A couple of things to add to Dan's comments:

Despite contacting various places including TechDis, I've never been
able to obtain information on the 'best' format for mathematics. In
particular, it's not clear whether LaTeX or MathML is more useful in
practice. I'd be very interested in any solid information anyone has on
this. Even if you go down the images plus ALT tags route (as we have),
there is still an issue as to the format you use for the ALT tags, and
also that of how to make authoring reasonably straightforward. 

As well as the browser plug-in requirement if you use MathML, it's worth
be aware that there are also significant technical issues with using
MathML within WebCT (I don't know about Blackboard). If you are thinking
of going down this route, I can supply more details. 

By the way, plain HTML does support such things as subscripts,
superscripts, Greek letters, integral signs and so on, so if your
requirements are fairly basic, this may be sufficient. The web page
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/ is a good starting point for
information on this and other ways of displaying mathematics on the web.


Juliette




> -----Original Message-----
> From: The M25 Learning Technology Group [mailto:M25-LT-
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dan Stowell
> Sent: 17 October 2005 12:58
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [M25-LT-GROUP] Accessible representation of maths
expressions
> 
> Hi -
> 
> At 10:17 17/10/2005 +0100, Johnny Finnis wrote:
> >Hi
> >
> >Has anyone come across the issue of how to represent maths
expressions
> >accessibly on the Web? Is it better to show expressions as images
with
> >appropriate alt text, or MathML, or some other alternative?
> 
> I looked into it a couple of years ago. Not much seems to have
changed:
> AFAIK the state of play is still that MathML would be best in an ideal
> world, but because many browsers still don't know what to do with
MathML,
> an image with appropriate ALT text is probably safest.
> 
> 
> >How accessible are the equation editors provided in the likes of
> >Blackboard & WebCT?
> 
> The WebCT one is not very accessible - the equation is rendered as a
Java
> applet (!), with no alternative for those who can't use Java. (The
MathML
> expression is in fact present in the HTML code, but only as a
parameter to
> the applet, and would normally be ignored by any browser.)
> 
> HTH,
> Dan
> 
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Dan Stowell
> Faculty Information Support Officer (Life Sciences), UCL
> http://www.ucl.ac.uk/is/fiso/lifesciences/
> 
> Room G22, Drayton House, 30 Gordon Street, London
> Phone: +44 (0)20 7679 5472      (within UCL: dial 25472)
> Email: [log in to unmask]