Re: [orca-list] Math on Orca

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
Firstly good to hear that some one else who uses maths is contacting 
developers of their screen reader about gaining access to maths. There's 
a few points to cover here:

Orca isn't great with maths. One feature it could do with is mathml 
support for maths in webpages as those on windows can gain some access 
to mathml in internet explorer. However this needs more than orca fixes, 
firefox I believe doesn't reveal the information orca needs. Side note: 
have you considered using the firevox plugin to make firefox self 
voicing, it seems to have some mathml support (although I found it 
wasn't as good as mathplayer and internet explorer on windows).

You specifically mentioned PDF containing maths, these are particularly 
bad for any screen reader. For PDF to work alot of work needs to be done 
and when maths is involved you are best advised to try and contact the 
author for an alternative format. Should you have no success, then there 
are some commercial offerings on windows which may be able to help (I 
won't go into detail on list here as windows stuff is off topic, either 
contact me off list or look at some of the links I will provide below).

If your used to using linux this suggestion for writing maths may suit 
you well, have you considered the LaTeX typesetting language? Most linux 
distributions either come with LaTeX installed or have it available in 
their package manager system, so getting a working LaTeX environment 
should be easy. Why is LaTeX so good? Its plain text based, so use 
whatever editor you like and so you can gain perfect access to the 
source document. You use commands in the text to insert more complicated 
notation/structures and there are many packages for many different types 
of documents. When you want to print your document, you use the LaTeX 
software to compile it into a format like PDF, and providing you used 
the LaTeX correctly you will have a professional looking document. The 
only problem with the last bit is, if you are really concerned about 
perfection, it can be hard to confirm the precise output being produced, 
but when you are familiar with LaTeX and read errors and warnings when 
compiling these situations should be few and far between.

OK, so as not to bore others on the list who don't want to do maths, 
here is a link to the NFB's blindmath mailing list where hopefully more 
detail won't be off topic 
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org. Also there 
is the NFB's science and engineering list (much quieter) 
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfb-science_nfbnet.org.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, Timothy Taves wrote:
> Hey there, I have noticed that Orca isn't great at reading out 
> mathematical equations, which makes life very difficult us physicists 
> and mathematicians.
>
> Are there plans to fix this problem?  It would be most useful if Orca 
> could read out mathematical equations from pdf documents.
>
> Thanks, Tim