Re: Marking Up Mathematical Symbols

On Wednesday 12 September 2007 21:06, you wrote:

> I hate to say it, but images with good ALT tags are probably the
> safest bet...unless screen readers have improved a lot.

Yes, but MathML is supposed to be the proper markup language.

> When I was testing equations a few years ago, JAWS was saying
> "question mark" for Unicode math symbols (e.g. theta), so I had a
> perfectly encoded, standards-compliant Web site that was useless on a
> screen reader.

I haven't deeply tested MathML support in different oriducts, but, for 
example, Design Science plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer reads 
formulae pretty good. It means that it's not impossible to implement MathML 
in text-to-speech software.

> Maybe you could use Math ML with hidden graphics with ALT tags if you
> want to move ahead tech wise.

I think that good idea is to work with MathML and produce images and/or 
human-readable alternative text for them with server-side XSLT. Let user 
choose.

-- 
Alexey Beshenov <al@beshenov.ru>
http://beshenov.ru/

Received on Wednesday, 12 September 2007 20:09:49 UTC