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I’m experimenting with math. The video above which recommends MathPlayer is a very good and comprehensive tutorial. The only suggestion I’d make is it is actually easier to learn LaTeX than it is to use the GUI. I might change my mind once I start learning Nemeth.

I was noodling around with NVDA when I noticed, it couldn’t read any math on almost any page that had math. This is obviously a problem. Below is Newton’s kinematic equation for finding the final position of a linearly moving object. Here, \(x_f\) is the final position, \(x_i\) is the initial position, \(v_i\) is the initial velocity, a is acceleration and finally t is time.

$$
\begin{align*}
x_f=x_i+v_it+\frac{1}{2}at^2
\end{align*}
$$

So to read the equations you can install MathPlayer. But this app works best with Internet Explorer which is a deprecated web browser. And also MathPlayer itself is no longer being updated. I should note in addition, this site doesn’t support Internet Explorer because it is extremely old and too much work. I’ve tried using it with Word but it is difficult. To insert math press alt plus +/=. You can arrow select math inputs but it is probably easier to use LaTeX.

I added the demo code to my site to try to make the math accessible. I also added an extension for braille output devices. I won’t be able to test this out until I get a braille note taker so it’ll be a while.

  <script>
  MathJax = {
    loader: {load: ['a11y/semantic-enrich']},
    options: {
        a11y: {
      speech: true,                      // switch on speech output
      braille: true,                     // switch on Braille output
      subtitles: true,                   // show speech as a subtitle
      viewBraille: false,                // display Braille output as subtitles

      backgroundColor: 'Blue',           // color for background of selected sub-expression
      backgroundOpacity: .2,             // opacity for background of selected sub-expression
      foregroundColor: 'Black',          // color to use for text of selected sub-expression
      foregroundOpacity: 1,              // opacity for text of selected sub-expression

      highlight: 'None',                 // type of highlighting for collapsible sub-expressions
      flame: false,                      // color collapsible sub-expressions
      hover: false,                      // show collapsible sub-expression on mouse hovering

      treeColoring: false,               // tree color expression

      magnification: 'None',             // type of magnification
      magnify: '400%',                   // percentage of magnification of zoomed expressions
      keyMagnifier: false,               // switch on magnification via key exploration
      mouseMagnifier: false,             // switch on magnification via mouse hovering
      align: 'top',                      // placement of magnified expression

      infoType: false                    // show semantic type on mouse hovering
      infoRole: false,                   // show semantic role on mouse hovering
      infoPrefix: false,                 // show speech prefixes on mouse hovering
    },
          menuOptions: {
      settings: {
        assistiveMml: true;   // true to enable assitive MathML
        collapsible: false;   // true to enable collapsible math
        explorer: false;      // true to enable the expression explorer
      }
    },
      sre: {
        speech: 'shallow'  // one of: 'deep', 'shallow', or 'none'
      },
      renderActions: {
        //
        // Force speech enrichment regardless of the menu settings
        //
        enrich: {'[+]': [
          function (doc) {doc.enrich(true)},
          function (math, doc) {math.enrich(doc, true)}  
        ]}
      }
    },
    tex: {inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]}
  };
  </script>
    <script id="MathJax-script" async src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-chtml.js"></script>

Going back to the above math equation, you can read it with NVDA pretty well without MathPlayer by arrowing through the equation (don’t tab it’ll be weird). Up and down will read the whole line and right and left will read one part of the equation at a time.

Learning higher level math simply through sound is quite difficult though. There’s a lot of variables to keep in your mind. I’m hoping the Braille works. I need to find out how to get MathSpeak to work with this site. So far I’m able to read simple kinematic equations just fine but what about matrices?

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