- From: Deyan Ginev <deyan.ginev@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2021 16:33:47 -0400
- To: Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
- Cc: Paul Libbrecht <paul@hoplahup.net>, David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>, www-math@w3.org
Hi Neil,
1. Yes, "natural" readings can be derived from the presentation tree
and Unicode, I think this is a point of group consensus we should
cherish and build upon. Those need no further annotation, presentation
MathML 3 is enough.
---
2. "B-double-prime" is already an example that is not natural, as it
makes a custom choice on how to narrate the variable name.
The "natural" choice is different, derived from walking the tree - "B
prime prime" or even "B Superscript prime prime".
(Aside: the compositional leaf narration is indeed the standard in
Bulgarian and Russian - "Б прим прим").
I think this is a great example since the entire group can follow along.
Yes, current AT systems have a rule for double-prime. That is great,
since until now there was no way to annotate it, it makes sense it had
to be hardcoded.
But AT systems today don't have rules for all potentially "double-"
and "triple-" embellished names.
I tested SRE and it gave me the "Superscript asterisk asterisk" and
"Superscript plus plus" readings for B^{**} and B^{++}. The "double"
and "triple" need to come from somewhere. I can also quickly come up
with B^{!!}, B^{--}, B^{††}, B^{↑↑}, B^{??}.
There are also cases where the "natural" speech will sound iffy, such
as word abbreviations. A paper I was debugging today had f_{att} as a
name for "the attention function". Maybe an author would prefer having
it narrated as "f-attention" rather than "f-att", which could create
rather unpleasant speech. In that case you would have an <mi
intent="attention">att</mi>, which answers your call for an <mi>
example.
To my perspective, in scientific discourse a math expression is a
linguistic description first, and not immediately a symbolic component
from a computational runtime.
Sure, sometimes it is both, and one can enable both CAS and AT
applications. But if the author named a variable as
"B-triple-asterisk" or "B-triple-plus" or even "B-third-star" and
"B-third-plus", I see no reason why we should prevent them from
annotating their chosen name, so that the AT user can have a clear
common language with the author.
I suspect this discussion could be simpler if it were a part of the
ARIA group, as an aria-intent would have been able to simply leverage
the aria-label attribute directly and combine the two paradigms
appropriately. Luckily we can still do this with a single intent
attribute, as long as we choose a naming convention akin to
wikipedia's encyclopedic organization.
Greetings,
Deyan
Received on Friday, 8 October 2021 20:34:27 UTC