Making Math Accessible

Creating and Using Accessible Mathematical Content: AHEAD conference, July 20-25, 2009

The Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) hosts an annual conference for professionals in the fields of higher education and disability. This year's conference will be in Louisville KY, where Steve Noble from The University of Louisville will present a session titled Creating and Using Accessible Mathematical Content. Many educators are now required to produce accessible materials for their own students. One of the products Steve will demonstrate is our newest product, MathDaisy. He will show how easy it is to use MathDaisy with Microsoft's "Save As DAISY" Word add-in to create accessible math materials from Microsoft Word.

To see other conferences where Design Science products and technology will be demonstrated, refer to the Events page on our website.

The Path to Accessible Math at U Guelph Conference

The University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada is hosting Aiming for Accessibility: Creating Barrier-Free Information and Communication, a conference aimed at raising awareness of IT-related accessibility issues and providing techniques for addressing them. Part of the motivation for having the conference is the pending requirements of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which may have important impacts on Universities in Ontario. The conference is in Rozanski Hall, University of Guelph on May 27.

I'll be presenting a session in the Accessible Web Programming, Document and Multimedia Design "stream" titled The Path to Accessible Math.  My talk starts at 1pm and will cover how to create and deliver documents that contain accessible math.  I'll give some background on the topic first, and then get into the creation and delivery aspects.  Even though I'm giving the talk remotely, I'm going to be leaving lots of time for Q&A.

To see other conferences where we'll be exhibiting and speaking, refer to the Events page on our website.

NFB Endorses MathML

The news may be a bit old, but perhaps you missed it.  I did.  At the NFB national meeting last summer, the NFB passed Resolution 2008-13 that calls upon publishers to start using MathML instead of images for math in their books.  They also call upon AT vendors and braille translation software to "move without delay" to incorporate the ability to handle MathML and render it as synthesized speech and Nemeth braille.

In an earlier post, Pearson adds mathml, I reported the good news that that at least one publisher, Pearson, announced that they are doing just what the NFB calls for: they are making one of their most popular line of textbooks accessible by using MathML for the math in the books. Several AT vendors are starting to take math accessibility more seriously too. We have worked with several of them to make their products speak math. TextHELP and gh have done even more and made use of our synchronized highlighting feature of MathPlayer. Much more can and should be done by others -- most vendors have not made braille generation of math a priority, nor have they taken advantage of some of our more advanced accessibility features You can find a list of what products have what math accessibility features on our AT Math Support web page. If your AT vendor isn't listed there or if the feature you would like is not supported in their product, let them know it is important to you. Companies that want to succeed listen to their customers.

News from the CSUN Disabilities Conference

Back in March I attend CSUN.  It was a little smaller this year, but it is still by far the biggest disability conference around.  I spoke with many different people, some representing vendors, some representing their schools, and some representing themselves. I couldn't possibly list everyone by name, but I do want to use this space to thank all of you for your comments and insights.  It is the people that go to CSUN that make CSUN such an exciting conference to attend.

There was lots of news and excitement at CSUN that surrounded DAISY this year:

• "Save as DAISY for Word" was officially released at the start of CSUN, although I didn't see any formal announcement at CSUN. You can read the press release and you can find links to it from DAISY's page on Save As DAISY - Microsoft.
• Our soon to be released MathDaisy product works with the Save as DAISY Word add-in to make the math in DAISY books accessible.
• There are two math-aware DAISY book players:  Dolphin's EasyReader and gh's PLAYER. In the Design Science booth, both Paul Topping (Design Science's President and CEO) and I were busy showing off how easy it is to create DAISY books with math and what the result looks like on those two players. People were impressed.

I gave a joint talk with Dennis Leas from gh and Masakazu Suzuki from Kyushu University entitled Word, Math, and DAISY: It All Adds Up. Given that the talk was at 8am, a surprisingly large number of people turned up.  I don't think they were disappointed.  Our talk was split among the three of us:

• Prof Suzuki showed InftyReader converting a scanned document into a Word document with the math being represented as MathType objects.
• I then took that document, fixed up the few problems it had, and used Save As Daisy (together with MathType and MathDaisy) to create a DAISY book.
• Dennis Leas delivered up the final course (his metaphor) showing it playing in the gh Player.

All along the way, we explained what was going on behind the scenes, things to watch out for, and things to be amazed by :-).

There were at least 10 talks about DAISY this year:

• The DAISY newsletter mentions our talk and some of the other talks.
• Dennis and I even managed to get our picture in the newsletter; we only seem to be able to get our picture in publications targeted at people who are blind...

For those that missed it, a 24 year run of CSUN being in Los Angeles came to an end this year.  Next year the conference will be in San Diego. No more having to walk between two hotels. Hopefully that means even more time to talk with people.  I hope to see many of those I met this year at CSUN next year.

MathDaisy 1.0 is Now Shipping

After lots of hard work, MathDaisy 1.0 has been released.  MathDaisy enhances Microsoft's Save As DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word to convert Word documents containing math notation to DAISY Digital Talking Books, ready to be read by students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with vision and learning disabilities, including blindness, low vision, and dyslexia.

If you are a teacher or professor who has students with vision and learning related disabilities, MathDaisy provides a way for you to produce the accessible materials your students need.  If you are a student, check out the MathPlayer-enabled DAISY book readers listed on our DAISY for Students web page.

For more information on MathDaisy, see the MathDaisy press release or the MathDaisy product page.