or at least it was supposed to be public. Microsoft announced it at ATIA and V2 was on the ATIA conference CD. However, as of today, Microsoft has yet to post it on sourceforge, so link in the previous sentence may not point to a page with download instructions for V2. V2 is a big step forward in making DAISY book production easy. V1 has the ability to save a Word document as a DAISY XML file. V2 allows you to save the document as a full DAISY book. Unlike V1, V2 works with MathType and Equation Editor equations.

To support production with math content, you will need the second product I want to highlight: MathDaisy, our newest product. MathDaisy handles the details of transforming the MathML in the DTBook into what is required for a full DAISY book. Take a look at the MathDaisy product page for more information about MathDaisy. Like "Save as DAISY", MathDaisy is in the beta phase. If you would like to join the beta program for MathDaisy, sign up for it by sending email to beta@dessci.com.

The third product I want to highlight is Dolphin's EasyReader 4.01. This is a an advanced DAISY player that knows about MathML. It uses some of the same technology used in MathDaisy to convert the MathML to speech.

Between the three announcements, you can create a DAISY book with math in it and play it back. My guess is that the two products that are in beta will move to being a final release by the time of CSUN. I'll be giving a talk there and Design Science will have a booth in the Mattiott (#330).  Please stop by and chat if you will be at CSUN.  If you won't be at CSUN, visit this blog -- I'll be reporting on any math releated news that is announced at CSUN.

A Little Step by the NIMAS Advisory Council is Big News for MATHML

Right before ATIA (one of the biggest conferences related to Assistive Technology), the NIMAS Implementation Advisory Council met and considered a host of issues.  One of them was an issue that has been simmering for the last year:  making MathML the required way to add math to a NIMAS document.

But first a little background.  NIMAS is a standard format that publishers of K-12 material in the United States are required to produce and contribute to a national repository called NIMAC.  NIMAS adopted the DAISY book standard as the format, but because publishers felt it was too expensive to convert their materials to use all of the tagging in DAISY, some of the DAISY tags are optional in NIMAS.  In NIMAS, publishers can use MathML to markup the math, but they can also use images.

If you look at a math book, you might easily find a hundred or more little expressions on a single page, which means there might be a hundred or more little images.  In NIMAS, adding alt text to an image is optional... and expensive for publishers, so they usually don't do it.  It is not hard to see that such minimally tagged books are expensive to turn into something remotely useful for people with visual disabilities.  The states, local schools, etc., end up footing the large bill to do the conversion so that they are accessible via speech or braille.  If the publishers use MathML instead of images, the books are useful to many more people at a much lower cost.

Back to the meeting... The NIMAS Implementation Advisory Council finally took the first little step to make MathML a required element.  A motion was approved and seconded to vote on this requirement.  That vote will take place in the next couple of months, and from what I've heard, it should pass with little opposition.  If that happens, then the recommendation will go to OSEP (a federal agency) to draft a change to NIMAS.  The process to draft the regulatory change, have hearings on it, etc., is slow and will likely take between 1.5 years and 3 years.   That's not exactly warp speed, but that's progress.

Several publishers have already done pilot projects producing NIMAS content with MathML.  Perhaps seeing that they will have to do this for all their texts in the not too distant future will give them an extra push to move MathML production into their regular workflow.  We may not have to wait 3 years to see a lot more MathML being used in textbooks.  This little step may soon be making big news.

For more information about NIMAS, IDEA, and other federal regulations regarding accessibility, see our math accessibility and public policy web page.