At the first meeting we had in Paris, I managed to plug speakers in and create quite a sensation when I blew them up because I didn't realize it was only 110 volt speakers and not 220. I was about to say I just discovered I'd left off the power completely here.

So thankfully somebody else had a converter plug. And I apologize to those of you who have been to the previous at science workshops. This is going to be a little bit of a repeat for those of you who have been to that.

But if you were sleeping through my talks, you'd get a chance to hear it again. So I'm going to go through an outline of what I mean by accessible math because I'm going to be talking about a particular type of math accessibility and the problem that I'm trying to solve.

I want to go over the math player features. I want to talk about how to offer web pages with math, issues with offering PDF that contains math, and then some of the things that I'm currently working on.

So as background, Microsoft did a study a few years back. Actually, they commissioned another company to do a study on how many computer users have disabilities and what types of disabilities they have. And so one of the interesting things was that people don't, for the most part,

consider themselves disabled. They might have impairments. They might have a little bit of trouble reading the screen. They might have trouble reading the newspaper, hearing things. But they don't consider that a disability. So the term that they used consistently was impairments. And they found that 60% of working age adults have some sort of mild or severe impairment.

Now, for example, that means you might need to wear glasses to see better. So that's to see the screen well enough to be able to read it, that you've reached an age where you need special reading glasses. Twenty-five percent of the impairments are vision related. Twelve percent of the users that use computers have accessibility,

have to use accessibility features such as increasing the font size, changing the contrast, or using a special keyboard because their hands hurt using regular keyboards. And so the focus I'm going to have, and I think everybody at this talk, at the conference is going to have, is on print disabilities.

So blindness, poor vision. I don't know if anybody else is going to be talking about learning disabilities, but that's a group that's about 1,000 times larger than people with just low vision or blindness issues. So it's a very large group.

One of the things from a vendor's point of view is that's actually a group that is large enough that there's a base that you could actually make products and potentially make money on. The estimate is there's five to 15 percent of the population has learning disabilities

that could be helped with computer technology. That actually scares a lot of publishers of textbooks because there are special laws concerning people in schools, both in the United States and elsewhere, that allows them to get special access to otherwise copyrighted materials.

And if it's as large as 15 percent of the population is allowed to get that access, needless to say, the book publishers are a little bit concerned about that. So the type of accessible math that I'm going to be talking about is going to be on mathematical expressions. Now, there's many other types. You might have a graph.

You might have drawings, such as happen in geometry, and you need to be able to describe those. You might have animations to show how one mathematical figure transforms into another, or you might have manipulatives, and Art Karshmer will be showing some manipulatives. All of those are other types of math that are important and need

to have solutions for, but that's not what I'm addressing. The other side of this is, well, where are these going to occur? So they obviously show up in math textbooks, and in science and engineering and economics textbooks you'll have math. In homework that students get, articles at work,

and unfortunately even in your taxes, there's several formats that are quite popular. Web is obviously a popular format, and math shows up there. Microsoft Word documents are a de facto standard in some sense,

as is PDF or e-books are starting to become popular. I'm going to focus on web documents for what I'm talking about today, but I will talk a little bit about using Word and PDF. And then the last one, which I would think is you don't need to say this, but I've just been surprised in a number

of mailing lists about why do you need math accessibility. And if you talk to a crowd, they always think about math with these wild, crazy-haired professors and all sorts of integrals and weird math floating across the screen. And even in some of the math accessibility news groups I've seen, people say, well, only a few people need math accessibility,

so we understand that so it's not that big an issue. And the point I always try to make is in every school, every student takes a math class virtually every day. It's not just for, you know, math geek somewhere else. In the U.S., there's the saying, there's the three R's,

reading, writing, arithmetic, and I'm kind of curious into how that translates into Italian, given that they're not probably all R's when you drop them. But those are the three basic topics, so math is essentially one-third of the curriculum,

and so it shouldn't be thought of as this, you know, high-powered thing. It's a basic accessibility issue. So when you look at the various user groups, blindness is a group that a lot of people here are focused on. It's a very small group, but obviously a very important one,

and so what's important there is the ability, obviously, to hear the expression, or if there are Braille readers, to be able to use a Braille translation of it. And navigation is also important. You don't want to have to listen to the math expression from beginning to end, just like you don't want to listen to an entire document from beginning to end.

If you have vision difficulties that are less severe, being able to magnify the screen is important. Being able to have color contrast settings is important. And again, speech and navigation helps reinforce what you may see, but you may not see so clearly.

So there's a path that's typical from needing magnification to magnification with speech as a support to screen readers, and that's a path that a number of accessible technology vendors have support for. And lastly, as I mentioned, learning disabilities is a huge group.

The main one, the focus here is on dyslexia, where, as you speak, the words are highlighted one by one, and that highlighting helps draw the focus of their attention in and helps a lot with their ability to read. There haven't been any studies for whether that is helpful for math.

There have been plenty for reading, and all the experts I've talked to have said there's no reason to expect that those wouldn't apply to math. I should say that I was hoping to demonstrate that today, but this morning when I tried it out to show it, it wasn't working on this computer,

and I'll see what happens during this talk, whether the gremlins are going to still be here or not. So we have a product in design science. It's a free download we have called MathPlayer. It works for Internet Explorer, and what it does is it displays the math, if it's encoded in what's called MathML, and we'll talk a little bit about that later.

One of the things it does is it matches the documents, font, size, and color. So if you choose a larger print, the math will be larger. It's not like an image. It allows the magnification of individual expressions, and I'll show that, and synchronized highlighting. It supports speech in multiple styles of speech.

It supports multiple languages, and it has pauses and rates and pitch changes and volume changes to make the math more understandable. We have two different types of forms of braille support, and I'm going to show that in a moment. So this is a page, a web page with some math on it.

Here's a simple expression, and I'm going to speak the math. If you had a screen reader such as JAWS or Window Eyes, the math would sound like it was text. It would just be a seamless transition as you move into the math, but it's not great for demos,

so I'm going to use this menu item, and let's see. So let's turn it on.

Let me put the speaker just down to this, or the microphone down. It doesn't seem to want to come out. Cross Y, cross Z, and root, equals, start root,

X, and root, start root, Y, and root, start root, Z, and root. Can people hear that? Okay. So I'm going to come, I apologize. Is anybody still asleep?

We're all deaf now. Well. Well. As I said, I blew up some speakers at the first one, so now we have something else to complain about. That's okay, I'll hold it.

This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep. So among other things, as I said, is you can magnify this. If I change the size of the font for the page, hopefully this isn't going to work. Didn't work.

So I'm going to individually magnify this particular expression. So if you had a page with math in it, you would normally set the page so that you could read everything at its normal size,

and you might want that size to be as small as possible so you can fit as much on the page. Want me to pause? There's something. Your phone's back in, which I've lost.

Try the speech again. See, entered, equals, start.

Well, I'll continue. So you can individually magnify this because you might have subscripts or superscripts, powers or whatever, which traditionally are shown in a smaller size. So the ability to individually magnify an expression is useful.

One of the, as I said, we support multiple styles of speech and I'll show that in a minute. We also support different types of braille. One type of braille that we support, this is a nod to John Gardner at View Plus Technologies, who's not here today, is a system he invented called Dots Plus.

It uses brailles for the letters and numbers, but for the math, it's displayed with a, sort of the graphical nature of the math is raised dots. So you'll have the square root sign will actually feel like a square root sign and you'll have the two-dimensional division

with a line that you can feel. So it's non-standard braille. My understanding is if you're an excellent braille reader, it's very strange to read because you have to move up and down. But if you're not a proficient braille reader, particularly if you're not proficient at the math braille codes, and you've seen mathematical notation

before you've watched your site, this is apparently a relatively easy format to learn and understand. We also support other braille translators so that you can convert this to braille and we're using other ones. Dominique Aginvault will show his translator

that we connected to also. So again, for demonstration purposes, I can show on the screen the braille. You would normally connect this up to a braille display. So here is the Nemeth code for the braille. And if I switch this, I don't wanna take away Dominique's thunder,

but this'll be French as soon as it does the conversion. So there's a French braille code too. So you can have multiple languages of braille codes. A lot of this talk is actually support for things

that other people have done to help me out, one of which was the Italian translations that Valeria did. And I'm thinking if I mentioned her name enough, she'll give me extra time if I run long. So we support currently Spanish, Chinese, Italian, German, thanks to Bernhard.

And Greek. And so here's some examples of other languages. So you can choose the, let me start with the German one. So it takes a moment as the computer switches the speech engine. And this is the world's oldest laptop.

That's the other thing. This is eight years old. So it probably has its own issues at the moment. Oh, because this is plugged in, it's not doing anything. Normally this, by the way, synchronize, synchronously highlights as it's speaking,

but it seemed to stop working this morning and it hasn't started doing the talk. A different one.

This was working even this morning. Let me try a different expression.

Ah, this all worked fine last night when I went over my talk. And now it's the first time I've ever had real problems with this. Let's see. It does multiple languages, as I said.

Let me try one more. So I apologize, I'm not doing a good job here. Let me move on because it's not wanting to work today. So for those of you who speak languages

other than the five languages that I've listed here, it takes about 150 words to translate and 74 descriptions of particular rules to do the translations, plus about 2,800 characters for math of which maybe 500 are actually used.

Valeria did one of those and she can attest to how boring it is to do the character translations. But if you'd like to get a translation into your language done, I'd love to talk to you about that to make it happen. And let's see.

I wanted to mention different styles of speech. So what, is this a, now I need help. I thought, or if anybody has a third arm, I'd appreciate that.

So one style of speech, let's see if this is gonna work for me now, English. Well, let me choose Italian since I'm an Italian and then wait here. Fraction. I understand. So one style of speech is a style of speech

that we developed for Math Player, which is a relatively simple form of speaking that's unambiguous. And so let's see if I can get the Italian version to speak here.

This all worked fine last night. I'm so disappointed. Oh, let me try the English. Now the highlights work. Except now it won't speak anymore.

I have a feeling the computer is suffering the same lack of sleep that I'm, yes, I'll get the demonstration outside later. So one style of speech is the simple style. Another style of speech is based on the Nemeth Braille code. One of the things about the Nemeth Braille code is it announces the level, the number of,

the nesting level of the fraction so that you know the complexity of the fraction as it's spoken. And so that's a very different style of speech. And I just was gonna show that we can support that. We can support other styles of speech too. One of the interesting things about Asian languages,

to me, is that when they speak a fraction, they speak the denominator first, and then the numerator. And so that was an easy thing to change. Let me go to a demo here. Let me see if this is gonna work, of how do you author this?

So this I actually need two hands to. So here's a,

a Word document. It has some math in it. This is math that's done with MathType, and that's the most common math editor in there. It's live. I can come in and double-click this just to show you that it's not too canned of a demo.

And there it is. And I can change the end to, I can change it to M. I always like to make sure that I actually make mathematically correct statements, so I'll change them all.

And save. Save it back. And there it's changed. And then I can go ahead and I can save this document out as a web page with our, what we call, math page. Oh, I need to save this. So it's asked me whether I wanted to save it. I need to make sure it's MathML. And I'll say, okay.

So it goes through the document now. And again, this is an eight-year-old computer, so on a modern computer, this is almost instantaneous. And now it's gonna bring up the web page. That's the next thing. So this is Internet Explorer that's about to pop up.

Hopefully. It's still thinking. And this web page is using MathML for the math in it, so it's all live. So again, I can go ahead and I can zoom this out. And I can go ahead and speak it, I hope.

So let's see what happens. Well, it was trying to do something, but it's not gonna work because it's probably the same problem. I probably need to reboot as the ultimate answer. Yeah, I'm not gonna do that.

So that's how easy it is to author a web page that's accessible on a better day. So going back to that, let me talk briefly about, we're working on trying to make this work now for Word so you don't have to directly convert it out to a web page.

So what about PDF? And to save time, I won't actually go through the generation of PDF, but you can do the same sort of thing where you save this as a PDF document. And what you get when you save it as a PDF document

is, hopefully, this is the right one. Here's a PDF document. And if you go to read the, well, this is the good one. Well, this, so if you normally read it, I'm out of time, it reads terribly. Valeria, again, will be showing a way

to make it somewhat better. But we did a math player for PDF so that, once this wakes up, so that, again, I can speak the expression. So this is PDF, you notice the acrobat. Y over 123 less than or equal to fraction, five F over two, and fraction.

So that one worked, so there you go. This probably is the only time in your life you will see a more accessible PDF document than a web page. So I'm glad to see that. That's using the same underlying code. It just happens to have a special form for PDF.

So the thing is that, unfortunately, there are about, well, there are exactly two documents in the world, this being one of them, for which that will work. And this is because we rewrote math types so that when it saves the document, it saves it with MathML. Unfortunately, it has to use Word,

and it has to use the PDF maker to convert to PDF. So every version of Word had different bugs in it about how this worked. And every version of PDF maker had different bugs. So we found one set in Word 2002, I think,

that actually worked. So we managed to make this work, and we created some documents, and we can no longer make it work. So this may only be the only two documents for a while. But it gave us a sense of how much work it would be to try and make this real, and the answer is it's a lot. But if we do, that's a potentially great way

for publishers to produce PDF that's really accessible, because, again, you can choose your speech, you can choose the language, you can choose the braille, and it would work in a PDF document. So that's that example. So lastly, some current work, and gosh, there's about zero chance this is gonna work,

is I've been working on trying to get some more languages, convincing, no, I shouldn't say, I'm trying to, I'm trying to convince people to add more languages and more braille support. I've worked on a tool for daisy books called Mathdaisy. Amelia Pearson is going to be presenting stuff about daisy,

and part of that is this back-end pipeline that will produce a full daisy book, and we've done the math component for that. And I've been working on subject-specific things, so rules such as money, which turns out to be extremely hard to speak the way we would speak it. There are probably eight different rules

to speak dollars. With the euro, the euro sign can be at the beginning, the end, or in the middle. So there's a lot more rules there. Geometry has a number of special forms. Let's see if this one's gonna work. In the United States, this is a array, a directed line. And so normally you would say, speak this in a way

that says B, capital B, capital C, with a bar over it. But let's see if this is gonna work. But this normally, last night, this morning, said array B, C. And similarly in probability and statistics,

instead of saying P, open parenthesis, A bar B, you'd like to see it say probability of A given B equals and so forth. And so it's useful to have, in certain contexts, interpretations of the math. And so you can use, if there was content math ML for that,

you could use that, or you can infer it from the subject area, if someone tells you the subject area. So in summary, everyone is different. All their needs are different. You don't wanna pre-write a document with certain text because that locks it in.

So you want the flexibility at the end for the user to be able to make their own choices. We collect anonymous statistics with MathPlayer. The latest version of MathPlayer that's out there has been out for a little bit over a year now. And when I checked a few weeks ago, we had finally passed the one million mark for a number of expressions read by assistive technology

since MathPlayer 2.1 was released. And that's out of 180 million expressions that were displayed on seven million pages. So it really is getting used. MathPlayer is getting used even though there's so much more work to be done to make it a truly useful feature. It really shows people are desperate

because they're using this even though it could be so much better. And I wanna conclude with what you can do. And I know there's two groups in this audience. One are some technical people that have been in a number of the Ad Science workshops over this year. And I wanna thank, as I said, a lot of the work here was done by people

at those workshops then. So I'm really glad I had a chance to meet them. So those of you who speak a language that wasn't on my list, please come to me. I'd love to talk to you about what you could do to get your language supported. And then for the people that actually are using assistive technology,

it's a very sad fact that the assistive technology vendors don't see math as an important issue. And they tell me over and over again, the reason is none of their customers have said that math is important. And what they do is they listen to their customers because that's where the money comes from. So if you use assistive technology, it's up to you to contact the vendors,

whether it's JAWS, Dolphin, Window Eyes, whoever it is you use, ZoomText, then tell them math accessibility is important to me. If you improve your math accessibility, I'll buy your next upgrade. And if you don't, don't assume someone else does it, you have to do it yourself. You have to tell them, I want it and I want it now.

And they'll respond to that. And if you assume someone else is gonna do that, it's not gonna happen and you're not gonna get better support. So there's stuff that you can do to make things a lot better too. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions?

Questions? Okay. Okay. Will you make your PDF enhancement format please? I'll repeat the question. Can you make your PDF enhancement format open so that others can, can you make your PDF enhancement format open

so that others can produce this? I have a feeling we could. Oh, absolutely. Especially, so one obvious group is the tech community. All it is, is it's MathML embedded with what's called structure tags in the tech

or in the PDF. There's a group that I'm a member of called PDF UA, Universal Accessibility, that's working on a PDF standard for what it requires to make a PDF document accessible and putting the MathML in is the requirement for making the math accessible. So yes, Michael, it would be great

if you could generate documents with it because then we would have more than two documents in the world. So, and then we would bother releasing a product based on that and we'd have another free download from our site. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.