Re: April Chemistry Meetings

In preparation for the meeting, I have attached an HTML file extracted from
the chemistry speech google doc
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yjNc1rY3q73Cf1UKPVsnhG0AXjJCu4M8dXAUJdBpRic/edit>
that a few people have commented on. If you have the MathCAT 0.2.1 addon
for NVDA <https://nvda-addons.org/files/get.php?file=mathcat>, you can
listen to the speech for the examples in NVDA. I have fixed some bugs with
chemistry and here is a MathCAT 0.2.2 beta with some of them fixed
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HVymZd2XvYDNz2LbnDm-BcvWXGj0jpXZ/view?usp=sharing>
if you want to give that a try.

Alternatively, you can go to the MathCATDemo page
<https://nsoiffer.github.io/MathCATDemo/> and use that for speech. If you
want to use the mhchem input notation, the input should be something like
   $\ce{H2O}$
where "\ce" is the mhchem macro for a chemical equation. The $'s are
optional in most cases as MathCAT will likely figure out that this is TeX
notation. Most of the examples in the chemistry google doc have examples in
the mhchem format so just add the outer "\ce{  }".

IMPORTANT: the speech MathCAT generates depends on the verbosity and
capitalization settings. For H2O:
verbose: cap h subscript 2 cap o
medium: cap h sub 2 cap o
terse cap h 2 cap o

In NVDA, saying cap, using a pitch change, and/or generating a beep for
capital letters is controlled by the settings in NVDA's settings:speech
dialog. The verbosity settings are controlled by MathCAT's settings dialog.

In the MathCAT demo, there are radio buttons to control the verbosity and a
checkbox to control speaking "cap". If you don't want to hear the speech,
set TTS to "Off". The speech area will show what would have been spoken.

Note: in preparing the HTML page, I discovered some bugs in MathCAT's
chemistry speech (recognizing something is chemistry -- mhchem makes that
much harder than it should be...). Some bug fixes have been incorporated in
the MathCATDemo site and 0.2.2 beta. More are coming.

I look forward to getting feedback for improvement from the group.

    Neil



On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 1:53 PM Greg Williams <
gwilliams@independencescience.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We will have a meeting of the entire chemistry on the web group on
> Thursday April 6 at 12:00 PM eastern. The two primary topics will be a
> report on the current progress of the organic chemistry subgroup and an
> opportunity for Neil Soiffer to discuss MathCAT and reading chemistry.
> If anyone has other topics they would like to discuss, please let me
> know by Monday April 3.
>
> There will be a meeting of the organic subgroup on Thursday April 13 at
> 12:00 PM eastern.
>
> I will send Zoom links for each of the meetings on Monday.
>
> All the best,
>
> Greg
>
>
>
>