Design Science News

MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken

I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news is that the new HTML5 standards initiative includes support for MathML and has been embraced by all browser vendors. This should reduce the barriers to producing web content with accessible, searchable, and interoperable mathematics.

Now the bad news. Unfortunately, MathML support in the next version of Internet Explorer 9 appears to be broken, based on our testing of Microsoft's latest Platform Preview. Read the whole story in MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken. It only requires a small fix but Microsoft likely will not give it much priority unless the STEM, Education, and Accessibility communities make it clear how important MathML support is for them. Our hope is that you will help us spread the word about this problem and make Microsoft understand the need to make MathML work once again. If you agree, let them know by any and all means at your disposal.

MathML 3 moves closer to being a standard

There's lot of good news around MathML these days and this piece of news is a bit of a scoop:  MathML 3 will become a Proposed Recommendation on August 10. Proposed Recommendation is the penultimate step on the road to being a full blown recommendation. Among other things, making it to proposed recommendation means that there are at least two different implementations of every feature in MathML 3. The only thing left is for members of the W3C to vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the recommendation. The voting ends September 10, and a final decision by the W3C director will be made around the end of September.

As I discussed in a previous post (MathML becoming a W3C Standard), MathML 3 cleans up a number of unclear areas and adds line breaking and elementary math. On our accessibility blog, I will post a video showing some neat examples of accessible elementary math — take a look over there in a few days or subscribe to that blog so you'll know when it is posted.

I'm really pleased to say that the next version of MathPlayer has the most complete coverage for MathML 3:  it passed a whopping 97% of the 1670 tests in the W3C MathML test suite. Many implementers are hard at work adding in MathML 3 support.  I don't know when their products will be out, but we hope to have MathPlayer 3 out in late fall.

MathPlayer 2.2 Released

MathPlayer is by far and away the most used MathML renderer around -- in the 27 months since MathPlayer 2.1 was released, 615 million expressions on 29 million pages have been rendered by MathPlayer! I'm happy to say that we've only had a few bug reports since 2.1 was released, some of which were fixed with intervening bug fix releases. We've fixed many of the remaining ones with this release of MathPlayer 2.2. We've also taken some big steps in 2.2 to improve our font support. When the STIX fonts are finally released in a month or two, MathPlayer 2.2 will be able to make use of them.  Even without them, our improved font support makes expressions look much better, as you can see in the screen shots below:

      
  MathPlayer 2.1 vs. MathPlayer 2.2

One thing that hasn't changed with MathPlayer 2.2 is its price -- it's still free. You can update your version of MathPlayer by visiting our MathPlayer downloads page.

MathML usage keeps growing!

Every so often, we take a look at how MathPlayer is being used. In the last 22 months, MathPlayer 2.0 and 2.1 have racked up nearly 500,000,000 MathML expressions viewed -- that's one half billion expressions. That's a lot of math!

MathPlayer V2.1 introduced accessibility features when it was released less than two years age. In that time, over 1.8 million expressions were spoken aloud by screen readers and other assistive technology. That pales in comparison to how much math was viewed, but that is 1.8 million expressions that would likely have been unreadable without MathML and MathPlayer. These numbers are a reminder why the NFB recommends using MathML and reinforce the importance of using MathML for representing math expressions so that everyone can have access to math.

You can learn more about MathPlayer from our MathPlayer web site, including how to download MathPlayer for free. You can also learn more about MathML and accessibility from there and from our math accessibility web site.

Creating and using accessible mathematical content: AHEAD conference, July 20-25, 2009

The Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) hosts an annual conference for professionals in the fields of higher education and disability. This year's conference will be in Louisville KY, where Steve Noble from The University of Louisville will present a session titled Creating and Using Accessible Mathematical Content. Many educators are now required to produce accessible materials for their own students. One of the products Steve will demonstrate is our newest product, MathDaisy. He will show how easy it is to use MathDaisy with Microsoft's "Save As DAISY" Word add-in to create accessible math materials from Microsoft Word.

To see other conferences where Design Science products and technology will be demonstrated, refer to the Events page on our website.

The path to accessible math at U Guelph conference

The University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada is hosting Aiming for Accessibility: Creating Barrier-Free Information and Communication, a conference aimed at raising awareness of IT-related accessibility issues and providing techniques for addressing them. Part of the motivation for having the conference is the pending requirements of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which may have important impacts on Universities in Ontario. The conference is in Rozanski Hall, University of Guelph on May 27.

I'll be presenting a session in the Accessible Web Programming, Document and Multimedia Design "stream" titled The Path to Accessible Math.  My talk starts at 1pm and will cover how to create and deliver documents that contain accessible math.  I'll give some background on the topic first, and then get into the creation and delivery aspects.  Even though I'm giving the talk remotely, I'm going to be leaving lots of time for Q&A.

To see other conferences where we'll be exhibiting and speaking, refer to the Events page on our website.

MathDaisy adds math support to DAISY production tools

At the ATIA 2009 Conference (Assistive Technologies Industry Association) we  announced the release of the MathDaisy beta, an add-on for the DAISY Consortium's DAISY Pipeline and Microsoft's Save As DAISY products, which were also announced as betas at ATIA.

DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) is an XML standard for producing accessible and navigable multimedia documents. This includes Digital Talking Books, digital text books, and synchronized audio/text books. DAISY is a globally recognized standard for accessible content. MathDaisy adds support for mathematical equations in DAISY documents, making them accessible to students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with disabilities. Visit the MathDaisy web page to find out more information and sign up for the beta program.

Read the full press release, MathDaisy Adds Math Support to DAISY Production Tools

At the ATIA 2009 Conference (Assistive Technologies Industry Association) we  announced the release of the MathDaisy beta, an add-on for the DAISY Consortium's DAISY Pipeline and Microsoft's Save As DAISY products, which were also announced as betas at ATIA.

DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) is an XML standard for producing accessible and navigable multimedia documents. This includes Digital Talking Books, digital text books, and synchronized audio/text books. DAISY is a globally recognized standard for accessible content. MathDaisy adds support for mathematical equations in DAISY documents, making them accessible to students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with disabilities. Visit the MathDaisy web page to find out more information and sign up for the beta program.

Read the full press release, MathDaisy Adds Math Support to DAISY Production Tools