As announced in a previous blog post, I was invited to two Mozilla Work Weeks in Toronto and Whistler during the month of June. Before these work weeks, the only assistive technology able to read MathML in Gecko-based browsers was NVDA, via the help of the third-party MathPlayer plugin developed by Design Science, as shown in the following video:

Thanks to the effort done during these work weeks plus some additional days, we have made good progress to expose MathML via accessibility APIs on other platforms: Mac OS X, Linux, Android and Firefox OS. Note that Firefox for iOS uses WebKit, so MathML should already be exposed and handled via Apple's WebKit/VoiceOver. If you are not familiar with accessibility APIs (and actually even if you are), I recommend you to read Marco Zehe's excellent blog post about why accessibility APIs matter.

Apple was the first company to rely on accessibility APIs to make MathML accessible: WebKit exposes MathML via its NSAccessibility protocol and it can then be handled by the VoiceOver assistive technology. One of the obvious consequence of working with open standards and open accessibility APIs is that it was then relatively easy for us to make MathML accessible on Mac OS X: We basically just read the WebKit source code to verify how MathML is exposed and did the same for Gecko. The following video shows VoiceOver reading a Wikipedia page with MathML mode enabled in Gecko 41:

Of course, one of the disadvantage is that VoiceOver is proprietary and so we are dependent on what Apple actually implements for MathML and we can not easily propose patches to fix bugs or add support for new languages. This is however still more convenient for users than the proprietary MathPlayer plugin used by NVDA: at least VoiceOver is installed by default on Apple's products and well-integrated into their user & accessibility interfaces. For instance, I was able to use the standard user interface to select the French language in VoiceOver and it worked immediately. For NVDA+MathPlayer, there are several configuration menus (one for the Windows system, one for NVDA and one for MathPlayer) and even after selecting French everywhere and rebooting, the math formulas were still read in English...

The next desktop platform we worked on was Linux. We continued to improve how Gecko expose the MathML via the ATK interface but the most important work was done by Joanmarie Diggs: making Orca able to handle the exposed MathML accessibility tree. Compared to the previous solutions, this one is 100% open and I was happy to be able to submit a couple of patches to Orca and to work with the Gnome Translation Team to keep the French translation up-to-date. By the way, if you are willing to contribute to the localization of Orca into your language feel free to join the Gnome Translation Project, help will be much appreciated! The following video shows how Orca reads the previous Wikipedia page in Nightly builds:

On mobile platforms (Android and Firefox OS) we use a common Javascript layer called AccessFu to handle Gecko's internal accessibility tree. So all of this is handled by Mozilla and hence is also 100% open. As I said in my previous blog post, I was not really aware of the internal details before the Work Weeks so it was good to get more explanations and help from Yura Zenevich. Although we were able to do some preliminary work to add MathML support to AccessFu in bug 1163374, this will definitely need further improvements. So I will not provide any demo for now :-)

To conclude this overview, you can check the status of accessibility on the Mozilla MathML Project page. This page also contains a table of MathML tests and how they are handled on the various platforms. At the end of September, I will travel to Toronto to participate to the Mozilla and FOSS Assistive Technology Meetup. In particular, I hope to continue improvements to MathML Accessibility in Mozilla products... Stay tuned!

http://www.maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic/?post/2015/08/15/MathML-Accessibility-%28part-II%29