I’m sure there will be many other cases where a Firefox extension should be an advanced version of what’s capable on a web app. Using GWT and the GWT XPCOM bindings could be a good choice there.

IAccessible2 – What’s next?
Over the last three years I developed the IAccessible2 interface, defining how screen readers and a11y enabled applications interact with each other.  IAccessible2 is often called IA2.  IA2 extends MSAA allowing addi…..

The way I think about this, is that contenteditable is really about making web content a first-class object for web *users*.

Possibly a plugin for firefox and may be other browsers could be developed to be able to convert TeX to mathml and allow that mathml to be passed to a screen reader. For this I am thinking of snuggletex http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/snuggletex (I don’t know how complete the TeX support is but it certainly can deal with TeX fragments such as those in a equation image’s alt text). The second part of the solution would be a library for converting mathml to Braille and speech, designed in such a way it could be used by various applications. May be this part would be python written so that it could be intergrated into NVDA and orca easily and with the COM scripting of window-eyes possibly there as well. This library possibly should take in strings of mathml and/or an object DOM and should be able to work on fragments as well eg. from the element inwards.

The advantages I can think of for the above is that having the TeX to mathml translation in a browser plugin then the screen reader/library part only needs to deal with mathml which is where I think we should be going. The library component for inclusion in screen readers might be useable else where eg. in a document Braille translator, and can be reused by many products.

The question of whether we should support TeX, well my view is it would be like webvisum (eg. webvisum with captures), we may not support people using what we are working around but unfortunately it is there and so we would like the access and so could do with a solution.

One disadvantage I can possibly think of is that object navigation of maths might be lost if the library returns strings from the input (eg. strings won’t contain enough information to jump to denominators, etc).

Any thoughts. What might help on the library translation side, eg. liblouisxml might do Braille (although I am unsure about the BAUK possibilities of liblouisxml) and what about the speech output?

Thanks for posting this Aaron.