Accessibility/Meetings/MathML 2015

Date and Location

16-18 June at the Mozilla Toronto Office.

Participants

• Joanmarie Diggs (Igalia)
• Alexander Surkov (Mozilla Corporation)
• Frédéric Wang (AcceSciTech Project)
• Feel free to add your name.

Proposed Topics

• Design of a MathML/Math accessibility interface for ATK/AT-SPI, extending and improving the work made during the Web Engines Hackfest 2014 and Mozilla accessibility internship.
• Preliminary implementation of this interface in Gecko/WebKit, ATK/AT-SPI and Orca.
• Testing basic/experimental MathML support in Orca with simple test cases, Wikipedia etc.
• Continuing implementation of MathML/Math NSAccessibility interface in Gecko for Mac and testing with VoiceOver.
• Comparison with other MathML-aware assistive technologies (NVDA+MathPlayer, VoiceOver...). See these demos.
• Discussion of the various ways to expose mathematics: http://metrc.uoregon.edu/index.php/resources/math-text-to-speech/speaking-math.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemeth_Braille, http://www.gh-mathspeak.com/examples/grammar-rules/ etc
• Discussion of AccessFu and how to make MathML accessible in Firefox OS and Firefox for Android.
• Discussion of MathML/Math MSAA/IAccessible2 interface in Gecko for Windows and NVDA.

Discussion

• "Design of a MathML/Math accessibility interface": We probably do not want AtkMath API or relations, maybe consider that later if ARIA adds math stuff. For now, try using only math roles and maybe object attributes as an interim solution.
• "Comparison with other MathML-aware assistive" / "Discussion of the various ways to expose mathematics". 1) MathPlayer reads "one over two" for 1/2 but "fraction with numerator ... and denominator ..." for complex fractions. VoiceOver always reads "fraction start ... over ... fraction end". For Orca, first implement a general way to read formulas and refine that later (e.g. to read Russian fractions). New preferences can be added to Orca after user feedback (for example use the Verbosity = Brief/Verbose to speak math differently, or add an option for the "MathSpeak" rule). 2) MathPlayer and VoiceOver always reads superscripts as "x squared" or "x to the power of y" although this is not necessarily semantically correct (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_notation#Statement_of_convention). Orca should read "x superscript y" instead. The proper way to get precise math semantics would be to use content MathML, but it is not really available in current Web pages. The semantics attribute can be used to provide parallel Presentation/Content markup and xref attributes allow to map presentation node to MathML node. See http://arxmliv.kwarc.info/ and http://drmf.wmflabs.org/wiki/Big_Page for pages using parallel markup.
• The semantics element can be used to attach to its first child some equivalent representations of the MathML formula (e.g. "LaTeX" or "Mathematica"). For now, we probably just do not want to expose the annotations (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1175164). It does not seem to be used by Apple API. We could maybe add some browser preferences to only expose a specific annotation to ATs (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163377).

Mac Accessibility Progress

• Created a separate bug to expose role/subroles on Mac together with a testcase. However, this (sub)roles-only is does not seem to be enough to make VoiceOver reads the formulas in the testcase. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1175269
• Updated Alex's patch for moving relations into the markup map. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1001635. However, this eventually is not appropriate for our purpose.
• Rewrote Jonathan's patch for NSAccessibility without using relations at all. This provides basic support for scripts, roots and fractions. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1001641

Linux Accessibility Progress

• Exposed element tag name as an object attribute on WebKit https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146062
• Added basic support for fractions in Orca
• Started support for roots in Orca
• Gecko: do not expose semantics element in the tree https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1175164
• Gecko: Expose fractions and roots as ATK_ROLE_SECTION for ATK < 2.16. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1175182
• Gecko: Assign role SECTION to math groups instead of PANEL/UNKNOWN https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1176094