Making Math Accessible

2010Q1: MathPlayer usage; back to school, back to using MathPlayer

A few months ago, I posted to this blog about how MathPlayer usage is really taking off this school year.  We have some new numbers to report.  Not surprisingly, MathPlayer's usage with Assistive Technology (AT) is closely tied to the school year; when the winter holidays rolled around, the number of equations spoken by MathPlayer really dropped off.  But when the school year revved up again, so did MathPlayer usage as is shown in the plot below (spring break is in March, so that month is down a bit, just as happened in previous years):

With almost 700,000 expressions spoken since school started back up after the winter holidays, it's pretty clear that MathPlayer is becoming an integral part of many schools' accessibility solution for their students.

Were hard at work making MathPlayer an even better solution for more students.  We'd like to hear from you about what you'd like see added to MathPlayer in the future.  Let us know by posting a comment to this blog or sending email to support@dessci.com. As always, you can find out more about math accessibility on our accessibility solutions page.  And you can check out whether your AT works with MathPlayer on our AT math support page -- if your AT is not listed there, contact your vendor and let them know you'll buy an upgrade if their product works with MathPlayer. Vendors listen to their customers (and their customers' dollars).

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.

MathDaisy 1.0 is Now Shipping

After lots of hard work, MathDaisy 1.0 has been released.  MathDaisy enhances Microsoft's Save As DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word to convert Word documents containing math notation to DAISY Digital Talking Books, ready to be read by students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with vision and learning disabilities, including blindness, low vision, and dyslexia.

If you are a teacher or professor who has students with vision and learning related disabilities, MathDaisy provides a way for you to produce the accessible materials your students need.  If you are a student, check out the MathPlayer-enabled DAISY book readers listed on our DAISY for Students web page.

For more information on MathDaisy, see the MathDaisy press release or the MathDaisy product page.

MathPlayer to support accessibility in Greek

Design Science is pleased to introduce our newest Accessibility Partner, the University of Athens. Professor Georgios Kouroupetroglou, at the University of Athens, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, in Athens, Greece, is directing the current development of Greek language support in our MathPlayer technology.

As development of future MathPlayer enhancements continues, we'll be happy to collaborate with other language experts in the mathematics field. Please let us know if you are interested, support@dessci.com .  Sprechen Sie Deutsch, anyone?  Find out more information about our Accessibility Partners.

MathPlayer 2.1 is released

In case you missed it, one of the big accessibility news items from Design Science of late is our release of MathPlayer 2.1, our Internet Explorer plugin for displaying and speaking MathML. MathPlayer 2.1 adds support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and synchronized highlighting of mathematical phrases as they are spoken for those with partial sight and learning disabilities. For more details, please read our MathPlayer 2.1 Press Release or visit the MathPlayer home page.