Minutes: MathML "intent" meeting, 1 Oct, 2020

The meeting was recorded:
https://benetech.zoom.us/rec/share/73eQ7NLe4MEuMqo8UrnWouwvwLm6Km3098KPmfhGyEO5bcGjzBabZNAxkhpaUyeS.H9_c2zb8aPdanbag
Passcode: CH.k7tYB starts about 7 minutes in

Attendees:

Neil Soiffer

Deyan Ginev

Sam Dooley

Patrick Ion

David Carlisle

Murray Sargent

Steve Noble

David Farmer


1. Charter -- comments?

NS: Draft is at
https://mathml-refresh.github.io/charter-drafts/math-2020.html

NS: Please send suggested changes to Patrick Ion or Neil Soiffer.
Alternatively, if you check out the sources, create a branch, make your
changes, and do a pull request with either of us as reviewers.
2. Intent values -- continue discussion with Deyan's google doc as a
framework   a) More discussion on the meaning/purpose of the various levels

DG: I continue working on working values. I’m up to ‘H’. Nothing new, but
some interesting ones that are very complicated.

DG: Chemistry is interesting. I shared two videos showing how chemistry is
used. They are top hits on youtube.

DG: Example of balancing equations. He talks about “hydrogen”, etc, but
when he talks about the balancing equation, he uses just the letter names.

NS: There are other things that change like reading sub/superscripts, [] -
concentration.

BM: Similar things are done in physics where “momentum”, “energy” are used,
but when writing things down, it is ‘m’, ‘e’, etc.

BM: are things different for accessibility?

LM: if they are read wrong then it is really hard to understand

NS: a study with kids was they want the semantics, not the syntax. For
their simple math, superscripts were always powers, so there was no bad
reading.

MS: Dr. Nemeth developed MathTalk that is syntactic and has a 1-1
correspondence with the braille Nemeth code

LM: if you want to understand the math, you probably have to see it in
braille.

NS: JAWS, NVDA, and Safari all generate Nemeth code for braille displays.

SN: The reading system should let you hear what you want

DG: The markup isn’t necessarily spoken. Just because it is marked as
‘hydrogen’, doesn’t it mean it is spoken. Useful for search. It is not by
default they should be read, it is up to the reading.

DG: We should defer to aria-label for hard overrides

DG: Properties like “twice differentiable” shouldn’t be spoken.

DF: pi(x) is the prime counting function. It is pronounced “pi of x”, you
don’t pronounce it as “the prime counting function” even if it is marked at
the “prime counting function”.

BM: ‘intent’ is a key to a dictionary. Not necessarily spoken directly.

NS: DG mentioned maybe needing another attribute. That property is
different from intent.

DF: intent is not necessarily what you want to speak.

MS: we have a hotkey that temporarily tells you more info.

BM: it argues that you have something semantic like whether or not it is
pronounced

DF: we such decide on whether intent is a key to info or something to
pronounce

DG: defaults are there for a reason -- they work 90% of the time but not
all the time.

DG: it is not sufficient to just to speak a key.

DG: even if it is not pronounced, the prepositions that put the expressions
together are helped. ‘Pi of’ vs ‘pi times’.

NS: in that case, it should have applyfunction vs invisibletimes

NS: but do we need a different attribute for a property rather than a name.

DG: real-valued, differentiable, …  All could use a different attribute.
Worksheets are examples. Several steps. Useful for search.

BM: I think having a separate ‘property’ attribute is useful. E.g., saying
it is a unit or chemical element.

NS: I don’t find those compelling because if we know it is a chemical
element, we know what it is.

<discussion around guessing/heuristics vs what should be said and what is
in the MathML>

NS: reminder about what we say we are doing in the charter -- does it need
to change?

BM: things are related, but not intertwined

DG: is this related to pragmatic vs strict content MathML?

DG: One things maps to another: implicit -> explicit

NS: We don’t want to require everyone to have to markup mfrac as ‘divides’,
so defaults should be in the spec.

Consensus is that there are implicit defaults that map to the explicit we
are defining.

Action Item: NS to change “semantics” to “intent” in various proposal
docs.  Also # -> @ ( DG thinks ‘$’ might be better).

Next week we return to the syntax of ‘intent’.