By admin 
Have you ever struggled to display complex algebra or math online? Would you like to adapt your STEM courses—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—for online learning to make them more accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired? While STEM courses are increasingly being offered online, these digital environments impose unique constraints on our ability to adapt them to the needs of our learners. Are you curious about how you can make popular screen readers like NVDA or JAWS read equations correctly? Follow the guide!
The social model of disability and the backwardness of modern media
The researchers cite the Washington Post , the New York Times , and fivethirtyeight.com as examples of modern media. The findings are even more alarming when you consider that the IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) brings together industry and academic experts in the field of visualization, and that the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) journal publishes peer-reviewed articles on the topic every two months.
Online accessibility
Online accessibility often involves the use of screen readers. What exactly is the problem? Simply put, the Internet was not designed to display mathematical notation in the way we typically interact with it in the classroom, typically on a chalkboard or whiteboard that has no spatial constraints.
If we think about PDFs, which are one of the main means of publishing scientific literature, the software does not display mathematical equations correctly because it does not have the notational flexibility necessary to divide the same blank page into a correct set of layers and symbolic relationships.
Fortunately, Microsoft Word’s equation editor fills this gap substantially. Teachers familiar with mathematical notation will have no trouble writing their equations correctly. But NVDA, the most commonly used screen reader, which is also free, has trouble working properly.
NVDA’s other major competitor is JAWS, but it is not free and its high price can be a significant financial barrier for learners. Universities may retain licenses for JAWS to accommodate students with disabilities, but not all institutions do.
Here is LaTeX
LaTeX converts mathematical notation into code, and vice versa. It is a language and system designed to produce technical and scientific documentation, and it is free.
How does it work? If we imagine that a math teacher has written an equation using Word’s equation editor, we can convert it to text by selecting the option to read the equation in a “linear” rather than a “professional” way.
Which has two major advantages:
The first benefit is that blind or visually impaired learners can read the equations with the right level of specificity via their screen reader of choice. Since the math has been hard-coded, there are fewer bugs, confusing expressions, and misnomers.
It is worth mentioning that sighted users benefit from this accessibility, as the equations are now interactive and can be enlarged.
The importance of alt text
The other important element of an accessible math course is the importance of alt text, which is the invisible ink of the internet. Data tables, graphs, spreadsheets, pie charts—data visualizations can be at the heart of a message, but without alt text describing the trend, the data, or the message, the learner using a screen reader is effectively excluded from the conversation.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to check the results Jung et al. have obtained since their paper was published two years ago. A review of the first images I could find on the websites of the Washington Post, fivethirtyeight.com, and the New York Times revealed that only the New York Times had since made images from its articles accessible. There is no explanation for the Washington Post, but fivethirtyeight has a tougher task ahead, since the amount of data contained in any one of their visualizations is more than you could listen to in an afternoon.
If you are brave and want to learn to code, LaTeX is free and you can definitely use it. It will reduce the bugs you encounter when publishing accessible equations because it gives you more control over how screen readers will interpret the math.
Despite these advances in accessibility, there remain two key issues that make high-level STEM courses difficult to produce. First, expert review can be difficult. While it is possible to produce accessible mathematics online, the Venn diagram of experts in a particular STEM field who are also blind or visually impaired is extremely small.
It’s a bit of a vicious cycle. We lack experts to evaluate online STEM courses, especially when it comes to accessibility, because these types of courses have historically failed to consider the needs of blind or visually impaired learners.
The second problem concerns the linguistic nature of mathematics. When a teacher reads an equation, some relationships or nuances in the notation are omitted, because it is assumed that the learner can read and verify the equation for himself at the same time.
The molecular formula for water, H2O, is a classic example. We don’t typically say out loud that the 2 is a subscript for H, because it might be perceived as pedantic. But for learners with visual impairments, because complex equations involve numbers that describe both the number of atoms and the overall composition of the molecule, screen reader output can be inconsistent.
In other words, as the complexity of an equation increases, the subtle omissions needed to describe it concisely can distort the overall meaning of the equation. More work is needed to help standardize how STEM teachers read equations. This will help teachers and learning experience designers create more accessible online learning environments. However, this is easier said than done.