(no subject)

here's something most likely some people have thought more about than me and hopefully have better solutions: how do you represent math in a way accessible to screen readers?

a lot of the time, if you're writing math any more complicated than basic addition, substraction, and multiplication, you'll want to go beyond putting unicode characters in a line (a recent popular tumblr post about inconsistent order-of-operations standards illustrates why even just representing division can get tricky if you are confined to a single line). some websites use scripts to parse LaTeX into images, which is very convenient if you can see and entirely useless if you can't. and i'm sure trying to parse LaTeX formatting by hearing a bunch of backslashes and brackets and stuff is not pleasant.

so, if you had to provide alt text to an equation as an image, is there something better than just trying to spell it out in plain English and trying very hard to disambiguate all the things we usually rely on actually drawing the equation for instead?

math accessibility, followup

so since writing that post this morning i learned that

1) MathML has a plugin called MathPlayer that’s meant for this, some screenreaders work with it. it has settings for both low vision and blind people, and can output stuff to refreshable braille displays (there are various standards for representing math in braille)

2) beyond just being usable for MathML, mathjax has its own set of accessibility tools. I think they allow you to navigate subsets of mathematical expressions for clarity? not super clear how they work

3) MathSpeak is a standard meant for unambiguous rendering of math in speech. MathPlayer can work with it, but presumably it can also be useful if you’re hand-annotating your equations.

(thanks to ilzolende and my fiancée, who saw the original post and brought various parts of this to my attention)