Re: Accessible user agents that support MathML?

Hello,

Unfortunately, although Mozilla supports accessibility APIs, as well as 
DOM extensions to accessibility APIs, there are no screen readers 
available yet that take advantage of this fact. We're getting pretty 
close with Window-Eyes, but Window-Eyes uses MSAA, and there is nothing 
in MSAA which contains support mathemetical objects. GW Micro, or 
another screen reader vendor that develops compatibility with Mozilla, 
would have to decide that it's a priority and go to the directly DOM 
nodes for the MathML info. I doubt this would happen without some kind 
of major grant.

Screen magnifiers will probably have much better luck, because they 
won't have to translate the structure into a voice or Braille stream .... :/

I believe that it would be great to support MathML, and even SVG, via a 
screen reader on top of Gecko/Mozilla, but I'm afraid we're not very 
close to it yet.

Cheers,

- Aaron Leventhal
   Netscape Accessibility



Ian B. Jacobs wrote:

>amp;In-Reply-To=<1054474543.851.72.camel@seabright>&References=<1054474543.851.72.camel@seabright>Content-Type: text/plain
>Organization: W3C
>Message-Id: <1054553689.15219.110.camel@seabright>
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>Date: 02 Jun 2003 07:34:49 -0400
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>
>A few other threads on this:
>
>1) Email from B.K. DeLong (3 Mar 2003) on some attempts
>   to make math accessible on the Web
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/2003JanMar/0041
>
>2) Mozilla seems to support both MathML and APIs for access
>   by screen readers:
> 
>   Refer to:
>   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/accannounce.html
>
>   And MathML in list of supported specs:
>   http://mozilla.org/why/users-features.html
>
>   I don't have any experience with Mozilla and MathML, however.
>
>Comments and suggestions from Mozilla folks welcome.
>
> - Ian
>
>  
>
>>A colleague asked me if I was aware of any user agents
>>that support MathML and that are accessible to users
>>with blindness. I welcome any advice that I may
>>forward to my colleague. 
>>
>>It may also be that there are accessible solutions
>>for putting math on the Web that don't involve MathML; if so,
>>please let me know.
>>
>>It would also be valuable to conduct a UAAG 1.0
>>evaluation on a MathML user agent.
>>
>>    
>>

Received on Monday, 2 June 2003 08:43:00 UTC