Re: Math in the Page Authoring Guidelines

The expression complexity of visual symbolic language for
mathematics breaks the complexity management guidelines for
spoken information.  I see a lot of equations in print with too
many productions in them to be spoken comprehensibly in one
sentence.  It's like one needs to sic a composition teacher on
them and get the argument restated as a sequence of shorter
sentences.

Another way to state this is: "Here is another domain, like
translating programs between programming languages, where a
purely syntactic transformation may yield less-than-desirable
results."

The risk associated with expression complexity is greater in
speech than in print.  Loss of tracking kicks in at a lower
expression complexity.  Articulating some mathematical utterance
as speech may work better if a whole article is compiled, and not
just the text (including math symbol structures) transliterated.

The shape of the compile process would be something like a) build
a knowledge base from the whole article including symbolic
exhibits and verbal voice-over b) segment it into feasible verbal
paragraphs for readout from the knowledge base, c) code-generate
the latter into fluent verbal language.  Or tolerable.

Al