Making Math Accessible

MathPlayer 2.2 Released

MathPlayer is by far and away the most used MathML renderer around -- in the 27 months since MathPlayer 2.1 was released, 615 million expressions on 29 million pages have been rendered by MathPlayer! I'm happy to say that we've only had a few bug reports since 2.1 was released, some of which were fixed with intervening bug fix releases. We've fixed many of the remaining ones with this release of MathPlayer 2.2. We've also taken some big steps in 2.2 to improve our font support. When the STIX fonts are finally released in a month or two, MathPlayer 2.2 will be able to make use of them.  Even without them, our improved font support makes expressions look much better, as you can see in the screen shots below:

      
  MathPlayer 2.1 vs. MathPlayer 2.2

One thing that hasn't changed with MathPlayer 2.2 is its price -- it's still free. You can update your version of MathPlayer by visiting our MathPlayer downloads page.

Math is accessible! MathPlayer closing in on 3 million equations spoken

MathPlayer 2.1 was released in September of 2007 and included the ability to work with screen readers and other AT to speak math expression. Its use has grown each year, with a huge jump in the number of expressions spoken in the last few months (the start of the school year) as you can see below:

Counting the usage from 2007, almost 3 million expressions have been spoken by MathPlayer since it was released!  That's a lot of math being spoken to people who otherwise would not have been able to access the content. If you or your students have been waiting for math accessibility to catch on, wait no longer.

We've seen increased interest from vendors in connecting up with MathPlayer, but not all vendors fully support MathPlayer.  If your AT software is not listed in our AT math support page or if the functionality you want (eg, Braille or synchronized highlighting) is not supported by the AT you use, contact your vendor and let them know you'll buy an upgrade if they add the support.  Vendors listen to their customers. The more often they hear a feature request, the higher priority it becomes for them to add it to their product, so make sure you let them know that math accessibility is important for you.