Obsolete: This demo accompanied brainstorming work buy the MathML Refresh CG in 2020-2021 and the Math WG in 2021-2022. It is now obsolete and remains online solely for archival purposes.
Demo is now defunct, was at: https://dginev.github.io/tiny-mathml-a11y-demo
Method:
- obtain presentation MathML with accessibility annotations from a TeX formula, via the experimental LaTeXML accessibility branch
- render the MathML (with help from MathJax if needed), to sample the browser behavior
- also display the verbatim pMML syntax, made readable via highlight.js
- minimal javascript implementation of narrating a11y-enriched pMML trees into plain-text English.
- using speech-rule-engine as a baseline in narration text
- sample text-to-speech audio via a baseline neural engine by mozilla/TTS
- deploy on commit via gh-pages, making the project easy to fork and mod further.
- the latexml endpoint can be easily swapped with any other conversion service.
Known limitations:
- near-everything is at a "barely demoable" stage at time of writing, as this is a first draft of an implementation
- LaTeXML's accessibility annotations are ongoing work
- multirelations and complex duals are just a couple of the cases with fishy markup
- we need a tiny dialect of TeX macros to demo adding accessibility annotations to e.g. scripts, embellished variables, others...
- the baked-in narration implementation is kept simple:
- lacks a coherent linguistic foundation, so readouts are bad
- only covers a small number of semantic primitives
- needs targeting, so that a narration is done in context and per-use.
- the showcase page is also limited
- more of the examples need annotating, and we generally need even more examples, maybe a gallery?
- responsive tables are difficult in HTML,
- ended up patching the
minimaltheme too much, can be organized better - jQuery is a bad foundation for a 2020 user interface, only works if this demo stays tiny.