Overview

In a previous blog post about MathML in Wikipedia, I mentioned that, despite ongoing efforts there was still no accessibility support for MathML in Gecko. The situation changed two months ago: Design Science and NV Access released new versions of MathPlayer and NVDA, which in particular add MathML accessibility support on Windows, as shown in the demos below. This is exciting news and I am really willing to see this support extended to other platforms...

Last December, I also met Joanmarie Diggs at the Web Engines Hackfest and we have been able to start some preliminary work for Linux (WebKit/Gecko/Orca). I had the opportunity to refresh some of the patches written by Jonathan Wei during a Mozilla internship and to get part of his work landed into trunk. I have also made basic improvements to how we expose the accessible tree for ATK in order to prepare future support in Orca. It is certainly too early to announce anything. Just as a comparison, I also provide how Orca currently (badly) reads the MathML formulas below.

MathML accessibility support is also available in the latest versions of Safari+VoiceOver. So in theory, we "only" need to make Gecko expose the same accessible tree as WebKit in order to support the Mac platform. Jonathan Wei had a work-in-progress patch for that, see bug 1001641. Since it is far from being ready, I will cheat a bit and just show how VoiceOver reads the MathML examples in Safari.

Finally, the mobile platforms (Firefox OS and Android) are also very important. So far, I have only submitted some patches to make the GeckoView accessible and to fix some other small accessibility bugs. So I am interested in hearing more from Mozilla developers about the AccessFu stuff and how we could make MathML accessible on these platforms.

Audio Demos

The table below contains some concrete examples taken from Wikipedia (in MathML mode), Mozilla Developer Network, KaTeX and MathJax. Note that at the moment, MathJax MathML formulas are not exposed to all assistive technologies. I recommend to force native MathML using an add-on for Gecko browsers or Safari ; or to use this GreaseMonkey script.

For the record, the detailed software versions used are:

• NVDA: Windows 7, Firefox 37, NVDA try-t4673-10720,5202e97, MathPlayer 4.0 beta 1
• VoiceOver: OS X Yosemite, Safari 8, VoiceOver 4
• Orca: Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie), Gnome 3.14.1, Firefox 31, Orca 3.14.0

Note: all these audio files are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

June Schedule

All of these developments are still in progress and there are certainly many bugs to fix and improvements to do. Next month, I expect to have several opportunities to meet people and make progress on MathML. For people interested to help, here is my schedule:

• On the 8th, I'll attend the 9th European e-Accessibility Forum in Paris where Neil Soiffer (Design Science) will present "The State of Accessible Math".
• From the 11th to 22th, I'll stay in the Montr'eal area. I hope I'll have the chance to meet Joanmarie and the accessibility team from Mozilla Toronto during that time frame (to be confirmed).
• Last but not least, I'm one of the lucky Mozilla volunteer invited to Whistler's work week from the 22th to 26th!

http://www.maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic/?post/2015/05/06/MathML-Accessibility