Making Math Accessible

Accessible elementary math with MathPlayer and MathML 3

In a previous post, I broke the news that MathML 3 is going to be a proposed recommendation.  I also bragged about MathPlayer having 97% coverage for MathML 3 features. Support for the visual display of elementary math went into what will be MathPlayer 3 over nine months ago (see my earlier post about MathML 3).  As many people know, MathML is the way to make math accessible.  Now that MathML 3 supports elementary math, that too can be made accessible. Here's a demonstration of the next version of MathPlayer displaying and speaking elementary math:

We're still working on refinements to what is spoken.  If you have suggestions for how to improve the speech for either example, please let us know!

NFB Endorses MathML

The news may be a bit old, but perhaps you missed it.  I did.  At the NFB national meeting last summer, the NFB passed Resolution 2008-13 that calls upon publishers to start using MathML instead of images for math in their books.  They also call upon AT vendors and braille translation software to "move without delay" to incorporate the ability to handle MathML and render it as synthesized speech and Nemeth braille.

In an earlier post, Pearson adds mathml, I reported the good news that that at least one publisher, Pearson, announced that they are doing just what the NFB calls for: they are making one of their most popular line of textbooks accessible by using MathML for the math in the books. Several AT vendors are starting to take math accessibility more seriously too. We have worked with several of them to make their products speak math. TextHELP and gh have done even more and made use of our synchronized highlighting feature of MathPlayer. Much more can and should be done by others -- most vendors have not made braille generation of math a priority, nor have they taken advantage of some of our more advanced accessibility features You can find a list of what products have what math accessibility features on our AT Math Support web page. If your AT vendor isn't listed there or if the feature you would like is not supported in their product, let them know it is important to you. Companies that want to succeed listen to their customers.

PDF math accessibility moves toward ISO standardization

I've been a member of the AIIM PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) working group for a couple of years and the group is close to submitting a proposal as to what is required for a PDF document to be accessible. Not too surprisingly, my focus has been on making the math accessible. At Design Science, we've done a lot of background work and came up with a plug-in to Acrobat and Adobe Reader that does pretty much what the MathPlayer plug-in for IE does: convert math to speech (and soon braille), sync highlight, and magnify the math. The key to making this work is getting MathML into PDF.

Adobe has controlled what is in PDF since they created it. However, a year ago or so, Adobe turned PDF over to ISO to become an official standard called ISO 32000. ISO has a very formal, deliberative (and slow) process for something to become a standard. As a first step towards math accessibility, the PDF/UA committee forwarded Design Science's math proposal to the US ISO Committee. The US Committee accepted the proposal and will present it and support it at an international ISO meeting in Beijing this week.

This is one small step on a long journey toward standardization. With the meeting taking place in Beijing, it seems appropriate to quote a famous Chinese philosopher, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I'm happy to say the journey has begun.

To find out more about this and other accessibility work that Design Science is involved in, take a look at this accessibility solutions and the other accessibility solutions pages at the Design Science website.