Accessibility Technology Initiative
(Web 2.0, Latex Experiments with Accessibility)

Chris Pollett

cpollett@gmail.com

Nov 6, 2009.

Agenda

Making Math Accessible.
Experiments with Web 2.0 Accessibility

What Projects Have Tried to Make Math Accessible?

The most common way to write mathematics is using the LaTeX language.
There are a few projects like braille.sty to convert LaTeX to braille.
This would provide a visual/tactile way (such as Nemeth encoding) to represent equations and might be the way to go for blind people.
Another approach to try is to say the math aloud.

What Projects Have Tried to Make Math Accessible II

In 1994, as part of his Ph.D. Thesis, T.V. Raman created a system called ASTER.
This was an Emacs-based Lisp system that could read LaTeX documents.
One issue with ASTER was what to do about user-defined macros? For instance, I often have the following LaTeX abbreviation in my documents:
```
\newcommand{\IMP}{\supset}
```
The intent is this should read as implies. By default, most systems which try to read LaTeX would read this as "supset".
Even if you just tried to read the name of the macro though it probably would not make sense...
An imp is something more mischievous than an implication.
In ASTER, you could write your own Emacs-Lisp extensions to say it correctly.
Unfortunately, you would have to learn how to write Emacs-LISP.

Math and PDF

T.V. Raman went on to work at Adobe and many of the accessibility features of Postscript and PDF are due to him.
Currently, he is at Google and works on extensions to Google search for accessibility as well as to Google Android.
So what happens when you try to compile LaTeX to PDF? How do the equations fair?
Generally, when you turn read aloud on in Acrobat on a document generated from LaTeX, it OCR's the whole documents, splits out everything it doesn't understand as images.
Let me demo, on a simple series like...

Acrobat will read "apt blank blank..."
This seems to suggest that the best strategy to get your math to read correctly is to convert displayed equations to images, then provide alternative text that makes sense for those images.
Do not use the raw LaTeX as the alternative text! You will suffer the same problems as the last slide.

MathML

MathML is a mark-up language, like HTML for writing both inline and displayed equations.

<math xmlns="&mathml;">
  <mstyle displaystyle="false" scriptlevel="0">
    <mrow>
      <mfrac>
        <mrow>
          <mi mathcolor="gray">sin</mi>

          <mo rspace="verythinmathspace">&ApplyFunction;</mo>
          <mi>θ</mi>
        </mrow>
        <mi>&pi;</mi>
      </mfrac>
    </mrow>
  </mstyle>
</math>

Like LaTeX, there is some hope that if the raw tags were read, it would be understandable to a visually impaired person.
Some tools for reading Math aloud are the FireVox plugin (also does text) for Firefox and Mathplayer for Internet Explorer.
I will demo how these do on the test MathML equation at Mozilla.
Based on these tests, I think you will agree you probably want to provide your own alternative text.

Firevox and Web 2.0

In Web 2.0, there is a focus on using technologies like Ajax to refresh only portions of a web page at a time.
There is an emerging standard for how to make such documents accessible called ARIA - Accessible Rich Internet Applications.
The basic idea is to add attributes to HTML tags to indicate that that portion of the screen might update and when it updates how the screen reader should behave.
For example, you might add to the tag an attribute like: live="off", live="polite", live="assertive", live="rude" to indicate if that portion of the screen changes should the screen reader interrupt what its reading to say what has changed.
Firefox with the Firevox add-on actually supports this standard.

How do the Web 2.0 web sites stack up as far as passing automated accessibility checks?

It is becoming increasingly common for faculty to use some of the Web 2.0 sites as part of their class.
So how do these sites stack-up as far as the automated tests you might find at webaim.org?
Here are the number of errors on the main page for some sites.

Site Number of Errors

Google Groups 3

Yahoo! Groups 6

Facebook 12

MySpace 5

Twitter 2

YouTube 22
It should be noted if you use Firevox, YouTube and Google search display differently and in a more accessible way.
Some of these though can be made accessible by using the fact that you can interact with them via e-mail.

Site	Number of Errors
Google Groups	3
Yahoo! Groups	6
Facebook	12
MySpace	5
Twitter	2
YouTube	22

Conclusion

It still seems the best way to make Math accessible is to provide your own text on how you would like the math to read.
Web 2.0 sites can be made accessible using today's technology.
Many Web 2.0 sites are currently not accessible, but often do provide an alternate means of use which is more accessible.

Accessibility Technology Initiative (Web 2.0, Latex Experiments with Accessibility)

Agenda

What Projects Have Tried to Make Math Accessible?

What Projects Have Tried to Make Math Accessible II

Math and PDF

MathML

Firevox and Web 2.0

How do the Web 2.0 web sites stack up as far as passing automated accessibility checks?

Conclusion

Accessibility Technology Initiative
(Web 2.0, Latex Experiments with Accessibility)