MathPlayer™ is our free plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) that displays mathematical notation in web pages using MathML, the W3C standard. It also makes math accessible to readers with vision and learning disabilities. Four years ago, MathPlayer 2 broke new ground by making math accessible. Since then, over 12 million expressions have been spoken using assistive technology such as screen readers and screen magnifiers.
We've been hard at work on version 3.0 of MathPlayer. Since the current version of MathPlayer does not support Internet Explorer 9.0, and the new version does, we've decided to make MathPlayer 3.0 available now as Preview Release 1. We expect to add more features in subsequent releases, but Preview Release 1 already has a lot of powerful enhancements:
- Support for Internet Explorer 9 (IE 10 is not yet supported)
- Support for HTML 5.
- Full support for MathML 3:
- Linebreaks: control over linebreaks and the indentation that follows
- Elementary math: markup that allows description of elementary math notations such as stacked addition (with carries) and long division
- Right-to-left math: support for right-to-left notation for math used in Arabic countries
- New accessibility features:
- Disability targeting. Different reading-related learning disabilities require specialized approaches for reading math. MathPlayer 3 gives you the ability to chose between "Blind", "Low Vision", and "Learning Disabilities".
- Improved speech. We've added hundreds of special cases to improve how math is spoken.
- Multi-language support for math-to-speech. The following languages are supported in this preview release: Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. We expect to have support for more languages in the final release. If you would like to help out and provide a translation for another language, please contacts us.
- Subject area targeting. Choose speech tailored to the type of math being displayed. This release currently supports, Geometry, Probability & Statistics, and Calculus are supported. The next preview release will allow authors to embed these setting directly in the document.
- Speech style options: Choose between SimpleSpeak -- designed to speak in a short, familiar, and unambiguous (for blind users) manner or MathSpeak™ -- designed to speak in a manner that is similar to Nemeth code so that braille users can easily write the braille equivalent when they hear it.
- Refreshable braille support. The ability to generate braille for a refreshable braille display. Please contact your screen reader vendor to see what their plans are to support this feature.
If you'd like to give it a try, please visit the MathPlayer download page and give us feedback about what you do and don't like. If for some reason, you find problems that gets in the way of your work, you can easily uninstall MathPlayer 3 and reinstall the older version of MathPlayer.
