Re: Some feedback from Chemistry CG

I think there is a strong use case for some way of semantically interpreting chemical formulas in such a way that a user can get a reading like "sulfuric acid" instead of "cap H sub 2 cap S cap O sub 4." I would suggests that such a use case is especially relevant to a user who has dyslexia and is using text-to-speech, and could be very useful also for publishers who are trying to address didactic approaches to chemistry content, and may want a "learning mode" (or whatever you want to call it) as students are beginning to study chemistry or general science. The "learning mode" could be turned off in an assessment context when the point of the assessment is to test students on their ability to interpret such formulas. The mode could also be switched when a blind student wants to know the precise characters being used.

Of course, this is just my opinion and I have not conducted any research to support this conclusion for chemistry. However, studies that I have conducted with dyslexic students around middle-school math content have demonstrated that semantic interpretation of mathematical expressions were very useful in place of simply reading the expression character by character without interpretation.

Now...whether that implies a need for semantic markup for chemical formulas may depend upon whether one believes that this determination should be left up the reading system to infer or whether one believes the author needs to specify this.

--Steve




Steve Noble
Instructional Designer, Accessibility
Psychometrics & Testing Services

Pearson

502 969 3088
steve.noble@pearson.com<mailto:steve.noble@pearson.com>

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________________________________
From: Deyan Ginev <deyan.ginev@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2020 4:49 PM
To: Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
Cc: public-mathml4@w3.org <public-mathml4@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Some feedback from Chemistry CG

Thanks for forwarding Neil!

It is indeed curious that they are basically asking for a
presentation-tree readout, no need for semantics at all -- even the
subscripts are read as-is. If we are to agree with that feedback
unconditionally, one wonders if we should be excluding chemistry from
level 1 entirely, as it won't have any material impact compared to raw
pMML, and it may get the acceptable level of speech without any
additional annotation work.

Greetings,
Deyan

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 1:07 PM Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
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> With Cary's permission, I am forwarding this message from the Chemistry CG to the MathML mailing list.
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> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Supalo, Cary A <csupalo@ets.org>
> Date: Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 4:09 PM
> Subject: RE: Request for phone meeting
> To: Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
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> Dear Neil,
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> A small group of chemistry community members met informally last week to discuss your request more at length. The following bulleted list of points are what we perceive as a starting point for a fruitful discussion on what further disambiguation of chemistry terminology is needed to support this collaborative effort between the MathML and the chemistry community. We feel and know that without the strong collaboration we have, and without the input from the MathML community, it would be a detriment to the print disabled communities. On our initial assessment of your request at our last meeting, we have three examples of conventions we would like to see fully implemented:
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> We feel elements and compounds should be read as letters, including the designation of the capital letter. Sodium (Na), for example, should be read “cap N a”. Chlorine (Cl) as “Cap C l”. Sodium chloride “cap N a cap C l”. Methane (CH4) as “cap C cap H sub 4”.
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> With regards to the question regarding elements and compounds being read with their proper names we feel is a pedagogical question that should be left up to the individual user to decide. If they wish proper names to be spoken by their screen reader, this can be enabled by means of the custom language dictionary that is offered by JAWS and NVDA.
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> We also feel strongly that units should be read as units. We imagine MathML probably already has many unit designations already that we can leverage. Chemistry content should be able to benefit from the same unit designations.
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> Anything that is not disambiguated/defined in our table should also be read “as is,” as the letters they are defined.
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> We hope this clarification is the first step to a lengthier discussion on optimization of disambiguation of chemistry content. It was our position all along that the table we provided to the MathML group was a first step. We welcome the opportunity to meet with you to discuss logical next steps at future meetings. We welcome and highly value this collaboration between the chemistry and math ML communities. If you would like to include this type of topic as an agenda item for a future Chemistry Community meeting, we are certainly happy to do so.
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> Thank you very much for your continued support of our community where we value your input and feedback highly.
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> Cary
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> From: Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2020 12:35 AM
> To: Supalo, Cary A <csupalo@ets.org>
> Cc: Barrett, Dan <Dan.Barrett@hmhco.com>
> Subject: Re: Request for phone meeting
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> The MathML CG talked about chemistry issues a little this week in the context of a larger issue that we are trying to resolve. As I mentioned, a subject area sets defaults, so most authors don't need to worry about labelling every token. But there are defaults, so every token has a meaning given to it by an attr (currently being called "semantics" but likely will change).  For chemistry and for that matter, units, the issue came up: how detailed are the attr values? For example, do we have semantics="units" or do we have semantics="millimeters", etc. For chemistry, is it semantics="element" or semantics="hydrogen", etc. I had thought everyone was on board with "unit" and "element", but I was wrong, so this issue needs to be hashed out. Because this needs resolution, it probably doesn't make sense to discuss it at the chem CG call this week.
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> There is a question that you or maybe the group can answer... if I have NaCl suitably marked up in MathML, should that always be 'spelled out' in speech? If sometimes it should be "sodium chloride" in speech and maybe sometimes "salt", who determines that? The author? The reader? The answer to that question will inform a discussion about labelling them 'element' (which would allow for various forms of speech) vs. specifically labelling them 'hydrogen' or for that matter not labeling them at all so that the letters are always just the letters.
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>     Neil
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