Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Review MathML (#313)

Benetech has created a "[Global Certified Accessible](https://bornaccessible.org/certification/)" program to certify publisher EPUB books have met the [Accessibility 1.0 Conformance and Discovery Specification](https://www.w3.org/Submission/epub-a11y/) which is now under the W3C's domain.   For STEM educational books which contain math publishers are encouraged to include mathML instead of just an image of the math equation.  

Over the past two years the [DIAGRAM Center](http://diagramcenter.org) has been working on a method to allow assistive technology access to the mathML for those reading systems which can understand the MathML and for those systems which can not we have a fallback solution proposed which uses SVG and an alt text description of the math.  Testing of this technique is currently underway and the results of these tests will be posted on [EPUBTest.org](http://epubtest.org/testsuite/accessibility/) and [MathSupportFinder](https://msf.mathmlcloud.org)

Publishers have millions of equations already in MathML format and they want to do the right thing and make their math accessible.  Deprecating mathML completely from HTML without an accessible drop-in replacement in my opinion would be a detriment to those students who desperately need access to accessible math.

Work is currently underway to try and remediate some of the issues that has prevented widespread adoption of mathML in Browsers and the current fragmentation of mathML support.  

The W3C has just deprecated the older versions of MathML in favor of the latest 3.0 spec. Let's not be too hasty and remove mathML completely from HTML since EPUB is built on HTML and most reading systems use HTML browser engine to render the EPUBs.



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