Problem Description

Accessibility to text-based web content and to interactive desktop-type widgets, such as checkboxes, menus, and sliders, has been made quite robust and reliable for persons living with sensory and motor disabilities. We are making progress extending support for persons with cognitive and learning disabilities.

Recent standardization work has begun providing accessibility support for graphicly expressed knowledge through SVG.

Many intellectual disciplines, however, routinely express knowledge and facilitate discourse utilizing knowledge domain specific symbology. Mathematics is expressed and interacted with symbols and semantic constructs radically different from those used in music scoring, both of which differ markedly from linear textual presentation, even where semantic textual structures have also been made accessible.

Examples of knowledge domain symbologies include, but are not limited to:

Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
Economics
Music Scoring

Additionally, there are common practices even in textual content not well supported for accessibility for users who rely on, or significantly benefit from accurate synthetic speech content pronunciation. Examples here include:

The study of history where publications routinely employ foreign language words, phrases, and entire paragraphs in line.
The acquisition of foreign language skills
The study of sacred and ancient texts, e.g. interlineal Bibles, where each ancient word is often “hyperlinked” to standard dictionary resources.

NOTE: The term “hyperlink” is set off in quotations because the common practice predates hypertext technology, and is commonly rendered through defined symbols for “cross referencing.”

Toward Solutions

We cannot expect the vendors of assistive technology to solve these problems because the problems are largely unique knowledge domain by knowledge domain, and good solutions will require expertise with that knowledge domain’s symbology.
We need to look for common traits across multiple knowledge domains, e.g. we likely need to denote the use of a specific knowledge domain symbology across some span of content embedded within standard web page constructs.
We need to be on the lookout for particular widget types used by certain knwledge domains for which we lack accessibility support.
We may need normative specifications for declaring what symbologies are utilized in individual publications. It should not be necessary to parse an entire publication to discover which symbology systems have been employed.
We will likely want best practices authoring guidance. It is highly likely that a publication will include spans of content from distinct knowledge domains.
We will likely require defined mechanisms for conveying correct terminology to accessibility APIs, as well as defined mechanisms for insuring content is correctly pronounced by TTS.