Minutes: MathML general meeting, 23 July

 Attendees:

   - Bert Bos
   - Christopher Comninel
   - Sam Dooley
   - David Farmer
   - Deyan Ginev
   - Patrick Ion
   - Brian Kardell
   - Charles LaPierre
   - Paul Libbrecht
   - Louis Maher
   - Bruce Miller
   - Murray Sargent
   - Cary Supalo
   - Neil Soiffer
   - Stephen Watt
   - Laurence Zaysser

Regrets:

   - David Carlisle
   - Steve Noble

Announcements/updates

CS: Reminder to Bert to send Cary the W3C Template mentioned in the last
week's meeting.
Action Item followup

NS: No consistent support for ARIA on MathML in alternative AT engines, see
email on the mailing list for details.

LZ: Is aria-description handling similar to footnotes in that they don't
happen by default?

NS: Tried alternative keys as well, but no meaningful behavior was produced
for Neil's specific keyboard setup.

Using ARIA for intentFollow up on Deyan Presentation last week on his idea
of using ARIAWhere do we go from here/how do we make progress?

NS: If the aria behavior is currently not well-defined, this could be a
place for the Math WG to provide that meaningful definition, going forward.
Especially in order to avoid problematic AT results with Braille.

*ACTION ITEM:* NS: Will begin to write a report on where we are, and where
we want to go. We will use Google Docs for our report.
MathML in the wild -- see mail archive thread

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-math/2021Jul/0051.html

DF: three categories

   1. tools that do the best they can to meet the spec that we come up with
   2. all the stuff in arXiv and elsewhere. That won't be improved. Should
   be spoken character-by-character
   3. remediated math. Someone can add info such as "number theory paper"
   to my writings.

LZ: You would have to come up with standards for the separate subject
catagories.

SW: There is a difference on how you would want to pronounce things,
depending on area. For example, in probability E be read as "expectation",
but in some areas of physics as "energy". Would we have defaults or have to
tag every instance in a section?

NS: Anything we do for math has to be contained within math. Math is one
topic no matter what kind of document we are processing.

MS: Two kinds of math speech: coarse-grained or fine-grained. Most people
talk about coarse-grained. If you are reading a p in math, you want to call
it p and not probability in fine-grained navigation.

PI: We could have a in which we could specify the local type of math. But
that's not going to happen. So one could have settings on a math element
that persisted until another math element turned them off. But that's
demanding technically. So the math elements would have to have repeated
values of such intents. Is that the only way we have? Does each object have
to have its own math setting?

PL: It's difficult to specify all fields of mathematics. Accessibility
tools read the DOM and can have intent injected with JavaScript.

NS: The accessibility tree is ignored by the AT. The AT looks at the DOM.
MathML lives beyond the browsers, MathML is used for many types of
documents besides web pages.

DG: We need to develop a list of tools where we want to be able to specify
the document forms we should be able to process.

NS: The core work is browser related, but MathML lives in a bigger world
that has other formats than browsers. WCAG is an example of a group that
goes beyond the browser in their rec. They basically specify the
aspirational goals of accessibility and have different documents on how to
obtain that in HTML, PDF, etc.

LZ: Their specification separates the stable from the unstable practices,
which is great.

BK: ARIA is similar in that they talk about OS-specific accessibility and
how to map HTML to that.

DF: 1. perfectly constructed MathML as per spec. 2. the MathML that is out
there now and unaware of what we are doing. 3. the current MathML which
tries to follow some of the rules we have specified.

NS: We have constructs like overbar, but what character represents this as
part of mover? Is it "-", "_", some other Unicode char? Which one will
trigger "x bar" as speech? In general, should the spec say what character
should be used for common situations. MathML 3 says this for primes and
degree.

NS: Going back to a comment Deyan made on the mailing list, if you type a
colon, does it mean an actual colon or does it stand for a ratio. You would
have to have an intent attribute to make this clear.

LZ: We must be able to deal with characters that look like one another
using intents.

DG: Unless we receive an offer from Unicode to include at least another
couple of thousand characters, (that look like existing glyphs, but have
dedicated mathematical intent), we don't have enough characters to rely on
Unicode as a primary solution.

NS: Unicode had too many characters already.

SW: discussed using style sheets to give the meaning of symbols for
different subjects. This may be beyond our scope.

NS: If the document is in english, then the math will be expected to be in
english.

BM: The emails discussed different levels of accessibility. The bottom
level has no interpretation. Higher layers may be topic specific. Should we
break down our specifications into layers?

NS: there is nothing we need to do to read out the raw form without
interpretation. People would like to have semantic interpretation. There
have not been formal studies on this topic so maybe people just *think*
they want a semantic interpretation.

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