Chemisty CG Telecon -- 21 May 2019

<dauwhe> Dan_B: I'm from Harcourt, work for the Math studio. I'm a people manager for high school science.

<dauwhe> ... for the last ten years I've been the lead on our chemistry programs

<dauwhe> ... I have a background/degree in chemistry

<Dan_B> Dan B introduced himself

<dauwhe> scribenick: Dan_B

Cary Supalo is also co-chair

Cary is a blind chemist, well respected in his field.

<dauwhe> scribenick: dauwhe

Dan_B: let's go to the agenda

<tzviya> 1. Scribe

<tzviya> 2. Welcome new folks

<tzviya> 3. Brief introductions of the co-chairs

<tzviya> a. Cary Supalo

<tzviya> b. Dan Barrett

<tzviya> c. George Kerscher

<tzviya> 4. Status of the Chemistry for the Web and Publishing Community Group

<tzviya> 5. Identification of GitHub experts to help us out

<tzviya> 6. Status of existing GitHub repository found at:

<tzviya> https://github.com/benetech/AccessibleChemistry

<tzviya> 7. Restatement of initial focus

<tzviya> a. Chemical equations = Chemical formulas

<tzviya> b. Joint meeting with the MathML WG

<tzviya> c. What are we asking for?

<tzviya> d. Proposed dates

<tzviya> 8. CG meetings

<tzviya> a. Frequency

<tzviya> b. Day of week and time

<tzviya> c. Next call

<tzviya> 9. Commits of samples to GitHub

<tzviya> 10. AOB

Dan_B: George is the other co-chair, whom we all know

status of the CG

UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: it's been set up
... I was able to join this morning

<tzviya> https://www.w3.org/community/chem-web-pub/

jasonjgw: you'll get a steady influx of people as they join

Dan_B: what do we want to talk about?
... I posted my samples from our current program into github
... did we have any more possible submissions?

George: Franco posted

Joshua: I need to join and add some samples

Dan_B: in our call, George, Cary, and myself, we talked about the focus of the group
... we were looking at the great tech that Volker showed us, letting students explore complex structural formulas
... we thing that's great, but our need right now is to figure out how we're going to deal with more mundane rendering of the information by a screen reader
... what does a screen reader do when it encounters a chemical equation?
... how does it interact with that type of information, as distinguished from a math equation?

<George> I can hear, but my voice to zoom is not dependable.

Jason: I know there's a CG working on MathML 4
... are they going to add semantics to disambiguate chemistry from math?
... where will that info reside?
... or you could use heuristics
... it might be better to disambiguate in the markup
... and volker had some ability to handle chem already in the speech rule engine
... I don't know what the state of that is

<Dan_B> Working with MathML4...assertive technology needs to distinguish between chemistry markup

<George> I went to the MathML 4 wg last week.

Neil: I chair the MathML group
... mathplayer does use heuristics to determine chemistry
... but it can miss things
... re: mathml reboot
... we haven't tackled that question
... we're having a meeting next tuesday to talk about semantics, chemistry will be on the agenda

Dan_B: thanks

<Dan_B> Neil: pretty sure we can add chemistry heuristics into the MathML engine

<George> Can somebody or two join the MathML call on the 28th to make sure our requirements get in there?

Dan_B: right now we're spending a lot of time trying to anticipate it or correct for it. if it's a matter of markup...

Neil: in the case of chem, it might be simple
... might be something on the math tag itself
... might be modular roles

Dan_B: we do lots of dimensional analysis in chem
... converting from moles to grams etc etc
... complex math rules
... we will have chem formulas embedded in there
... what would that situation look like?

Neil: I can picture that
... based on my experience with math player, once you know it's chem that's great
... I don't think the units interfere with the interpretation of chem formulas
... you can still throw math in there

George: we have some advantages in the publishing community, where we have validation tools like epubcheck
... and a11y checkers
... and we can put schema.org metadata into publications
... if mathml includes these additional semantics, then we could add these kinds of checks to ACE, add to schema.org metadata.
... would these roles, if it's math it would say math, if it's chemistry it would say chemistry
... is that what we're thinking?

jasonjgw: all the tools would take that info to generate their output rules. the users wouldn't really notice other than that they get good presentation
... you can check for syntactic correctness
... you might be able to use some heuristics, but it might be hard to auto-detect proper usage
... it's a good idea, especially if the authors of the user agents think its a good idea

Dan_B: if they have a restricted domain, they can check things

George: if I'm in a portion of mathml where this is chemistry, and the role is chem, that would apply to that element and it's children
... so you know you're in chemistry

???: I agree

George: that kind of checking would be easy
... we see that in math as well, where it looks right but is constructed wrong
... and if we had proper presentation audio description automatically, it would be a way of checking that your chemistry is correct--see it and here it

jasonjgw: we have one standards-related enhancement
... people use MathML if it's a typical chem formula, not a structural formula?

???: If they're using MathML generally, that's common

jasonjgw: we have a clear path into resolving that side of it with semantic additions to mathml
... we have a good demonstration of what can be done with structural formulas due to volker
... so we have one concrete proposal for the standards process
... what are the issues going to be?

Dan_B: the issues in mathml?
... or the structural formulas?

jasonjgw: given that the standards that we're aware of, what are the unsolved problems that this group needs to look at?

Dan_B: Here's what the problem we've been having are, with making this material accessible
... when you encounter an equation, whether it reads it correctly
... sometimes there's additional info in that equation
... an equation might have annotations beneath it, which calls out water or something, might say 3 moles
... there's additional information with an equation that we're unsure of how we present that information
... it's the responsibility of the publisher
... to maximize the use of AT
... when we're writing our books, we should have that in mind

jasonjgw: one concern is about annotations
... are they inside the expression?

Dan_B: yes

jasonjgw: what would be the standard markup for that? I can't remember

Neil: math player had two ways to speak things, it could say "h20" or "water"
... looking at the hM example, there's a balancing equations sample
... under it there are the steps to balance it
... these things are more difficult
... I don't know how to render tath

tzviya: we're getting deep in teh weeds here, but tehre are only 20 minutes left
... I thought teh agenda would be around identifying issues, not solving them

George: I'll speak quickly

Dan_B: what does moving forward look like? Team up with MathML and have this as a sub-case?
... or do we figure out tihs ourselves?

jasonjgw: it's a horizontal relationship
... and are there other issues in need of solution?
... which is why I was asking what teh otehr issues were

Dan_B: I have no idea what needs to happen
... i know the outcome I want

jasonjgw: we could create a wiki page and invite cg members to contribute to an issue list
... to get problem identification done
... and tehn sort out implementation problems, spec problems, authoring problems

Avneesh: one piece to resolve is meeting with Mathml next week
... we've talked about teh representation problem
... and next week discuss for when mathml has solution
... short term meeting with mathml then do long term

George: I think that's right
... get semantics in math

Neil: I suggest people think about wheterh just saying something is enough.
... and to come up with examples taht are not straigthforward

George: do we have a couple people who will join teh math meeting next week?

Neil: it will have a different meeting number

jasonjgw: I'm available but I'm not teh expert

tzviya: I have a conflict

Neil: could we do start or end?

tzviya: that would help

SteveNoble: I can be on teh call

George: do we need more roles to clarify?

Neil: I'm not sure how math player would do a few of these

<CharlesL> Neil: are there any ambiguities like there are in math

<scribe> scribenick: CharlesL

George: is the mathML a W3C group?

Neil: it is a community group now.

Dan: Is the math group doing anything about graphs?

Neil: No

Jason: thats ARIA / SVG

Avneesh: what are the action items?

<Joshua_Hori> ++

George: date for next call
... I will post the minutes, and we can do another doodle poll for the later part of June.
... I will try to get the infrastructure in place for chairs etc. get the data transferred over from DIAGRAM center to this group.

Jason: I will talk with Cary to see if he might be able to join.

George: action items: how many people do we want on the math call? maybe only people who know the issues?

Neil: I would like to have people with deep knowledge where math/chemistry differ, more than one chemistry tab they can answer those types of questions.

George: I have a large list but less than 15 hard core folks.. Dan, Steve, Cary, Jason, Tzviya on that math call…

Jason: I can promise to be there but I don't have that deep knowledge, but Cary has the Chem knowledge but no the math which I have.

Dan: I don't have mathML knowledge..

Neil: I don't think you need the mathML knowledge just the chemistry.

George: get buyin from the math folks, and there may be other domains that need the same.

Neil: I am un-aware of anything in physics that need special knowledge, its just applied math.
... some physicists have come up with some specialized notation.
... chemistry new names for equations etc.

George: statistics?

Jason: applied mathematics.
... formal logic from time to time, proof trees not really fractions but could be set up
... how do you show presents and conclusions, not numerator/denominator.

George: I will talk to Janina to see if there are other domains that could benefit from semantic enhancements. We are having our math conference in Geneva on the 29th. musicML

Neil: does chemistry have its own braille notation?

Jason: Yes

Neil: that is another reason why the mathML will need to know that this is chemistry.

Jason: how you represent specialized formula. we will need to address that in braille as well. structural formulas. There are specialized chemistry braille, germany or France may need this as well as the unified braille.

Charles: weather or not this is in a test situation for these chemical equations.

Jason: could be handled with metadata.

George: I will try to figure out whats going on with the chemistry community group.

<scribe> Meeting: Chemistry General Community Meeting

- DRAFT -

Chemisty CG Telecon

21 May 2019

Attendees

Contents

status of the CG

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

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