Minutes: MathML intent meeting 22 April, 2021

Attendees:

David Carlisle

Sam Dooley

David Farmer

Patrick Ion

Paul Libbrecht

Louis Maher

Murray Sargent

Neil Soiffer

Laurence Zaysser

Moritz Schulbot

Deyan Ginev

Bruce Miller

Steve Noble

Charles LaPierre

Thanks to Louis for once again taking notes.

Regrets: Patrick Ion and David Farmer

Agenda:

1.  Announcements/updates

NS: WG meetings starts May 13.

DG: May not join the WG until June.

DG: Should we send out invitations to join the WG.

NS: Yes.

2. (finally) Sam to update us on where we are at with the intent attribute

https://mathml-refresh.github.io/mathml/docs/intent.html

DS: Reviewed the intent attribute proposal.

We want to have an intent attribute to explain what the author means.

People might want to have PI to be 3.

Use default rules so that you do not have to enter that many attributes.

Sometimes the defaults will not work; for example, the differential inside
an integral.

NS: In many cases, the default rules  will capture what people want.

You would only have to add information for special cases.

LZ: How do you know what the default values are?

SD: Someone must write a specification.

SD: The Intent document is just an initial draft.  We do not want to vote
on it yet.

LZ: Who is going to implement this?

NS: The authoring tool will generate it. The browser will pass it along to
the Access Technology (AT) that will vocalize it.

DG: Is there any proof that this will work?  We must prove that the
defaults do 90% of the work.

SD: This will eliminate the complexity of parallel markup.

PL: Are we going to specify the complete grammar for the intent attribute?

DG: Yes.

SD: It should be simple.

DS: You can give the same symbol different meanings in a document.

BM: There should be a language table to translate the english intent
attributes into other languages.

LZ: Perhaps you can specify the global language in the HTML header for the
entire document so that you do not have to put language tags on each
expression.

NS: Things like “greater than” may be called different things in different
languages.

DG: Has speech hints in his document.

NS: Does not trust automatic language translation especially for AT speech.

DC: Discussed  a LaTeX tutorial, and many people made translations for it.

LZ: Suggested that language instructors might help do the translations.

DG: If we use volunteers due to a lack of money, then people will translate
only what they are interested in.

DG: Has listened to Khan Academy videos to see how the same thing is spoken
in different ways in english.

NS: For next week, discuss:

How to make the table easy to implement; and, what do we do about producing
local language translations.

DG: We still need to prove that the defaults will work in most cases.

DG: Link to place to find defaults:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EsWou1K5nxBdLPvQapdoA9h-s8lg_qjn8fJH64g9izQ/edit#gid=1358098730