Hacker News Reader

Comment by parham90 | Hacker News Reader

Hey,

Thanks a lot for going through the article! :-)

You should keep a few things in mind about what I said regarding the accessibility of math content:

- I am in Iran. A lot of the assistive technology (other than software) is not available to me. I have no idea what people have in the United States, but I know blind people who have been very successful in mathematics. So, there is definitely a way. You just have to be in the right place.

- At the time I was in university (that is 2008-2010) screen readers and accessibility were not as advanced. There was also no concept of MathML back then. Things are improving though.

With all that said, math content is still not as accessible to blind people as it is to their sighted counterparts. But with the right people, you can circumvent the lack of support.

View on HN

MathML existed then but support for it was scarce, in browsers it was poor to non-existent. For Internet Explorer there was the MathPlayer plugin. MathJax is a JavaScript library for rendering MathML that's very good. However much of the use of MathML is focused on the presentation of the math, how it's rendered, rather than its semantics so that still makes it more challenging to learn.

One of the better ways to access math is to learn human-readable TeX; it's just the parts of the TeX language needed to represent equations and scientific notation. TeX is already heavily used in STEM fields for laying out papers and such so there's material already in that form and there are many people who can write it. Even more people are familiar with its conventions like using the carat ^ to mark the beginning of an exponent, e.g. E=mc^2. Platforms like Wikipedia's MediaWiki can take human-readable TeX in the editor, render it to an image file in the published page but keep the TeX as the alt text of the image. MathJax can also render it.

From Japan, there's InftyReader [1], OCR software that specializes in converting scans of mathematical equations, and ChattyInfty, a speech interface for InftyEditor, a mathematical document editor. Unfortunately, both are expensive.

For statistics, the R language has existed for a while but I think it has become a lot more popular in the past five years or so. Having a command line interface, it's much more accessible than other statistics software like SPSS.

[1] http://www.inftyproject.org

[2] https://www.r-project.org

I don't know why, but you have been shadowbanned, likely by some automated process. I vouched for each comment of yours. Hopefully, if enough people do it, everyone else will be able to read your comments too.

Go here for more information: https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements

That seems to be fixed now?

I think so. Maybe the system now automatically shadowbans new users and relies on others to vouch for them to make them active.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com