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.

NIMAS Advisory Council Votes to Require MathML

At the beginning of February, I blogged that the NIMAS Advisory council is going to vote on making MathML required in NIMAS. The result of the vote is now official. The board is going to recommend that MathML become a required part of NIMAS.  There's a lot of leg work to do, and the process of drafting rules in the federal government is a long one, but this is a big first step towards getting a large number of books with accessible math into the hands of those who need them.

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.

CSUN talk on Math and DAISY

CSUN is the biggest conference on accessibility, at least in the US if not the world.  They claim over 4,000 people attend each year.  This year, CSUN is March 16 - 21 in Los Angeles.  They recently posted the schedule for talks.

I'm giving a talk along with Dennis Leas (gh) and Masakazu Suzuki (InftyReader) on math and DAISY.  The focus of our talk is on producing DAISY books with Math and on reading DAISY books with math.  There have been several exciting developments in this area, including the ability to take a PDF document and convert it to a DAISY book in a few short steps.  I'll be showing off another exciting development:  MathDaisy.  To build suspense, I won't blog about MathDaisy until after the conference.  I hope no one turns blue holding their breath in anticipation :-)

Our talk is on Friday, at 8am in the Meridian One room of the Marriott. Please come by and see all of the great new things that have happened in the last year with math and DAISY books.  And don't forget to come by our booth in the Marriott Hotel (booth 330).

You can find this talk and other events that Design Science is participating in on our events page.

IEEE Multimedia Paper on DAISY

I'm excited that a paper I wrote with some MathML in DAISY committee colleagues (Dennis Leas, Emilia Persoon, and Michael Zacherle) has just been published in the Oct-Dec issue of IEEE Multimedia. The article is a nice overview (said with all due humility) to many aspects of DAISY, covering not only the technical aspects of DAISY books, but how they are produced, what they look like when played, and users' experiences reading them. It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that the paper has an emphasis on putting math in DAISY books.

IEEE has a very enlightened policy towards copyrights, so we've put the paper up on our website. You can get that paper and other papers on accessibility from our Math Accessibility Articles web page.

PDF math accessibility continues move toward ISO standardization

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first step towards making PDF math accessibility an ISO standard.  I said that the international ISO meeting in Beijing was going to consider a proposal for including MathML tags into PDF (officially known as ISO 32000).  This was a proposal that Design Science made to the PDF/UA committee, who approved it and sent it to the US ISO committee who also approved it.

The US ISO committee presented the proposal along with other items to make PDF documents more accessible to the international ISO meeting and I'm very pleased to report that the MathML proposal and most of the other accessibility proposals were accepted.  It will probably be two or three more years before these become part of an official ISO standard.  Objections might be raised later on, but for now (and hopefully forever), it is part of the ISO 32000-2 proposal.  This is a big step forward for math accessibility of PDF documents.

To find out more about this and other accessibility work that Design Science is involved in, take a look at  our article How is Design Science making math more accessible? and the other accessibility solutions pages at the Design Science website.

MathPlayer+Read&Write = Better Understanding

A couple of weeks ago, the University of Kentucky's study, "Supported Math Accessibility Reading Tool" (SMART), reported positive findings from a pilot study.  The study involved middle school students with print disabilities such as dyslexia.  It was designed to see if assistive technology (AT) that took advantage of MathML might help these students and the early results are quite positive: students using AT learned more math, with the benefits increasing as the math grew more complicated.

The study involved Design Science's MathPlayer and TextHELP's Read&Write Gold software.  The textbook, Say It With Symbols, came from Prentice Hall (part of their Connected Math 2 series). Prentice Hall converted the book to a NIMAS book that uses MathML for the math.  This was then converted to XHTML using a tool from the DAISY consortium and CAST that we modified to work with MathML (its available for download from CAST).  The end result was a book in the form of webpages that students could read in their browser using Read&Write and MathPlayer.

This is an example of the pieces of the math accessibility puzzle starting to come together -- DAISY, NIMAS, publishers, and AT vendors all took advantage of standards (especially MathML) so that students had better access to the math.  The great thing about the SMART study is it shows the effort does pay off.  We are continuing to work on improvements to MathPlayer and we'll let you know when there is a new version available.

If you want to read more about the study, the results were written up in a couple of places.  There is an Education Week article by Andrew Trotter and there is a shorter one by the NSF.  This was a small pilot study, but they are moving forward with a larger study.  The results of that study should be out in the summer of 2009.  We'll keep you posted.