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There is one other tool available at the moment that may be worth looking at – Central Access Reader http://www.cwu.edu/central-access/reader. It can read Word documents with equations created using the Word equation editor of MathType. Regards Abi From: A discussion list for Assistive Technology professionals. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Parry Sent: 13 March 2014 09:49 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: text to speech for mathematical formulae Hmmm.. I tried reading these examples of maths rendered in a web font at http://www.mathjax.org/demos/mathml-samples/ (in MathML mode) first in IE9 with R&W vs11 (on Win7) and then with Chrome/Vox...as per Abi's suggestions, Given it's all quite hard to do : ) it's more than possible I didn't properly configured some aspect of the process, but anyway.. R&W failed to read some symbols (eg Nabla - the inverted triangle), but it would read out a complete string of symbols and numbers, which was good. Chrome Vox, on the other hand, was able to read out the names of the symbols if you clicked on them, but you couldn't read out a whole formula. If you tried to drag a box over the formula, it would begin to read out some hidden layout info.. Then I temporarily got excited about Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 in MS Word, but that turned out to be a false dawn. #procrastination #backtowork On 12 March 2014 21:20, Michael Parry <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Whoops - well, that explains why I got no joy from MathJax. (I just googled 'text to speech for mathematical formulae' and it came up..) Abi, I've just had a look at your link, and your project sounds very interesting. I take it the TTS tool is not ready to download yet? To answer your question - I recently saw a dyslexic electronic and electrical engineering undergrad. He's struggling to keep up with the course reading requirement. We looked at TTS in a general sense, and he thought it would help. But, he said, most of the reading has a lot of maths in it. He mentioned as an example, 'the formula for capacitive reactance', which we duly googled, and then tried ClaroRead on it, just to see what happened. It wasn't pretty. Suffice it to say, it struck me as a hard thing for TTS to do well. And, I guess for it to be genuinely useful for someone struggling to absorb this kind of information, it would have to be done very well, or it could end up being counter-productive. I gather the main types of maths associated with his discipline are trig, calculus and something called 'matrix algebra'.. There are obviously a lot of mathematical symbols, and not all of them presented in a linear way, possibly.. but I'm totally out of my comfort zone now. .. Most of the course materials are in the form of textbooks, or powerpoint slides. Although I presume all of the general formulae are available in a variety of formats, including via a browser. This student is keen to get support in place as soon as possible, with his rapidly approaching exams, but it's possible he could be interested in trialling your project, especially if there's nothing else out there that does this at the moment. Mike P On 12 March 2014 15:43, Abi James <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Mathjax is a JavaScript rendering engines for MathML, LaTeX and other maths mark-up. It is usually embedded in web pages e.g. http://www.ianholden.com/how-to/how-to-use-mathjax/ and started to be embedded within ebooks to render the formulae. This doesn’t provide speech support per se and currently the only tools to get speech from MathML/MathJax web pages are to use IE9 or earlier with Mathplayer or ChromeVox. IE9/Mathplayer will work with TTS programs like Read & Write Gold (but not on Win 8) while ChromeVox has speech and highlighting built-in. At Southampton we just started a project to build a concept maths TTS tool (www.stemreader.org.uk) so I would be interested to hear about what you are trying to achieve. We will be looking for students and individuals to trial the tool in the coming months. Best wishes Abi ====================================== Dr Abi James Assistive Technology Consultant & Researcher BDA NTC Chair (bdatech.org) Visiting Research Fellow, University of Southampton Email: [log in to unmask] Tel: 0161 818 2710 / 07941 465985 From: A discussion list for Assistive Technology professionals. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tim Symons Sent: 12 March 2014 14:56 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: text to speech for mathematical formulae Interesting. I was aware that MathML and TeX integration with popular TTS AT was in development, but wasn’t aware it was functional yet. I too am curious about this, if anyone has any further info. Thanks Tim From: A discussion list for Assistive Technology professionals. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Parry Sent: 12 March 2014 14:37 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: text to speech for mathematical formulae suggestions needed.. I tried MathJax but didn't manage to install it on this win7 32 bit machine... a run time error of some sort. thanks in advance Mike Parry Study Needs Assessor No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4336 / Virus Database: 3722/7183 - Release Date: 03/12/14 -- Regards Mike Parry Study Needs Assessor -- Regards Mike Parry Study Needs Assessor No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4336 / Virus Database: 3722/7188 - Release Date: 03/13/14