Re: multi-symbol variables

double prime -- as David C pointed out, there are multiple ways to write
the double prime in MathML. Some of them will result in "prime prime" and
the "right" way will use the Unicode double prime character and likely will
result in the AT saying "double prime". I spent some effort in MathPlayer
(and more in my upcoming MathPlayer replacement) working on cleanups, and
merging primes is one of them. Of course for things like "*", there is no
"**" character in Unicode so there's not much that can be done other than
maybe merging them into a single <mo> (something I haven't done). However,
it is not clear that "double-asterisk" or "double-star" is better than
"star-star".

I think we all agree that if the author cares about how it is pronounced,
they should have a way to make that happen.

But there is also an alternative way to think about it and that alternative
is likely a reason why it is taking us so long to figure out intent: what
if the author doesn't care about the specific wording but wants to just
make sure the concept is conveyed correctly? In that case, the exact words
aren't important, but it is important that *appropriate *words are used.
For example, suppose an author wants to say that <msup> is a power. They
could specify that a particular example should be spoken as
"x-to-the-m-plus-n". Is that good? Maybe not. For someone who is blind,
they wouldn't know when the power came to an end if the <msup> was followed
by "+1". Another issue, which Steve might raise, is that adding "end power"
(or whatever) at the end might be good for someone who is blind, but bad
for someone with dyslexia. So while supplying the exact wording is good in
many cases, in others, it is not so good. Allowing an author to state their
"intent", not the speech, might be better. But it will only be better if
the intent is something the reader's AT recognizes and knows how to speak.
I'm not sure how to reconcile this two ideas, however I'm slow starting to
convince myself that maybe both need to be supported via an
aria-label(like) attr and an intent attr that is less directly tied to the
speech... like the approach of pointing to Wikidata that Moritz and Deyan
(I think) are advocating. That (hints? suggests?) a wording, but is also
something AT can know about and use its own appropriate wording based on
what it thinks is best for a reader using its technology. If both are
given, I would say the aria-label(like) solution should win, but as with
most things, that's debatable.

    Neil



On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 1:34 PM Deyan Ginev <deyan.ginev@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>