The Accessibility of Mathematical Notation on the Web and Beyond

This paper serves two purposes. First, it offers an overview of the role of the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) in representing mathematical notation on the Web, and its significance for accessibility. To orient the discussion, hypotheses are advanced regarding users’ needs in connection with the accessibility of mathematical notation. Second, current developments in the evolution of MathML are reviewed, noting their consequences for accessibility, and commenting on prospects for future improvement in the concrete experiences of users of assistive technologies. Recommendations are advanced for further research and development activities, emphasizing the cognitive aspects of user interface design

eMath 3.0: building blocks for a social and semantic Web for online mathematics & elearning

In this paper we present recent developments in content markup for mathematics, and a corresponding software stack that functions as an enabling technology for a social and semantic web for the STEM disciplines. We show the potential of this technology in two eMath 3.0 applications: PlanetMathRedux, a re-implementation of the mathematical encyclopedia PlanetMath.org, and PantaRheiRedux, a community reader for course materials. These applications indicate both present and potential uses for this software as a basis for eLearning applications in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics through the addition of suitable pedagogies

Authoring XML Documents with XHTML and MATHML Support

Since the late 1970s, a large number of scientific documents have been authored in TeX or its derivations such as LaTeX. These typesetting systems allow anybody to write highquality books and articles. But the TeX syntax is not compatible with HTML or XML. So the WWW consortium\u27s answer is MathML. The primary goal of MathML is to enable mathematical documents to be communicated, exchanged, and processed on the Web. Therefore, MathML documents are usually embedded with XHTML documents. Currently, there are several XHTML+MathML editors. The most popular editors use two common approaches. The first approach offers a WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet (WYSIWYG) interface. But experts often find it is difficult to have precise control. For example, font attribute is determined by the direction of the mouse movement during the event of insertion. The second approach uses a textbased form. The entire document is presented as a treelike structure. The treelike structure is unintuitive and extremely inefficient to comprehend, particularly for twodimensional structures such as tables or equations. Here, I present a WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouNeed (WYSIWYN) editing interface that satisfies the needs of experts who have knowledge of XHML+MathML. The WYSIWYN interface is presented in a form that simultaneously makes editing operations unambiguous and that looks recognizable. It avoids unexpected errors by showing enough structure, but still maintain enough visual presentation to avoid confusion. This report presents a test bench, an XHTML+MathML editor with a new navigation model that demonstrates the WYSIWYN user interface. Similar to a WYSIWYG editor, XHTML+MathML documents can be visualized during editing, and users can check the current XPath position by viewing the status bar. In contrast to the WYSIWYG editor, the new approach offers users the ability to view local structure of the current element with a selected style. In this way, users can magnify any ambiguous positions and still be able to visualize mathematical documents. In addition, the test bench offers multiple WYSIWYN modes with different levels of magnification

Using Markup Languages for Accessible Scientific, Technical, and Scholarly Document Creation

In using software to write a scientific, technical, or other scholarly document, authors have essentially two options. They can either write it in a ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor such as a word processor, or write it in a text editor using a markup language such as HTML, LaTeX, Markdown, or AsciiDoc. This paper gives an overview of the latter approach, focusing on both the non-visual accessibility of the writing process, and that of the documents produced. Currently popular markup languages and established tools associated with them are introduced. Support for mathematical notation is considered. In addition, domain-specific programming languages for constructing various types of diagrams can be well integrated into the document production process. These languages offer interesting potential to facilitate the non-visual creation of graphical content, while raising insufficiently explored research questions. The flexibility with which documents written in current markup languages can be converted to different output formats is emphasized. These formats include HTML, EPUB, and PDF, as well as file formats used by contemporary word processors. Such conversion facilities can serve as means of enhancing the accessibility of a document both for the author (during the editing and proofreading process) and for those among the document’s recipients who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Current developments associated with markup languages and the accessibility of scientific or technical documents are described. The paper concludes with general commentary, together with a summary of opportunities for further research and software development

Editing and reading early modern mathematical texts in the digital age

The advent of digital technology has brought a world of new possibilities for editors of historical texts. Though much has been written about conventions for digital editing, relatively little attention has been paid to the particular question of how best to deal with texts with heavily mathematical content. This essay outlines some ways of encoding mathematics in digital form, and then discusses three recent digital editions of collections of early modern mathematical manuscripts

Towards semantic mathematical editing *

Currently, there exists a big gap between formal computer-understandable mathematics and informal mathematics, as written by humans. When looking more closely, there are two important subproblems: making documents written by humans at least syntactically understandable for computers, and the formal verification of the actual mathematics in the documents. In this paper, we will focus on the first problem. For the time being, most authors use T E X, L A T E X, or one of its graphical frontends in order to write documents with many mathematical formulas. In the past decade, we have developed an alternative wysiwyg system GNU T E X MACS , which is not based on T E X. All these systems are only adequate for visual typesetting and do not carry much semantics. Stated in the MathML jargon, they concentrate on presentation markup, not content markup. In recent versions of T E X MACS , we have started to integrate facilities for the semantic editing of formulas. In this paper, we will describe these facilities and expand on the underlying motivation and design choices. To go short, we continue to allow the user to enter formulas in a visually oriented way. In the background, we continuously run a packrat parser, which attempts to convert (potentially incomplete) formulas into content markup. As long as all formulas remain sufficiently correct, the editor can then both operate on a visual or semantic level, independently of the low-level representation being used. An important related topic, which will also be discussed at length, is the automatic correction of syntax errors in existing mathematical documents. In particular, the syntax corrector that we have implemented enables us to upgrade existing documents and test our parsing grammar on various books and papers from different sources. We will provide a detailed analysis of these experiments

GNU TeXmacs: a scientific editing platform

3 pagesGNU TeXmacs is a free software for editing scientific documents, which can also be used as an interface for computer algebra systems. In this software demonstration we will briefly recall its main features and present some recent developments

Dynamic Mathematical Layout in E-Books

The development of e-books technology, with the emphasis on content readability and accessibility, raises the issue of mathematical layout optimisation. Although typographic formatting is successfully conducted by incorporating complex mathematical content in the form of bitmap images, such content is not accessible to text-to-speech technologies nor does it enable readability on small screens. For the purpose of creating dynamic and accessible mathematical layout, various e-book formats are analysed and EPUB3 format is presented as the only format meeting the requirements of openness, fluidity, support, accessibility and semantically correct mathematical type. The paper defines the realisation of EPUB e-books with emphasis on the optimal mathematical type using the Mathematical Markup Language. The problems of display, typographic formatting and dynamic layout are resolved through JavaScript functions depending on the rendering technologies of various e-readers on different platforms