Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Anita Walz. I’m the open education,
the assistant director for open education, and scholarly communication librarian here
at Virginia Tech. This event is sponsored by the University Libraries open knowledge committee in
consultation with colleagues from Virginia Tech's office of accessible technology, undergraduate
academic affairs, the College of Engineering, the Department of Mathematics and Virginia Tech
Publishing. Thank you so much for each of you who were involved in planning this event for
your involvement. This is the second of two events in Virginia Tech's 2021 open education symposium.
If you wish to find more information about the other events, we have one more on Friday
that is co-sponsored with SCHEV which is the State Council on Higher Education for Virginia
on Friday. And all of our recordings will be available on the open education
website for Virginia Tech. We welcome seeing you or having you view the, the um,
the information the, the recordings there after they're posted those will be about a week.
There are also many international virtual events
and there's more information available at openeducationweek.org.
The idea for this presentation came out of multiple efforts to make STEM content,
specifically math rich open educational resources accessible to people with low vision.
Over the last five years I have, with colleagues in Virginia Tech publishing,
experimented with several different methods for making math intensive educational resources,
open educational resources accessible. These have involved receiving manuscripts in print,
LaTex and Microsoft Word. We have worked with PDF tagging, LaTex,
and MathML in press books as well as some other methods. We participated
and initiated conversations with many of you on this call. In designing this program, we have two
main two overarching goals in mind. We hope that digital math, STEM, and, and open education
communities will catch a vision for what is possible regarding STEM and accessibility,
and we hope you'll be motivated to learn more. We've created an annotated list of resources
that we hope you will add to this is available at bitly/ accessible_STEM. That link should
also be in the chat. We hope that you'll gain greater insight into the importance of making
and sharing content which is not only openly licensed, but is also accessible with that.
I'd like to introduce you to our speaker. Dr Volker Sorge is professor in document analysis
and accessibility at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham in
the UK. Dr Sorge leads the scientific document analysis group whose research primarily focuses
on mathematical document analysis, diagram recognition, and handwriting recognition.
He's worked on STEM accessibility for many years.
As a visiting scientist at Google. He integrated math support into the ChromeBox screen reader.
As a member of the MathJax consortium he has worked on formula accessibility on the web.
Most recently, in collaboration with the Pretext Group, the National Federation for the Blind,
and the American Institute of Mathematics, he contributed to the automatic transcription of
LaTex textbooks into tactile braille books. In his startup company, Progressive Accessibility
Solutions, Volker focuses on exploiting pattern recognition and image analysis
technology for automatically making STEM diagrams accessible for use in teaching and science
you study mathematics computer science and philosophy at the University of
Würzburg, University of Texas at Austin, and the Universität des
Saarlandes. He holds research Masters in Mathematics, and a PhD in computer science
in computational logic. Please give a warm, socially distanced welcome to Dr Sorge.
Hello; thank you. Thank you very much for the kind introduction.
Um yes, thank you again for the kind introduction. So, my name is Volker Sorge. As, uh Anita said,
I mm have a professorship at the University of Birmingham, um, where I’m nominally now, um,
lead the scientific document analysis group, because most of my time I actually spend,
um elsewhere not just because we're still in full lockdown and therefore the university is closed,
but also because I’m primarily now working for my own little company, which is called Progressive
Accessibility Solutions, as well as for the MathCheck consortium. And as you can imagine,
I will talk quite a bit today about MathCheck uh in the course of this presentation.
And um I’m very glad to have been invited for this particular event because I think it's an important
subject, accessibility, and it's particularly important right now at this particular point in
time, and I shall motivate a bit throughout the beginning of the talk why first of all
accessibility is important, why it is important at the current moment and also particularly why it's
important in education and particularly in higher education for STEM subjects. And um I will, so,
towards the second part of my talk, I will then talk a bit about, a bit about the science behind
some of these techniques that we're working on as well as some of the technology that's
already available and hopefully that will become available in the future to, to help everybody uh
with making their content accessible and therefore also helping people to actually access it.
So, first question is of course what is accessibility? Can we somehow define
accessibility? Um well first of all what is it about, in particular in our context.
Most people when you tell them, well, accessibility they think maybe about uh
ramps being built to buildings or alternatively have large cubicles and in toilets um,
but when we talk about accessibility, we mainly talk about accessibility, um, which
is about overcoming barriers that we build by building more and more modern electronic gadgets
and there's quite a number. So, everybody in many ways has some sort of a disability at some point,
so there's obviously people that are born or, or have had a disability
due to a late accident in life like visual disabilities. People are blind, low vision,
but there's other things to consider also. You know people that have are deaf, that have aural
distractions, people that cannot use certain gadgets like because they forget this, can't
use a mouse um, they have to they have to use um they have other limited modified motor skills they
can only for instance access a computer with their mouth etc., and various other cognitive
disabilities which particular interesting I always find in a university setting which have
to do with things like dyslexia, discalcula, etc. for which we're trying to provide, ah,
something that overcomes these barriers. And, uh, just I always like to say, well, everybody's not
fully able at some point, everybody's is not fully able at some point in our life so um we all have
some temporal situational disabilities at some point. So, for instance if you work outside and
there's a lot of sunshine all of a sudden you have glare on your screen then you, you know
you might want to, want to change the setup there, or aren't we all glad, for instance, that when we
drive our car, that the GPS automatically changes to night colors, uh when the sun goes down. And,
and all these are in many ways disabilities and disabilities we have to take account for.
And in particular important this is in, in the field of inclusive education because
equal access to education is an important human right,
and everybody should have access to education regardless of their special needs.
And consequently, it is important that in the teaching setting accessibility is, is,
it is guaranteed. And again, I’m not talking about wheelchair accessible lecture theaters;
I’m talking about the actual teaching material that has to be accessible. It's no good if I can
get into the lecture theater and find a seat, if I then cannot participate in the lecture
because I simply cannot take, I cannot use the same material as, as my peers around me.
As a consequence, there has been, you know, not, not just now, but for ,for centuries as
a matter of fact, but particularly over the last 50-60 years, there's been a lot of work
on providing things like alternative formats and specialist help for people in education setting to
ensure inclusive education, but often these these, um, efforts are made mainly in, in um,
in primary secondary school so k to 12 you would say in the US. Um, and then for somehow,
somehow once the university stage is there, you know, it becomes less uh
so the, the support becomes less widely available for, for students with special needs.
So, ahem, we're trying to change this, obviously. And how are we trying to change it.
Well let's first have a look at what is the historical solution or what are the
historical solutions to these problems and then let's see why these don't work anymore
and how we can change them in for a modern setting.
So historically you would make, or you would give students with special needs alternative
material. When I say alternative material that means instead of saying, say, giving them a
book which is printed you might give a blind student a book that is embossed in braille.
Likewise, you can give them an audio book, you can give them a textbook that has been read out by an
expert and they can listen to it. They can rewind things and they can thereby follow their book.
Engineering students for instance, but also students in mathematics, they would then get
particular embossed diagrams in order to follow graphical content.
So tactile prints can be prepared as well; paper can be used so things are automatically
being raised if you draw on them, and then they can experience those if they are blind.
Likewise, complex content then can often be spoken out by expert humans and can
explaneed to them in more details, if you have a video, you can subtitle it for, for students
with aural or with hearing impairments and so on and so forth. And likewise, in, in exams,
people would get specialist support, they would get their nuances if they can't write and so on.
Um, these days this is a lot harder to provide, because there's a couple of
reasons for that. The first reason is, of course, that now a lot of content is in electronic form,
and not only is it an electronic form but it's also being prepared on the fly.
So, I’m aware that in the US you still use, or people still use, textbooks but for instance in my
own lectures, for many years I've told students, well, I provide handouts and the handouts are good
enough. You can have secondary reading but there's no need for a specialist textbook anymore. Now the
that is in many ways great, because students don't have to buy a textbook anymore. On the other hand,
what is the effect is, that these are my handouts, my lectures. I can change them the night before
the lecture and I often do. As a matter of, as, as a matter of fact this is not just me. I know
that happens a lot with other students and we are always told by our accessibility support services,
well, provide certain students at least 48 hours in advance with the, with the teaching material,
but often that doesn't happen. Similarly, if you need to, if you have a blind student in
your class who really needs that material in an alternative format how you can you translate it
by the time of the lecture if you've just changed the lecture notes the night before? So, all these
provisions that used to work historically don't really work anymore in the light of
ephemeral material like teaching material on the web and it's getting even worse.
So, what about COVID 19? Now all of a sudden, it's not just the teaching material that we put into
learning management systems. Now everything has to move online, right? It's not just the handouts,
but it's also the teaching, the entire learning experience. Exams are online.
Even the social interaction, so that means that even more barriers that are being built.
Because, while maybe previously a student who had some problems reading something or
couldn't hear something properly could ask a peer whether they could translate them for it can
translate it for them or could help them with a certain material,
now that's no longer possible because everything is social distant. They all sit in their own
little dorm room and that's it. And likewise, no experts can read them formulas and there is no way
of an amanuensis is coming to help them writing their exams. And for us as well, all of a sudden,
we have to subtitle lecture videos now. That's, you know, if it works, it's great. Unfortunately,
many subjects, in particular STEM subjects, automatic subtitling is not really an option yet.
So, we're in a pandemic. Does that mean we should forget about accessibility, or have it as an
afterthought? And, and obviously my obvious answer is no, we shouldn't. And why shouldn't we? Well,
because it's important for the people that need it, but it's also important for us
that do it in a way. Because there's a couple of questions I want to debunk here. So, for instance
is there always the usual replies of why don't we have more pressing matters now? Don't we
have to move things fast onto the web? Doesn't it focus down trying to make everything accessible?
And my answer here is, of course, no it doesn't. Actually, it's the opposite,
because if you now do a rush job, all that means is that you put bad material online
and eventually it comes back and haunt, to haunt you and you still have to put in the effort of
making it accessible and it, it doesn't really go all that much faster, because if you know
what you're doing and if you just put in this little epsilon, this little extra bit of work
right now, then you get not only accessible material, but also future-proof material,
and material that you do not have to constantly go back and revise.
And next question is, of course, always, well isn't the target audience too small? Um well,
no, because the target audience ultimately is everybody. If good material is online, it's
good for all students; it's good for everybody's experience. It's also good for the lecturer who
doesn't have to constantly revise their lecture notes. Moreover, if you think about all the
tools and, and over the years that have been originally being built,
been built just to help and to support people with disabilities and we all use now, um.
Just as an example, you know, think about something like speech output
that used to be particularly for blind, for blind users of computers. Nowadays we ask
Alexa and we're happy that you reply to us with the weather forecast for tomorrow. Um,
other things, uh, here's a little example which I believe everybody can see that we
can all benefit from it. So, here's a bit, bit I've stolen from the Wikipedia page on functions,
but it's just a, um, a regular graph and it has, it has a caption which says the red curve is the
graph of a function because any vertical line has exactly one crossing point with the curve.
Now here's a couple of things that we can observe. First of all, if we look at that
this image, it's a bit grainy and, you know, maybe I want to have it slightly larger. Let's
make it slightly larger. What we can see here is it gets worse, the graininess, if you, if you,
you know. Already I have problems discerning that this here is a seven, that this is an eight,
right? And the reason for this is because the format of the image is just poorly chosen. This
is a bitmap image. Bitmap images do not scale. So, what do we do about that? Well, let's have a look
at a different version of the same image. Well, here that's an SVG, so scalable vector graphic.
The advantage here is that it scales and that is accessible to some degree and if I, if I zoom
that in now because I want to see a bit more, now I can see actually oh this 0.8 here becomes
it comes out very nicely there's no graininess. Everything scales nice if you look at that graph.
Now one question you might have is where's the x-axis? Well, somebody decided that to make the x,
oh no, sorry, the x-axis actually, the y-axis; where's the y-axis? Somebody decided to make
the y-axis, um, yellow for some reason. On white background, that's a bit nasty isn't it,
um, so it would be nice if this were in a different color. Um, and there's something else
terribly wrong with the whole, with the whole page here. And I’ll give you a hint if you don't know
what it is yet. If you read the caption again, it says, well, the red curve is
the graph of the function and I have problems seeing the, the yellow line. So, what I do,
well, I use a little extension of my browser which simply gives me a high contra, contrast value,
uh, high contrast color values. And let's, let's just shift 11, which I press now,
and what do I get? Oh well, all of a sudden, I can see the y-axis now it is blue
and, unfortunately, now I can read the caption again. The red curve is the graph of the function.
Well, what is the red curve? The red curve is gone. The red curve is now blue. That's a
bit of a nuisance, and the other, the only other thing I can see is now that I have
a yellow vertical line here maybe that refers to the x-axis, but probably not. But yeah, um,
so how do I solve the dilemma? Well let's go to the next, next page and have a look
how that looks like. Huh, well, let me let me switch this off
now. I've written the red curve, at least I put red around it,
and then, and that refers to the same color as the curve. And if I now switch on my, if my, my high,
high contrast colors, at least I can get some sort of a reference between what the red curve is
and what the actual color here is. Obviously, that's still not ideal. Ideal is a scenario
like this, where this is also stolen from the same page, uh, with a slightly extended caption, where
I see two trigonometric function and I can discern the sign not only by its color but also because
it's a solid curve, whereas the cosine is a blue dashed curve. And if I change the colors now,
then obviously blue and red don't really work anymore, but at least solid and dashed still do.
So, this is just an example, um, why these things are quite useful not only for people with visual
impairments, but pretty much for everybody. When you have, when you have problems with contrast
and, and when you maybe are different or prefer a different a layout of colors.
Um now these are in many ways, what I've just shown you are certain properties that make content
accessible, if they're there or if they're not, right? If you, if you, if you refer to something
by color only and that color changes, it's clearly no longer accessible for the person who has,
who has to use a different color palette for because of their visual impairment. Um, so there's
what's called the web accessibility or content accessibility guidelines: the Woocock Guidelines,
which are generally accepted standard, not just for the web, but for, for many electronic
material, um, how things should be and how they're being made, should be made accessible. Many of
these accessibility guidelines inform countries in, in, in most countries and formed, not
countries sorry, inform the law on accessibility in most countries. Some of them are optional or
ideal, um, but I, I mean it's pages and pages of these guidelines, roughly 60 success criteria,
and the main idea is what they call the Poor Principle. It's about content should be for
all users perceivable, it should be operable, it should be understandable, and it should be
robust. So perceivable means that if I can't see the image, at least I need to have some sort of an
alternative description. If I can't listen to the video, at least I need subtitles. Operable means
if I can't use a mouse, for instance, I still need to be able to get to certain elements by keyboard,
and if I understandable means, of course, it's about the language of the document,
but often also about something like referring to things like color,
because all of a sudden it does no longer become understandable what curve you're talking about,
and then robustness of, of course is that things should not just be optimized for this particular
browser on this particular operating system, but it should work everywhere.
And, uh, just as a and a little aside, because I was talking about the operability, so
I occasionally gave, gave bootcamps for students so they get starting software engineers
and so they get an idea what accessibility is all about. So, the first thing I normally do is I,
I plug, I, I take away their mice and sit them in front of a computer.
They're always quite shocked; how they can even log in without a mouse?
And the second thing then is you switch off their screen and switch on a screen reader
so they can really experience how it is if you can't see what you put in front of them.
So, this is general accessibility.
What does that mean for STEM? what does that mean for science, technology and math?
Well, the problem is, even if all these criteria are really, um, fulfilled or satisfied,
that, that still doesn't make the actual STEM content accessible, and that has a couple
of reasons because, first of all, of course STEM is quite different from regular document
content in documents. And it's also hard what math and other science documents bring together
are most of the hardest accessibility problems. So, for instance, you have specialized vernacular,
very specialized things you can't just look up in dictionaries. You have scripts,
um, that might be in the mix. So, you have three characters in between Latin letters,
sometimes even in the same word. Think about chemical, uh,
components or chemical, um, molecules described in IUPAC form. They have alphas and parentheses and,
and, and type punctuation inside words. You have tables, formulas, diagrams. Modern days you might
have animation simulations and whatnot. Everything all together in single pieces of content.
And another problem we have in with, with STEM is that effectively, STEM are infinite languages
and that's the whole point about science, right? We constantly enrich the language,
we constantly invent new concepts, we constantly define new stuff. We give them new names so
it's not like in English where, you know, an Oxford Dictionary has to be revised every few
years adding a few words, taking a few out. In, in, in scientific languages this is not enough,
because it grows every day, meaning that you can't really declaratively prescribe things,
and all these standard accessibility techniques that work for standard content really fall flat.
And even if solutions exist, most solutions are really just good for k-12, um,
because that's, let's face it, this, this is where the commercial market is. But it
doesn't have to be that way, and that is one of the things I often get asked. And,
and I would like to debunk a couple of standard and common myths about STEM accessibility.
So, one is for instance that people think that PDF, once I put a PDF document on the
web it's accessible. People should be able to deal with this. It's definitely not the case.
It's very rarely accessible for regular text. It is definitely not accessible from when you
have mathematical content in there. Just try to, to copy out a mathematical formula out of the,
out of a PDF document and see what garbage you get on your, on your console, on your text editor.
Um, another problem is that, um, people often about being told, well, you have to entirely
change how you work. We want everything from you in Word and MathML, otherwise we can't make it
accessible. That's also not true. By all means, do not change your authoring habits. Do not move away
from things like LaTex etc. As a matter of fact, LaTex is so much more preferred to things to,
to standards like MathML, because it's much richer and one can do a lot more in
terms of understanding the mathematics that's being expressed. What is important, though,
is that people understand certain requirements of accessibility and, therefore, get rid of certain
bad habits when they author. And that's something that people can learn. And once they learn it,
they become much more proficient at providing good content and good material.
And another one is always that people have, well, my, my content the content I produce
is far more too, far too complex to make it accessible. That's also not true. Generally,
it just means that the way it's authored is too, too complex, not the content itself.
And I’ll tell you how to make some of that content accessible. And we'll start effectively with just
regular, with just regular documents, mathematics documents. And in order to understand a bit how
the accessibility really works, it's important to understand a bit how electronic content is
different from traditional content, how the web in particular, but also other electronic content,
um, say on, on eBook readers etc. But even to some extent um in in in formats like PDF or DVI,
the content is different. Because what happens is that the content is being provided in a way
that it's being rendered somewhere else, right, so one previously in, in previous days, you would
have a camera-ready copy, you would put it onto a printer. And then somebody would get a book,
meaning that the content is fixed, the rendering is fixed once it's delivered.
Nowadays it's different. We deliver the content first and then it's being rendered in the browser.
It's being rendered in, in your PDF reader, reader. It's being rendered somewhere else.
A lot of the what the content electronic content generally is a vertical content as
opposed to traditional content which is, uh, horizontal, right? You turn the page nowadays,
we scroll down and, just to give you an idea how that really works with the mathematical content,
this here is a math paper from the art side on a disproof of conjecture by Rademacher.
And although this looks like PDF and it originally was, it came from PDF this is really not PDF;
this is a web document. However, what happened is that we've translated it with a PDF to HTML and
all these things are little spans in here and, and therefore the, the entire pagination, the entire
layout, everything is preserved. It doesn't really look like a web document, as I said,
but it is, all right. It's just done as if it had pages. Right, but that's not really what, what new
modern formats are really all about, yes? Let's get rid of this. Let's look at the same documents
translated slightly differently. All right, so here it is, here's a live document, just on a web
page. It's still the same, it's still the same article. It's translated slightly differently,
and now you can see something which is common with, uh, with electronic documents,
good electronic documents, that you can actually reflow the whole thing. So,
I zoom in a bit. Oops now I zoomed out. And you could, you can start seeing the reflow
of, of, of the text, of a certain, the text of the next page and so and, and therefore,
you can also see what I meant with the, the content or, or the medium is a vertical medium.
All we ever want to, really do is scroll up and down. Nobody wants to scroll or pan sideways.
All right, let's, let's go a bit further. And also, this year now, you know,
you've got live links, um, and you've got a live formula and “oops, something's happening”
um, it's actually interactive. We can have a look at the original, uh, TeX command which produced
that formula. I can copy it out; I can take it; I can immediately plagiarize it, put it into my
own paper do whatever I like with it. And this is pretty much what you want from a web document or
from, from a, from an electronic document, from a flexible document. And how do we get that.
Well, next, the important thing is to understand how to transform mathematics
so it's nice and that it's a good top becomes a good document that's, uh, that's really useful.
So, I’m going through the, the GBU, so the good, the bad, and the ugly of the math content that's
out there. And all of this can be produced, and I’m telling you which one you should produce and
which you definitely should not produce. So, let's start with those I don't want you to produce ever.
So, this is a web page which is, uh, MathWorld. Let's zoom out a bit. So, this is MathWorld and
it's got some really old content on here. This is quadratic formula, of course, and what you can
see here this is a picture, this is an image, a bitmap image similar to that graph we had earlier,
and it's really grainy. And once you, once you need a higher assume factor or, or go in a
different form factor, you can see this is really, really ugly and hardly to read, hard to read.
Now what you can do, somewhat something else also somewhat old-fashioned, is
you can style it in some way, um, that is being used in just natural HTML.
And here's another example of the quadratic formula. And this here now is in in HTML,
and as you can see, it's quite ugly right? It certainly doesn't have any LaTex quality to it
whatsoever. The radix doesn't even fit the overbar here, but at least it's not an image;
at least you can grab things and you can possibly copy things out, um, but you can also imagine that
this doesn't really work as soon as the formulas become larger and more nested.
All right, slightly more modern, then, is if, if you render it like, like they do on Wikipedia
these days. Here's the quadratic formula in Wikipedia. What this here is, this here is an SVG,
but again it is an SVG image, so I can crop it and I can move it around.
There's nothing in the else to do and, and but at least it zooms nicely so it doesn't,
you don't get any checkies you, don't get any blur. And let's, let's zoom back.
And then finally, of course, what you, what we ideally want that content to be; you want the
content to be fully rendered. Sorry, my slide jumped away. So, here's fully rendered content
and that's our on our own MathCheck page. Again, the quadratic formula here, it is right
fully rendered looks a bit like the one on the on, on, on Wikipedia, but it isn't because I like,
if I go there, if I focus on it, I press return, things start to happen. All of a sudden,
I get a magnified version of the formula. I get some subtitles which actually give me text which
I can read through and I can, I, you know, things are being highlighted and, as a matter of fact,
I can do more things. I can use my cursor keys. I can start navigating this whole thing
and I can navigate bit by bit, and things are changing. The subtitles are changing the facts,
the magnification is changing, and this is really now an accessible formula.
This is accessible for people not just for you and me who can see this thing, but also for people who
cannot see it. Why? Because what I see here as a subtitle can actually be spoken by a screen reader
and I show that to you now on those slides because obviously
what the one thing I don't want you to say is “well, this is the MathCheck web
page, of course you've got all kinds of fancy things in there.
But can I do that as well. yes you can of course because
these slides here are running at home on my computer. it's a website of course but
MathCheck is somewhere in the background. so here's MathCheck I can
see, I can, I can get to that formula I can
see my original LaTex code which I put into the site
this is the original later code and what I can now do is I can switch on a
screen reader here on my machine and I can listen to what that formula has to
say and let me do that here's my
here, here are my chrome extensions so I’m, I’m working just for
as background I’m working on a on a Linux box here
the only screen I have installed is ChromeBox which runs in the in
every chrome
ChromeBox spoken feedback is ready and I hope you can hear that
yes, yes, good let me go back to my x equals start fraction negative b plus
or minus start root b squared minus four a c
and root over 2 n fraction
generic container generic container x equals start from
sorry, let's, let's stop ChromeBox here for a second so you could already hear
that it was speaking out the formula nicely
right so we're speaking the formula but generally if you, if you listen to that
formula even if you listen to it fast it's fairly long
although this is a simple formula um so you might want to
to step through it in more detail and so you can effectively start exploring this
interactively x equals start fraction negative b plus
or minus start root b squared minus four a c and root over two
n fraction all right so now it, read it, read it
again and we can now go into x equals
start fraction negative b plus or minus star
we can do this fraction, sorry, we can listen to it over and over again of
course but I would like to point out a couple of
things to you which you might not be familiar with
so there's a couple of words in here which we would probably not
use if you were to say write it on the blackboard and, and then and while
writing it on blackboard you speak it out to your students you wouldn't say
start fraction you wouldn't say start root or end root
now these words are in there because imagine you cannot see what that formula
is and you have to still get a feeling for
the two-dimensional layout of that formula
then it's important that you know which part
is in the first in the fraction or which one is in the denominator which part is
in the enumerator where does the square root
start where does it end before you carry on
and naturally this, this is, doesn't really sound very natural there's
different ways you can pronounce this I’ll give you a different one you can
switch the more natural way the fraction with numerator negative b
plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac and denominator 2r
right, um, so this is a more natural way of reading it
it's more natural however it's less disambiguating meaning that the more
complex the formula becomes the harder will be, be for students to
actually listen to it and know exactly where they
are in the formula right so this is so as I said all this
is being rendered with MathCheck in the background
and the actual input is LaTex it also takes things like AsciiMath and MathML
and it produces the output straight away in the browser
and there's nothing really to do apart from putting your LaTex into it and one
extra line into the HTML
code which calls MathCheck from the web and that's it and things start rendering
and the accessibility is built in so in many ways
there is no excuse to have non-accessible math on,
on, on web pages unfortunately they're still of that nature out there
um let me switch off my screen here because otherwise it'll interfere
we have two questions that I wanted to all right see if you could answer um one
is whether students who frequently um look at math read aloud to them
understand the way it's spoken by MathJax
um right that that is a good question
there's so, so what we implement we implement two particular grammars in
there um one is called math speak
so that's a, it's, it's a grammar that goes back to
um Abraham Nemeth the person who also did uh
math braille and he kind of put together that grammar as a
standard grammar how things should be spoken it's of course enhanced because
we do a lot more kind of semantic recognition if you like
where we recognize more mathematical constructs which then can be spoken
directly and the other one the, the second one I,
I showed you is called clearSpeak which was developed a few years back
maybe 10 years ago years ago by, by ETS, by the electronic testing service
um so students are generally familiar with MathSpeak
and please speak up to a certain level and as it's more natural and it's more
in line with what teachers would say I assume they
understand it quite well um I, I have to admit uh
we have, we have done quite a bit of testing particularly recently
we've done testing in, in l, I within a different project uh with students in
India and there is a certain learning curve
but once they have that learning curve in particular once they have the
interaction as well available then it becomes quite uh so, so they
become quite proficient at it was there a second question that's
really helpful yeah uh second question is I’m getting a lot of
reverb here I’m not sure why but I probably, ChromeBox is always
making problems when just on and off. um this question asks whether there's a
way to copy an equation from a page with MathJax
in it and then paste the verbal description in another document
of course there is but you wouldn't, you wouldn't really want to do that
you, you can't do it here just like this um however
that there are several ways to do it so so one way is you
with on MathCheck we've got a page where you can get all in various uh
locales you can describe verbal descriptions out for formulas
another way and a much better way to do this is if you want to do that for an
entire document we do have uh scripts and
and, and uh programs that let you do this in bulk for in within your accessibility
workflow I will discuss some
workflows towards the end
time permitting I, I’m mindful that the time is already
foreign um but there is a number of workflows which you can use
just to, to get speech out and, and to get speech integrated in
into your, into your documents if you like. that sounds great.
thank you. I would like to briefly, I’m mindful of the time, I'd
what happens actually in the background there which produces the speech is not
MathCheck it's
my very own little system called Speech Rule Engine which I originally started
implementing while I was at Google working on ChromeBox which is now a
speech solution for quite a number of systems out there including EquatIO by
Texthelp obviously MathCheck, MathLive and, and a number of others
and of course it still runs on your everyday ChromeBook
in ChromeBox and what really happens there is
um in order to produce the speech or in order to produce good speech let's put
it this way it's not enough just to look at the
actual representation of the mathematics as you would find it in LaTex or in
MathML because that is just very, very flat, right? What you really want to be able to
do is you want to understand where say where an equation is being split up what
operators are in these things and then use that information and what happens is
that there's a pattern recognition in the background of course and
there's a semantic representation that is being created bottom up
from, from the from the visual representation
and I’ll just show you how that semantic representation looks like for a very
simple equation like a x plus square plus b x plus c so the
semantic representation is represented as a tree where you then get
an equality of two sides on the zero on the right inside on the left-hand side
you've got a sum with three summons and so on and so forth
and this is in many ways uh how the actual
representation then is done in the background and how it's being folded
into, into the formula that is being displayed and thereby we
we make use of what's called the separation of concerns for the web
that you have parts which are responsible
for purely for the display and the styling which is primarily HTML and CSS
and then we have various parts which allow us to hide
information in these structures without them actually being visible
and some of them is for instance WAI-ARIA which is a hum which
tends towards human oriented semantics uh which is
for, for accessibility and there's various other ways how to do that and
JavaScript in order to make this the whole thing interactive and, and
start working and so in many ways this semantic tree
I've just shown you on that page is folded thing of it as kind of an,
a, a different view on the on the actual element that you see on that page
and what that allows you once that rich semantic is in there what that also
allows you is to go to, to produce other kind of
formats so for instance here's another form,
formula slightly more exciting this is a curl of vector field
um which if when I start that now you get the same effect it takes a
little while longer because that's not just
speech because this now comes out as braille
and that braille would now go to the student's uh braille display
if they read it and if they have a braille display connected,
right, you can still do the same thing. you can navigate the whole thing and you
get the braille for every sub expression and so on and so forth
and here the subtitle braille normally doesn't appear just done that so,
so you can see what's happening uh if you
if you were reading this on a braille display obviously you can
all kinds of other formats you can generate out of that
as soon as you have the interesting and enriched semantics in there
you can actually generate all kinds of other um
all kinds of other formats like braille, like Nemeth,
like um computational formats etc. right I’m mindful of the time I briefly
tell you about diagrams and then I’ll tell you a bit about these workflows.
so what about diagrams? well diagrams are obviously even harder
the problem is that Woocock tells us an alternative text is fine what for
for any graphic or image um
in practice when it comes to STEM that is obviously not true
now if you have an alternative text normally has the length of 160
characters I believe which is the size of a tweet
and that's generally not enough to describe anything which is more complex
than the uh but then say a parabola
um so there's various ways how to do this
I’m not going to go through, through those in detail now
but the best way to do this is using a format called SVG
SVG scalable vector graphic i've shown that to you early
it scales it doesn't become grainy and you have all the
advantage that you can embed lots of information
in the background and now how that is being done
is I demonstrate with a chem example from chemistry which we primarily
working with now in my company um this here is just a a uh chemical
diagram that is a bitmap image what happens to the bitmap image is that
is being analyzed as image analysis run over
one starts putting together a basic graph out of all these
uh out of all the edges and then try to understand what those edges are all
these top ledges or the single edges etc and then these there's a pattern there's
pattern recognition algorithms in there which then will eventually put together
a diagram of that of that molecule name naming components automatically
using all kinds of web services out there
and then generate a fully accessible diagram and I’ll show you the diagram
here and and I’ll show you
I’ll show you how that works bit similar to what we do in the mathematics
um you can navigate this thing and again you get a subtitle which tells you what
this is and you can see this is a
this is an SVG I can zoom in it becomes nice and
it scales not scales up nicely you can also
do tricks like change the background for instance
right background colors all kinds of different
background colors and then you can start navigating this
expression using the cursor keys in that case for instance I use go down
and I’ll start zooming in onto the first major component which is a few string
system and then I can stop go even further down
this is a benzene ring and I can go over to the other ring and
if I have no idea what the three oxolene ring is
then I switch off the expert mode, I’ll get more information because there's
additional knowledge in the graph and then that tells me this is a sub ring
with five elements with oxygen at position one and there's
a double bond between positions two and three
three and four and again if I were to switch on the screen reader now you
could actually listen to this and and
it would, it would tell and, and the navigation would be described what you
do right
and now as I said all this is done with image analysis once you have
more information to generate these, these images then it's even easier so for
instance you can generate these things using
chemical specifications that you get a regular chemical drawing programs like
smiles or more or cml where you can pick them up on on
Wikipedia or if you're working in different
domains say you have want to do something with statistics
once you have the statistical model of course then you already have that
information all you then need to do is you need to
have some means of embedding that information
into your document so it can actually be made accessible
and and there's friends one thing i've been working on with a colleague in new
zealand is a package called braille r and that does effectively the
same thing as we've shown I've showed you for the
um chemical diagrams just for
data visualization so for instance here's a box plot
and I can now start navigating the box plot
and I can go to the title I can look over the axis
the y-axis and then I can start looking in the box plots. it tells me all the
data points
tells me minimum maximum and like this is kind of you can, you can dive into
these you can dive into these and start
walking around see what the quartiles are or you can move over to the next
element and so on and so forth so you get a hierarchical view
on these elements which allow you to actually experience
um this, this diagram, the data visualization.
and just to say that the person I did this with Jonathan Godfrey, he's a
blind lecturer in statistics at, at Massey University in New Zealand,
and for him why this was important was because he wanted to actually see
whether
the data visualization he gives his students
were useful and, and, and he didn't always want to,
if you work in a model you don't always want to, to emboss this onto an
embosser then feel whether everything is there in the right place
so at least you get an overview you can listen to things
and, and see um whether whether they make sense before you then
take the exact same data put it onto an embosser get an
alternative medium and then have a tactile copy of it
right, right now I've promised you that I wanted to give you some sample workflows
how you can actually work with these things and how you can make things
successful so one of the question earlier, earlier
was, is there some way of getting um speech out directly and
yes there is. so there's plenty of elements on our, on our, uh MathCheck
website where you can take the math checks uh scripts directly
and all of these scripts and all the workflows
I’m talking about here one of the goals is first of all
that you don't have to do things formula by formula but that you do things in
bulk document by document
that you do not need to change your authoring habits
you do not need to move away from whatever if you
if you're using LaTex you can use LaTex, if you're using Word you can use Word
um, and also what is important is that they allow you
to make your document future proof there's a lot
of technology already out there to make things successful but
if things come online more, more things come online on a daily basis
what is important is that all the information that you have in your
document is still preserved when it's being turned into an
alternative format because there might be a system in a
couple of years’ time which can exploit that
might not exist yet but there might be one
soon. right so here's a workflow which for instance allows you to just put
LaTex, take LaTex sources and put it
onto the web that's a simple workflow with Tech 4 HD.
Tech 4 HD is a part of every standard tech Distribution,
so if you have Tech-Life or if you have a MiKTeX or anything you normally have
Tech 4 HD and its counterpart Make 4 HD,
then all you need to do is a couple of very, very
simple command line arguments on your file name
and you would pretty much automatically
get a fully accessible math document with and you can say whether you want to
make it accessible with MathCheck so you just given MathCheck as an extra
option
it automatically includes MathCheck from the web and it'll run
and will be accessible. obviously when i say
all of it will like be accessible, there will always be some caveats, there will
always be, you know, there will always be certain macro packages that won't
understand and so on and so forth but that's more about authoring
later rather than about, about the conversion itself
you can do something fairly similar with a package called Pandoc.
Pandoc is a universal document converter and I’ll just show you briefly um
what it can do let's scroll down here there's the
the whole the whole graph of all the input formats Pandoc can use
and all the output formats Pandoc can review
so whenever you need to transform from one format into the other
Pandoc should be your first point of call.
what it can also do is similar to Tech 4 HD. it can take
but more in many ways it can take other
sources like Word markdown etc.
and then output HTML for instance but also other things so you can translate
LaTex into Word you can translate markdown in the LaTex
and whatever you like. um you can include MathCheck directly uh you can
also tell it not to produce, do anything smart with the tech and just
let MathCheck to all these jobs. um
um right and these in many ways are here's the idea of these workflows is
that you translate from something um they never launched into something, into
another benevolent um, um, format I would call those
there's malevolent formats out there and those are the, what
print formats and one of the old print formats of were for instance Postscript
but the new print format of course is still
and still is PDF and the problem with PDF is
that once things are in PDF it's really a nightmare,
or it can be a nightmare, and it's difficult to generate accessible
PDF as it is right now. Um, there are important things which you
often get wrong or which the generators often get wrong that's
things like reading order, alt-texts, header nesting,
and you often have to work a lot with Acrobat Pro, Adobe Acrobat Pro in order to get
these things right manually. it's particularly bad if you're coming
from LaTex you have to do a lot of work. LaTex is
really bad in producing accessible PDF, Word is better so if you
if you need to translate LaTex and access and PDF it's sometimes better to
go via word by using, using Pandoc, um often what happens is you make things
accessible nicely in your Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Pro
and then you then you find that typo and you have to start all over again.
it's, it's really not nice it's getting even worse if you only have PDF as a
source. so there's quite a bit of work has been
done uh on that problem. turns out it's actually a
surprisingly difficult problem. so say you have a PDF document that has been
originally generated with LaTex but all the sources are gone.
um then what you're trying to do is you're trying to get the information
that's in the PDF back out and that is quite a nasty
pattern recognition problem actually. in about 2006 I had a PhD student who
was supposed to do as a warm-up exercise for his PhD,
extraction of math elements from PDF. eventually it turned out
to be his entire PhD and the problem is still not fully solved.
we brought a system out which was called Maxtract at the time 2008, which we're
currently reworking. I’m really working with the group in
India at, at Delhi. um other people have re-implemented some
of our approaches particularly the Infty system
which generally also does other math OCR. um what I can say is the standard is
currently improving but it's not quite there yet so with any
luck at some point in the future you might be able to
make these inaccessible PDFs accessible again
um but it might still take a while, will never be perfect.
um let me have a quick check at the time yes so another
alternative um workflow is which we're
currently trying to perfect and finalize with uh is trying to get from LaTex in
particular in PreTeXt format um to emboss braille so where you can
effectively have a textbook in PreTeXt which PreTeXt is just
LaTex with some XML markup so it takes the good parts of LaTex think about it
this way the math markup and replaces the bad parts uh, the, the
document structure markup, uh with pro,
with XML and from that we're using MathCheck and SRE
and, and some other libraries in order to get
it straight into Nemeth output we're working on that with the NFB
and we have grant from the from the American Action Fund
to do that and uh it's currently going pretty well.
I’m mindful of the time so I’ll skip the graphics part.
the graphics is quite straightforward. I've shown you some examples
um please on the slides there's various links and, and, and you can certainly
um have a look at that. what else did I want to say? well um one
thing is as I said before please
let nobody tell you that you have to change your authoring workflow
um because this is just, you know, this impedes creativity in my opinion.
but be mindful when you author that you might be authoring for something that
goes beyond just that one PDF format. you generate um your, your document for.
it goes beyond that single, uh journal you're submitting your paper to and
therefore
don't, stop thinking print only particularly, that particularly means
stop thinking about manipulating the white space.
in particular when you're talking math formulas, do not put white space
manipulations into your math formulas, the slash,
exclamation mark, and all these nasty bits
is really not good. it's really, really, really bad.
for you can imagine if we go out from single pages to this reflowing,
nicely reflowing document you do not want any hard line breaks,
hard page breaks or anything of that nature because that
ultimately that has to be filtered out somehow.
um there's a lot more tips I would have on math authoring.
um just a few that I would like to, if you write math that should
eventually be converted into different format
think about not using all the, your homegrown macros.
think about using more standard environments
as they are for list figures etc. don't use custom elements like
list items, specialist list items etc. and even if you're doing slides say with
Beamer, Pandoc does a great job translating those into web formats for instance
but it has a hard time when you're using non-standard
elements. other things from a MathCheck point of view
um try to write clean math, don't do too much nesting of text and math.
from an accessibility point of view,.
no punctuation after your math elements please, please, please if you write your
formulas why do you have to put a dot behind it
because what happens when, when you try to make that accessible into speech
it becomes two elements: it's the formula and then the dot.
right so the first bit of navigation will go into the either the
formula or the dot
and then you know and, and only then you get to the real math
and that is really, really you know, it's effectively a layer you put
on, on top of your math which shouldn't be there and prevents accessibility.
well finally once you're doing all these things
or once you're trying to do all these things, is there some way to easily
check whether what you've done is really accessible?
Yes, there is of course. first thing is always try some zooming:
does it work on all zoom levels so here's my,.
I’m sure they don't work well, don't really work all that well
um so here we see that's not good
now next Pro Question is always what does it work on high contrast,
high contrast is easy to check there's a there's a Chrome extension
it's Shift F11, yep works on high contrast.
I can see pretty much everything.
next question is does it work for, for keyboard interaction, can you get to
every link that's in the page? um I’m not good, well I can’t that here
so here I am. well and that's
um and I can get to all the links, yes, fine.
other things you can try yourself, well you can try form factors and I’ll show
that to you, you can switch on screen readers. if you're working on
Apple voiceover is Command F5 and it Works.
Windows you've got Narrators-Windows- Enter.
you can easily, NVDA is free, JAWS is free for 40 minutes,
easy to test. I use ChromeBox and Chrome, it's
also nice. and what you can always do is, you can switch on
the, the, the developers console. it's there, there's a, it's a Chrome.
I want to see my slides on different form factor, there's a different form
factor right, what is that?
um oops, that always interferes a bit with my,
here's a different form factor -let's get rid of this a bit-um
so uh what, what do I want, I want Galaxy S5 so here
this is how my slides look on Galaxy S5 this is how they look on an iPad
um and then the final little tool I've already brought up here.
there's an accessibility checker here you can generate a report with the
Lighthouse checker takes a while, um
but once it's there it will tell you what the problems are,
particularly the accessibility problems performance problems, all kinds of other
little things as well.
um there you go, at least mine slides, so they should be 100 accessible,
not fully best practice performance is slightly less than it could be
but you know it gives you a good feeling but now we're nearly there
and we're on slide one which is obviously not where we want to be.
um right so I think I should conclude. um um in the meantime let me try to get to
the final slides. this is,
and then I think I could take questions if. oops, I saw it.
Conclusions? well I think my basic conclusions are
things, accessible STEM is possible
and it's the right time to do it now. you have to move your stuff online or, or
into electronic format. anyway it's important that
you use that opportunity rather than waste it.
what's important is that you get, don't change your workflow,
try to do things in bulk, and be aware of some of the do's and don'ts,
and stay future-ready. meaning do not throw away your sources. try to integrate
your sources as much as possible if you want to dive any deeper into the subject
I have given plenty of talks of that nature it's
confidence is like Accessing Higher Ground, CSUN,
Empower. we had an AMS workshop on, in January. We’ll probably put
up, uh put on another one at some point uh this year. um it's all about getting
mathematic, mathematics online. um they, we
might do a workshop at the joint math meetings as well, together with Peter
Graudsberger And, and um Tom Byrne from the AMS.
um there's the MathCheck documentation out there. we also offer bespoke training
and seminars if you want us to, uh from MathCheck as well as with, with
Peter Grouse playing with other people so there's plenty of
things out there. I’m sorry for overrunning.
Hello? um, you're fine I’m going to mute you while I’m talking.
uh let's see okay, that's better, thank you. the echo is gone.
um thank you that, this is very interesting. we have a number of
questions from uh, from the panelists who can't ask
questions um, and a number of questions in the Q and A
and it was, your timing was just perfect so
um I want to invite a couple colleagues Christa Miller and
Lizette Zeitzman to unmute and to turn on cameras. um
Christa Miller is
the, I’ll let you actually introduce yourself.
um sure I’m the Director of inclusive media design at Virginia Tech which
basically means if a student has a need for
alternative text I try to help provide it and
that I teach a lot of faculty how to improve their authoring techniques for
accessibility. and Lizette would you like to also
introduce yourself? yeah it's, good afternoon my name is
Lizette Zietzmann. I’m in the Department of Mathematics
and I've been working with Anita for the past few years
on developing open education resources for mathematics.
as you know we have huge classes, thousand, two thousand students and
who have to buy textbooks, so we hope that there are some initiatives
um, that we can incorporate, and this was extremely helpful. thank you very much.
Thank you both. uh Kayla McNabb is also Here. I, I recruited these three experts because
I wanted uh people who know the subject material uh
to um have a chance at um
selecting some of the questions that we wrote before the panel,
um as well as those that have come in through the Q and A so
um Kayla, would you also introduce yourself?
Certainly. thank you. uh I’m Kayla McNabb. I work in the University Libraries here
at Virginia Tech. I’m Head of Instructional Content
and Design. so we primarily focus on creating online content to support
learning initiatives for the library,
particularly digital literacy and information literacy initiatives.
thank you. so we have a few questions in the chat
and we have a few questions as, um as panelists.
one of the, one of the questions that um I think Lizette was asking
earlier is about operating systems and software. Lizette, do you want to
jump into
I’ll post your question also in the in the chat.
um so everyone can see it I can't put it in today.
um you mentioned future-proof material and you talked about robustness.
and how, how much control do you have, so we,
recently had a situation, we used a canvas testing system and the day of the
exam
the minus signs didn't show up. turned out it was on the Chromium browsers. they
had a hardware acceleration setting change.
but, so thousands of students took the exam that day.
so how do you keep current? how do you know when it's going to be an issue?
um well
that, that is a good question and it's a nasty question as well, because that,
that's something that's very much out of our control often.
so, so okay I’ll, I’ll answer this from a MathCheck perspective.
so the uh the idea of MathCheck is to provide a, a library
which uh runs in every browser on every operating system and it renders the
mathematics. however there are certain glitches which
happen during the rendering, when the browsers, particularly when they change
from one development mode to the other and, and so on and so forth. so we get
quite a lot of issues which say things like
okay, well this just disappeared in this zoom, uh
zoom size on this screen on Chrome for instance. Chrome is
very, because they update in the background all the time.
and then there's that's one thing, like one thing you can always say is well
wait a day
it might change. you know, it might change for the better. that doesn't help, of course,
if you're running that exam right now and I appreciate this.
one thing that often helps with some of these things, is
changing things like zoom factor if you, if you're running things like
with MathCheck, you can change the renderer.
if it happens in HTML mode, we have other renderers like SVG
that might help, and if you're working with something and I, I know that
is very frustrating, if you're working with something like
Canvas or Blackboard unless you have control over it or unless you have
control of the people who control it on your campus,
you're often stuck with whatever they provide you with, with
so often they don't switch on a single dollar sign
math, um inline math note. right because that's a, that's an option
uh that's an, uh that's a configuration option people don't often, don't know
about it, or because you know that they are not technically
knowledgeable enough to know what people need for math. And,
and these are things you have to, you know you, you have to be aware of and
then when you can tell people explicitly this is what I need and want. I can do it
for you often. Right. so this is the long answer to that
but, but the minus sign, I’m sorry that's beyond my control personally.
um Volker there's, there's a few people who have kind of a follow-up question
to the learning management system piece. so Canvas in particular has
the HTML embed option and several people want to know
if they can use these techniques and just
paste it into the HTML and have it work the way you demonstrated it,
or if there's another way to integrate MathJax into
the Virginia Tech instance of Canvas for example.
so the first thing is you should have a look at a, check with your, with your
technical services whether they have MathCheck in there.
most universities do. as I said, I mean I can only talk about my own experience
from Canvas and at Birmingham and there is MathCheck in
there. it's a very old version um
and, and it's a fairly old version. it's not very old, but it's fairly old.
uh inline math isn't switched on properly, like this is pretty but, but it
works so you can, you can get your display math expression in
there with two dollar signs at least and, and it should work. and if it works,
it might be the same at Virginia Tech. obviously I wouldn't
know. I probably don't even have access to your Canvas.
um all I know is that at Birmingham they asked me whether I can update it for
them and I told them yes I can send you a quote.
I haven't heard back from them since um But,
but yet but it's something for your technical staff people to, you know, if
you know what you want, tell them and I’m sure they can do it.
great okay. uh so there are a number of other questions, um
that are kind of interesting. so uh one that everybody's interested in is, would
you share a link for your slides? Um.
okay yes yeah okay of course. I mean that's
so, so the slide, just to talk a bit about my slides.
that is a single file. with one exception, the MathCheck is being loaded in
through the, uh through the web and it's a single
file. everything is embedded including all the accessible elements
and this is pretty much what I normally advocate. you know it's,
it’s everything can be done in, in a single document that can be
accessible all the, all the STEM in there. Sure, thank you. uh so another question
um Jonathan Ports is asking if there should be a style file for
LaTex which makes accessible PDFs? um there used to be one um
it seems unsupported. do you know the history and do you know
do you know any, anything about where that might be going?
and yes, I do know a bit about it; there's been, it's, so this accessibility
style it was never very good. I understand
and it's, it's no longer supported, yes. Um there was a few years back, um,
we tried to get something off the ground, so
we actually also had some funding promised
to make the whole process of LaTex turnout an
accessible PDF. the problem with LaTex is
that it, all this has to go through all the deep, really deep inner
uh of the of the system in order to produce accessible PDFs.
meaning that all the, most of these current style files have to be
changed. so I don't um, it's, I don't really know all that much about it but
but I trust the experts which, who looked into it at the time, so that was Ross
Moore and he's, I think, he's in Canberra somewhere
in Australia, who's the absolute expert on these things.
um who can for instance, who's, I think, he's written a style file that at least
in, I think, puts MathML for certain math equations into PDF
which helps a bit um but, but Ross effectively said, well he's going to
leave his hands off that because it is a can of worms he cannot open.
And, which is very sad because you know in many ways
everything should be there and in terms of structure everything is so much
more neatly structured than, say, in Word
but the conversion is just not that great.
and so my advice is always, well, use Pandoc in order to go to a different format and
go then from there into accessible PDF that's easier. we also have a Pandoc
question: so if someone is using Pandoc and wants
to HTML with the expressions in MathJacx can they tell Pandoc what to start, what
start and end codes they would need? um
right. so you can tell Pandoc, primarily you can tell Pandoc,
first of all, to include MathCheck directly,
and making the standalone file which generally leaves your LaTeX intact.
and you can also, I think there's an option,
which is called Rawtech it's on the slides.
I think there's an option in Rawtech which
means it will not touch any of the tech whatsoever.
uh which means that it comes, yes, it's dash, dash, Raw
dash, tech. and then it comes straight into MathCheck
and, and we can do whatever, whatever we like with it
or whatever we can. so what, what these ah converters often try to do
is that they try to untangle some of the macros,
and um depending on how much they are aware of style files,
and, and that often, that sometimes goes wrong.
Tech 4 HD is better for that than Pandoc.
um okay, so we do have a note from one of our
panelists that, um we'll follow up with the Canvas team about
installing MathJax and that there's one, one workaround that
is available in the meantime. yeah so um I would, I’m puzzling about
this one. I’ll touch base with our Canvas team
later this week, find out more about the MathJax but um
in the meantime, we did a license and install a tool that's called
equatIO. let me type the spelling in the chat for
you. and, and really it's a MathML solution, so
bear in mind that the things that Volker shared about that.
it looks like a blue diamond, though, and you can
access it directly from the, the editor inside Canvas whether it's on a page or
a quiz. any of the above. and when you
open it it actually has a LaTex option so that you can directly paste your
LaTex code in there and you don't have to, like,
recreate the equation manually or anything like that. so for
for the LaTex lovers out there, that may produce a,
and Lizette in particular, it might avoid the minus sign disappearing,
um because it does create that, that MathML
image so that's an option in the meantime.
yes great, thank you for that equation. sorry do you want to say
to equatIO? it is so it's done by the company called Texthelp
and , you might be surprised but the the, the speech solution behind it
is my system, the same as in MathJax so, so yes so that is good, yes.
and it's, it's also very good for it has very good dyslexia support so they're
their, their line of products aimed primarily at
dyslexia support not, it's not so much at blind users.
Okay, uh, we have two other questions. um one is about using an expanded UTF-8
character set to represent math, especially for metadata shared within
between systems. um what do you think of that? um
so I assume you're meaning uh the, the upper
plane or first plane and math alphabets in these things.
um yes, there's nothing wrong with that. we can, and so in MathCheck we can use
all of those. Um, in speech I can, they, they're all
supported so there's, there's all the systems which
do not go beyond uh the regular character sets but
uh I support all of them. so it's all there .okay. yes yeah
it's, it's a reasonable idea, yeah. you just have to be
aware that not all of them are implemented everywhere
so sometimes you get these little boxes which
which then represents some, some uh some UTF-8 character on the on the upper
unicode plane. yeah uh and then one, one other question
and then I want to ask a kind of, a little bit higher level
question, but um you showed the
SVG files, and um this question was um, are all of the descriptions of the
image examples embedded in the SVG file?
yes they are. yep okay. so um think about, so the nice thing about
SVG is you can do multiple things with it. you
can have it very hierarchical, meaning that you can group semantically
relevant elements together. so say for the chemistry, for instance, double bonds
would be in a single, would the two lines would be in a group, and
then the ring would be in a group, and so on and so forth, and you can embed,
uh XML information in alternative namespaces and on that basis effectively
you embed a graph structure as a shadow DOM, and
that's all in there and then you need a bit of
JavaScript magic to actually animate it.
great okay. um so looking at the next, I don't know five,
three to five years, um what advances do you expect
to, or do you hope will happen with regard to STEM and math accessibility
that, that we should look forward to. we've
talked a lot about what we can do right now. what kinds of
things do you think we'll be able to do in the future? Um. Um,
well with so, so, so one thing I hopefully, you should be,
one should be able to do quite quickly is, um
generate tactile output more,
more easily. I mean right now from what I understand it takes about six months for
a textbook to be put into braille and Nemeth braille.
so with the currentt workflow we're working on with, with pretext,
um uh which, who do a lot of open source textbooks of course,
um it should ideally, be the workflow. there might still be a need for a
transcriber to manually correct some of the math and some of the
the layout, but it should be a lot faster than setting everything by hand.
so that's, that's kind of a short, short term goal.
in terms of more long term, I would assume that, so
for instance in MathCheck, we've now resurrected
uh, somebody from Japan resurrected a, a graphing tool. It’s for the Xy-pic library.
the next step for me will be to make that accessible.
so obviously that's more of a research goal because I have no idea yet how
one actually makes Xy-pic images and and things accessible.
how do you explain a graph to somebody who can't see them, and these kind of
things. TikZ hopefully will
eventually be also on the agenda.
um you can already produce SVG out of TikZ. It shouldn't
really be a big issue, uh, to also add sufficient semantics to some of these
expressions and, and get, get some of these things out. um
yeah so, so from that point of view, I mean other, other things in other areas
uh we've lost. or two years ago I start, organized a hackathon, um,
at The Lighthouse in San Francisco where we started making a
JupyterLab and Jupyter notebooks accessible.
so, to have accessible computational devices out there in
computational environments,
in pat, in pretex they're sage computations which are partially accessible.
some of you might be familiar with webworks. That, their accessibility is
primarily based on the MathCheck accessibility. I understand they, they are
quite happy with that. I have to admit that
I know the people, but I haven't really used it very much but ANita you might,
you might know them or, I don't know, somebody.
So, hopefully the, the, the, I mean it will never be
fully, fully solved, uh the math, the math question if you
like, but uh it, it should improve uh
and, and what I’m hoping for is that we get away
from thinking k to 12 only and, and make more inroads into
serious and more advanced mathematics, university,
up to research mathematics where people can take the paper they get on archive,
put it through that the processor, get tactile math
out, where we can understand more of the semantics.
um I've got currently got a research project,
uh where we are trying to find out or mine context semantics from math papers
and, and where you then try to understand, is
something defined, can we use the definition in order to make that
particular expression more, more accessible. say that this g
is a group element rather than a functional one.
Great. um so we're at time, and uh unless there are other questions,
uh we really want to thank you for your time. I know it's late there in the UK.
you also said you’re a night owl. thank you for spending
um, some of your evening with us and, um for, for um talking with our audience
about all different kinds of things. we have a lot of
different interests, lots of different contexts, lots of
interesting problems and different levels of knowledge, and
we sincerely appreciate your, your time with us today.
so thank you very much, and thank you also to
the planners of the, the event and the panelists who
came to bring moral support. so
um yeah. well thank you very much for
having me. I assume normally we would now start mingling
with, for drinks, but uh I shall have a pint on my own then.
Yes, enjoy a pint on your own um, and we will post the slides, on the link to
your slides on, uh our slide
link which is bitly slash Volker open ed. so
we'll hopefully get that done, uh fairly
quickly, so. They are there. all right thank you very much.
all right thank you. bye-bye. thanks everybody, bye.