Towards making mathematics a first class citizen in general screen readers

Abstract

The text to speech translation of mathematical expressions has always been a challenging problem, which has not diminished by more and more content moving to the web. In this paper we present our efforts of making the speech translation of mathematical formulas a first class citizen in ChromeVox, a general screen reader for the Chrome browser. We exploit ChromeVox's ability to handle alternative representations of DOM elements for translation of mathematical content given in a variety of web formats into uniform utterances. We present a format of flexible and adaptable speech rules that support the customization of aural rendering of mathematics and introduce a specially semantically enriched representation of expressions that allows for a more natural reading experience. To further aid understanding of the math we exploit ChromeVox's idea of letting users engage with content on different levels of granularity to enable interactive exploration of complex mathematical formulas.