Re: [orca-list] math

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

To take this bit by bit.

First of all you mentioned about using openoffice writer to edit/read
math, I don't think this is good/possible. Something you may wish to
consider, and you may prefer it also for doing any document is the LaTeX
type setting language. In short it is a language which has commands to
mean specific constructs for a document, and it is all written in a text
editor (so you can use the editor of your choice here), and then you run
it through software to compile it into whatever format you desire for
your output (there is certainly HTML, PDF, mathml, etc). This is a
system not just used by visually impaired people, you may find that some
of the documentation for opensource software was originally written in
LaTeX, the python documentation I believe is an example. LaTeX has very
good math features and is quite widely used by university level
scientists and mathematicians.

You next mentioned PDF. You are right in saying that access is no better
than it is on windows, and doesn't provide sufficient information for
screen readers to give you access to math. This problem is really to do
with the software which creates PDF and reads PDF, I believe the PDF
standard does have a way that sufficient structure could be given to it
and make math accessible. I also believe some initial attempts have been
made by design science to help improve PDF math accessibility, but I
think that would be for windows and is still quite a way off before it
becomes production ready.

The final thing was to do with mathml. Orca itself doesn't support
mathml in firefox, the comment previously (in the last few weeks about
it) was to do with orca providing a way that the firefox plugin called
firevox could use orca as output. I suggested that the feature may be
considered to be kept as the firevox plugin does support mathml (when I
last used it the mathml support wasn't quite as full as the mathplayer
plugin for internet explorer). As memory goes, I believe the feature
wasn't removed, but was going to be set off by default and would only be
possible to change by modifying one of orca's configuration files by
hand. Depending on what math support you need, and possibly by talking
with the author of the firevox plugin you may find this enough.

I believe there may be some thought about trying to make a more general
way for ATs to access technical information such as math, but don't know
what the state of that might be and how long it might take before
something useful appears from it.

So while access is not great to math on Linux, I would say access to
math in general isn't great and possibly on Linux you may have some more
success, simply if it is that you can try everything as it is generally
free software.

You may also wish to discuss some of this stuff on the NFB blindmath
mailing list as there are certainly Linux users there as well (in fact
some of them, me included, are here as well).

Michael Whapples
On Mon, 2008-04-21 at 13:56 -0400, aerospace1028 hotmail com wrote: