Making Math Accessible

I am extremely sad to report that Robert Miner, Design Science's VP of Research & Development, passed away this morning from liver cancer. I have worked closely with Robert for about 15 years and considered him a close personal friend. Our condolences go out to his wife and son. We will all miss him greatly.

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.

Design Science has been involved in mathematical notation technology for 25 years now! During that time computers have gotten much, much more powerful and the internet has changed our lives enormously. Still, math notation has not changed at all during that time and editing it on a computer remains pretty much the same task. But things are about to change! The rise of mobile and tablet devices, web-based applications living in "the cloud", social media, semantic processing, and other technologies presents a ground-changing opportunity for our company. We envision a world where math is searchable, math can be spoken for accessibility and distance learning, and where math can be copied between documents, applications, websites, etc. as easy as plain text. And that is just the beginning. We see the development of a science of math notation and wonderful products built on top of that science.

Like most technology companies, Design Science is limited not by imagination but by the people that it is able to attract that share its vision. We are looking for sharp people who are excited by mathematics and see the same possibilities as we do. People who want to help us develop a science of mathematical notation and deliver products based on that vision. If you think you can contribute, we want to hear from you. We have listed some of the kinds of jobs we have available on our new Careers page but if you don't see your ideal position we still want to hear from you. Please contact us at jobs@dessci.com to tell us your story. We look forward to working with you!

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.