MathSVGA11y

Story: I as a publisher or other content creator/remixer needs to provide accessible mathematics in an eBook or webpage in a way that accounts for the lack of MathML support in browsers, eReaders and assistive technology.

Due to the lack of or incomplete support for MathML in modern browsers, content creators are using images to render mathematical expressions. Accessibility is one of the reasons why SVG is a good format for this rendering, because aural/textual descriptions of the packaged inside the SVG for accessibility reasons. Being able to navigate and listen to the components of the expression is a desired feature due to the cognitive load required for large expressions and to serve users with cognitive/learning disabilities, such as dyslexia.

Because some screenreaders, such as ChromeVox, do render MathML aurally despite the browser not providing visual rendering, it would also be useful to be able to embed the source MathML in the SVG and enable screenreaders to access it.

Wikimedia and other organizations are currently exploring SVG rendering for mathematics using MathJax and Node.js:

Benetech is also exploring combining ChromeVox with MathJax and Node.js to automatically generate aural/textual descriptions.

Story: I as an educator, volunteer or alternative media provider need to improve the MathML or the generated description, so that a screenreader provides a correct and unambiguous aural description of the expression.

While MathML may render correctly visually, it may not provide enough semantics to enable a screenreader to generate a correct and unambiguous description of it. For example, more parentheses may need to be added to clarify the order of operations or the screeenreader is saying "slash" instead of "divided by".

Requirement(s)

The tab index functionality is very useful, however additional options for navigation may be needed, such as tree navigation.

There needs to be a way for a person to create and provide an improve version of the MathML or generated description and have a screenreader get it from a web service. This is similar to how Open Annotations on the web may work.

Reference(s)

[1] http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/

[2] https://github.com/gwicke/mathoid

Stakeholder(s)

Always uses one of the predefined values PUBLISHERS-ALL, PUBLISHERS-STEM, USERS-ALL, USERS-A11Y, RETAILERS. New values will be added to this space as they are needed.

Ranking

Ranking will be done as a separate activity later. For now, leave this field as 'TBD'

Relations/dependencies

Optional, links to other entries in the corpus

Relevant W3C group(s)/specification(s)

Where the target WG/spec is obvious, specify it

External relevant group(s)/specification(s)

Where there are external groups/specifications that address on this problem in whole or part

Comments

Any additional info (clarifications, etc)

Submitted by

name of author of the use case

Status

Always uses one of the values NEW | REJECTED | ACCEPTED