Accessibility goals

Introduction

The primary goal of MathJax is to enable mathematical content on the web as a “first class citizen”, using standard technology, in particular MathML.

As a first class citizen, mathematical content must be as accessible as possible. In most scenarios, mathematical content is no different from regular text, hence the same level of accessibility should be obtainable.

Accessibility on the web takes many different forms: accessible content authoring, user agents with accessibility features, AT solutions on an OS level and user-based modifications such as User Style Sheets.

Current Problems:

1. MathJax does not facilitate math accessibility as compared to facilitating authoring and typesetting.
2. Mathjax 2.1 Output is not (easily) accessible to AT solutions except MathPlayer (nor does MathJax provide its own AT solutions such as screenreading).

Possible Goals

1. Ensure that MathJax-generated content can be picked up by AT solution.
2. Create an API that enables (and grows with) the state of the art in active AT functionality and allow AT solutions to seemlessly integrate with MJ rendering. State of the art currently is:
   1. User preference negotiation
   2. Expose internal MathML
   3. Highlighting (all MJ outputs)
   4. Sync-Highlighting
   5. Copy&Paste
3. Be a tool for AT solutions without math expertise
   1. embed math speech and other data for passive AT.
   2. help highlighting correctly, e.g. “integral” -- what do you highlight? everything to the dx, the integral sign, with the subscripts/superscripts etc
   3. sync highlighting -- matching generated speech with MathML (also in SVG output)
   4. generate basic text for math speech