Making Math Accessible

MathPlayer 3 Preview Release 1 is now available!

MathPlayer™ is our free plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) that displays mathematical notation in web pages using MathML, the W3C standard. It also makes math accessible to readers with vision and learning disabilities. Four years ago, MathPlayer 2 broke new ground by making math accessible. Since then, over 12 million expressions have been spoken using assistive technology such as screen readers and screen magnifiers.

We've been hard at work on version 3.0 of MathPlayer. Since the current version of MathPlayer does not support Internet Explorer 9.0, and the new version does, we've decided to make MathPlayer 3.0 available now as Preview Release 1. We expect to add more features in subsequent releases, but Preview Release 1 already has a lot of powerful enhancements:

• Support for Internet Explorer 9 (IE 10 is not yet supported)
• Support for HTML 5.
• Full support for MathML 3:
  • Linebreaks: control over linebreaks and the indentation that follows
  • Elementary math: markup that allows description of elementary math notations such as stacked addition (with carries) and long division
  • Right-to-left math: support for right-to-left notation for math used in Arabic countries
• New accessibility features:
  • Disability targeting. Different reading-related learning disabilities require specialized approaches for reading math. MathPlayer 3 gives you the ability to chose between "Blind", "Low Vision", and "Learning Disabilities".
  • Improved speech. We've added hundreds of special cases to improve how math is spoken.
  • Multi-language support for math-to-speech. The following languages are supported in this preview release:  Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.  We expect to have support for more languages in the final release.  If you would like to help out and provide a translation for another language, please contacts us.
  • Subject area targeting. Choose speech tailored to the type of math being displayed.  This release currently supports, Geometry, Probability & Statistics, and Calculus are supported.  The next preview release will allow authors to embed these setting directly in the document.
  • Speech style options: Choose between SimpleSpeak -- designed to speak in a short, familiar, and unambiguous (for blind users)  manner or MathSpeak™ -- designed to speak in a manner that is similar to Nemeth code so that braille users can easily write the braille equivalent when they hear it.
  • Refreshable braille support. The ability to generate braille for a refreshable braille display. Please contact your screen reader vendor to see what their plans are to support this feature.

If you'd like to give it a try, please visit the MathPlayer download page and give us feedback about what you do and don't like. If for some reason, you find problems that gets in the way of your work, you can easily uninstall MathPlayer 3 and reinstall the older version of MathPlayer.

Carnegie Learning announces new accessible math curriculum

Steve Noble, Accessibility Research Consultant (Guest Writer)

Carnegie Learning, Inc., a Design Science Technology Partner, has issued a press release today describing their collaboration with the University of Kentucky's Math Etext Project and the accessibility of their new MATHia® middle school software (pronounced math-ee-ah). Although not mentioned in the press release, Carnegie Learning is using MathJax to serve accessible math to students.

Students using assistive technology will be able to use MATHia in conjunction with MathPlayer, which works with assistive technology applications to make the math content accessible. In the Kentucky Math Etext Project, students have already been using MathPlayer to access digital versions of their textbooks with an assistive technology application called Read & Write Gold by TextHelp. This allows them to hear both the words and equations aloud as they are highlighted on the computer screen. Now that Carnegie Learning has begun using MathJax with their elearning systems, students will now have the same capability when using MATHia.

To find out more about MathJax, check out the project website: www.mathjax.org. Also, be sure to check out Design Science's article Which Assistive Technology Products Have Math Support?

Steve Noble is a research consultant with a core focus in mathematics accessibility and assistive technology. Currently he serves on grant-funded research projects with both the University of Kentucky and Bridge Multimedia, and previously served as Director of Accessibility Policy for Design Science.

US DoED affirms educational institutions' obligation to make content and education technology accessible

Today the US Department of Education published an Office for Civil Rights FAQ as a follow-up to the Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) they had sent out last June. It puts publicly funded educational institutions on notice about the potential legal ramifications of using inaccessible reading systems (like the early version of the Kindle). This FAQ makes it clear that the law covers all types of technology systems (not just portable eBook readers), and that schools have an affirmative obligation to use accessible technology even if there isn't a single student with a disability in the class where it is being used. Although there is no specific reference to math here, this FAQ certainly pushes the implications for requiring accessible math more than we have seen to date.

For a broader discussion of the specific linkages between federal accessibility requirements and using mathematics content in educational settings, see What are the public policy issues involved in making math accessible?

Steve Noble, Accessibility Research Consultant (Guest Writer)

Design Science and ETS receive grant to boost math accessibility in the classroom

We are very excited to announce that Design Science and Educational Testing Service (ETS) received an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grant for the continued development and advancement of math-to-speech technologies. The backing of the US Department of Education and the involvement of ETS reaffirm our long-held belief in the importance of math accessibility in the classroom. We are also optimistic that this work will go a long way in helping to establish math accessibility as a requirement for all educational content containing mathematics.

The grant work is slated to begin in July 2011 and will bring together some of the country's leading subject-matter experts and developers of assistive technology. The first phase of the grant work will enhance the capabilities of MathPlayer and MathType with the goal of improving the way computers speak math. This new math-to-speech technology will give students who are blind or visually impaired the tools they need to learn math and science on a more equal footing with their classroom peers.

For more information about the grant, see our press release, New Math-to-Speech Technologies to Help Blind and Visually Impaired Students Master Mathematics.

MathPlayer usage takes off!

Three months ago, I posted that the number of expressions read by MathPlayer connected to Assistive Technology (AT) such as screen readers and learning disability tools set a new record. I've got some new numbers, and they blow away all of the old numbers. In the last three months, 5.7 million expressions were spoken using MathPlayer's math-to-speech features!!!  That's over half of the 10.1 million that have been spoken in the last three years using MathPlayer.

The obvious question is: why the big increase? Every year, the start of the school year has produced a new record and usage then drops over the winter, spring, and summer breaks. This year was exceptional in the increase. My best guess as to why is that the latest version of Kurzweil's K3000 product includes MathPlayer support and Kurzweil wasn't shy about letting people know of its support. This is probably another example of "if you build it, they will come".

If your favorite AT software doesn't support math accessibility, let them know. That's what the Kurzweil customers did and they listened... and now so can their customers.

Translating math to Nemeth Code - a ViewPlus webinar

If you have Word documents with MathType equations in them, you can make those documents accessible to the visually impaired in several ways:

• convert it to a web page with MathML for the math and display in IE+MathPlayer;
• convert it to a DAISY book;
• convert it to Braille.

This later topic will be a focus of the webinar Translating Math Equations to Nemeth Code on November 10. The webinar is being presented by ViewPlus, one of our accessibility partners. It will include an in-depth discussion about translating Word+MathType documents to Braille+Nemeth Code using MathType and ViewPlus's Tiger Software Suite. Sounds like it should be really helpful for those of you who need to produce braille with math in it.

MathPlayer + MathJax = more accessible math

MathJax 1.0 was just released and this is great news for accessibility. MathJax is a JavaScript-based display engine for both MathML and LaTeX. It extends MathML support to browsers that don't otherwise support MathML so that even mobile devices like smart phones and tablets such as iPhone/iPad and Android devices can display MathML. There is no longer any reason to use images for math, so hopefully that practice will finally come to an end, and MathML will start showing up on more and more websites. MathJax is an open source joint project between Design Science, AMS (American Mathematical Society), and SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics), with additional support from Elsevier and a growing list of other organizations.

A great feature of MathJax is that it can turn the display of math over to a native MathML renderer such as MathPlayer. This results in much faster display of the math. More importantly for accessibility, it allows all of the assistive technologies that work with MathPlayer to work on MathJax pages. This is true not only for pages that have MathML in them, but also for pages that have TeX in them. If the page is not configured to automatically work with MathPlayer, you need to tell MathJax to use MathPlayer. See the MathJax documentation for details on how to make MathJax use MathPlayer. That page and the sample pages at mathjax.org have examples you can try.

Since MathJax was just released, the number of sites using MathJax is still small. However, with sponsors and supporters such as AMS and Elsevier, you know that some big sites will soon begin using MathJax. People have already developed modules to work with course management systems such as Moodle and blogs such as WordPress.

The release of MathJax is great news for accessibility on the web, but were not stopping there. We're busily at work on some more exciting developments related to MathJax, MathPlayer, and accessible math. If you haven't subscribed already to this blog, click on the link in the upper right hand corner to subscribe so you'll be the among the first to find out about what's next for accessible math.

Note: there is bug with MathJax and MathPlayer's zoom. We'll be releasing a fix for this soon.

MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken

I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news is that the new HTML5 standards initiative includes support for MathML and has been embraced by all browser vendors. This should reduce the barriers to producing web content with accessible, searchable, and interoperable mathematics.

Now the bad news. Unfortunately, MathML support in the next version of Internet Explorer 9 appears to be broken, based on our testing of Microsoft's latest Platform Preview. Read the whole story in MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken. It only requires a small fix but Microsoft likely will not give it much priority unless the STEM, Education, and Accessibility communities make it clear how important MathML support is for them. Our hope is that you will help us spread the word about this problem and make Microsoft understand the need to make MathML work once again. If you agree, let them know by any and all means at your disposal.

I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news is that the new HTML5 standards initiative includes support for MathML and has been embraced by all browser vendors. This should reduce the barriers to producing web content with accessible, searchable, and interoperable mathematics.

Now the bad news. Unfortunately, MathML support in the next version of Internet Explorer 9 appears to be broken, based on our testing of Microsoft's latest Platform Preview. Read the whole story in MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken. It only requires a small fix but Microsoft likely will not give it much priority unless the STEM, Education, and Accessibility communities make it clear how important MathML support is for them. Our hope is that you will help us spread the word about this problem and make Microsoft understand the need to make MathML work once again. If you agree, let them know by any and all means at your disposal.

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.