[WG: Accessibility] [Using Sakai] fMath or MathJax? Why I'm thinking MathJax...

[Charles Hedrick]

We’re looking at that now. We’re concerned about fMath. It’s Flash based, which is a problem in itself, and it doesn’t seem like it’s accessible.

We currently use a simple dialog that allows people to prepare LaTeX. There’s a preview button. When they finish, it is inserted into the HTML with a class of “math”. headscripts.js has code to find all such items and run jsMath on them to display it.

My current thought is to move the interpretation from jsMath to mathJax. mathJax is really a replacement for jsMath. It seems to be intended to be accessible, though we haven’t tested it. It can handle both LaTeX and MathML. My current thought is the provide both our current editor for people who can write LaTeX math, and fMath, configured to generate MathML. Then we can use mathJax to render all of it. I would configure mathJax to use the browser’s MathML support where the browser has it. That allows the accessibility helper (which uses MathML) to function.

I’m not happy with having two different equation editors, but I think it may be inevitable. I believe scientists are likely to have experience with LaTeX, and will find it a lot faster and easier to enter equations that way rather than with the GUI editor. Doing an equation of any complexity with the GUI interfaces is very frustrating. Because it uses plain-text, and mathJax for previewing, it should be accessible.However I’m concerned that if you want to ask a test question that requires the students to enter an equation, lower-level students may not know LaTeX, and thus may need to use a GUI editor. Also, people in the social sciences don’t share the STEM folks’ dedication to LaTeX.

The only GUI editor we’ve been able to find that has accessibility features is WIRIS. It’s commercial. Its version of accessibility is to produce an ALT tag with a natural-language translation, e.g. “square root of x.” I suspect that’s not as good as the MathML-based accessibility tools. It appears that it stores the expressions in MathML, so I assume it could also be connected to mathJax for rendering. It sesms to be written in Javascript, which I’d prefer over Flash. It has Sakai support. But it’s commercial.

Unfortunately I’m not enthusiastic about any of these, but a combination of a plain text LaTeX editor and a GUI editor may be the least bad alternative.


On Jul 8, 2013, at 7:48 AM, Neal Caidin <neal.caidin at apereo.org> wrote:

> Hi Accessibility group,
> 
> Is anyone familiar with Accessibility friendliness of fMath (currently in Sakai CLE 2.9) and MathJax (being considered by the Samigo team)?
> 
> Thanks,
> Neal Caidin
> 
> Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
> 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: "Mark J. Norton" <markjnorton at earthlink.net>
>> Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] fMath or MathJax? Why I'm thinking MathJax...
>> Date: July 8, 2013 7:39:10 AM EDT
>> To: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> 
>> On 7/5/2013 4:16 PM, Keli Sato Amann wrote:
>>> fMath is a Flash plug-in for CKEditor. It brings up a WYSIWYG editor that lets you create an image of your equation
>> I wonder how accessible this is.  Modern screen readers have support for 
>> reading MathML expressions, but they have a hard time with images, 
>> unless the alt text was VERY detailed.
>> 
>> - Mark
>> 
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