Re: [Filter Effects][css3-transforms] Using MathML for formulas

Hello,

As part of MathJax, I would like to address Dirk's concerns. Short version:
MathJax will only increase accessibility, not decrease it.

First off, accessibility is important to us and MathJax is designed with
accesibility in mind (cf.
http://www.mathjax.org/resources/articles-and-presentations/accessible-pages-with-mathjax/).
We have dedicated features in this respect and in our experience screen
readers have no problem with pages using MathJax. I should add, however,
that we are not aware of screen readers that can read MathML without help
from MathPlayer -- we'd be very interested to hear about such a project!

Regarding Dirk's concerns: MathJax does *not* remove the original
MathML.when using MathJax's "HTML-CSS" output mechanism -- instead the
MathML is heavily styled so that the browser displays it correctly. It is
somewhat true that MathJax's SVG output mechanism removes the mathml from
the DOM -- but it is added to the page in a script-tag after each SVG
(and remains available internally for MathJax). In any case, we would not
suggest SVG output as a default setting for the specs since it does not
work with IE 8 and below.

I would tentatively suggest to configure MathJax in such a way that
"NativeMML" is used whenever possible (e.g. IE with mathplayer, Firefox if
your code works there etc) and use "HTML-CSS" elsewhere; you can take a
look at our documentation for specifying this
http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/options/MMLorHTML.html.

Let me know if you need more information,
Peter Krautzberger.


On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Vincent Hardy <vhardy@adobe.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is there a way to keep the work Cameron has done and address the
> accessibility concerns Dirk raises?
>
> -v
>
> On May 18, 2012, at 3:43 AM, Dirk Schulze wrote:
>
> >
> > On May 18, 2012, at 12:49 PM, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> >
> >> Without even having noticed this thread (Dirk just pointed me to it), I
> >> added MathML supported by MathJax to the SVG 2 spec earlier today.  It
> >> is currently referencing the CDN copy of the library (although the
> >> stable version, not the "latest" link).  It works pretty well -- I've
> >> currently got it using the SVG rendering mode, since it looks nicer in
> >> than the HTML+CSS, IMO at least.
> >>
> >> I replaced one <pre>-formatted equation here:
> >>
> >>  https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/painting.html#StrokeMiterlimitProperty
> >>
> >> Anyway, I'd love to keep using it in the spec.  I'd be fine with adding
> >> a local copy of the library to the svg2 repo if necessary.
> > (Previously posted on public-svg mailing list)
> >
> > I think it is to early to do this. For browsers that do not support
> MathML, the complete MathML code gets replaced by HTML or SVG as far as I
> can tell. Therefore it is no longer accessible by users of screen readers.
> That itself is in conflict with the idea of MathML and doesn't help at all.
> The semantics get lost completely. Not all people with the need of screen
> readers use Internet Explorer and the Math plugin. And there are still
> browsers like Chrome that don't support MathML. This becomes more
> problematic once we see laptops with ChromeOS and ChromeVOX. Therefore we
> should think about it twice. For the meantime I would like to see it
> removed from SVG 2 again untill we have a decision in the W3C with other
> WGs, including the MathML WG.
> >
> > Greetings,
> > Dirk
>
>
>
>
>