Math to Braille
IEEE Spectrum - April, 1999 - page 38
KRE

The ability to read mathematical material is crucial to the ability of
visually impaired engineers and scientists to pursue their professions. At
every level of education, too, teachers of the visually impaired need to be
able to communicate about mathematics to their students.  

Some help is supplied by Nemeth code, which formats math using ASCII
characters that can be readily converted to Braille. Nonetheless, converting
math documents into formatted Nemeth code is a time- consuming process.  

Hard at work in this area are investigators at the the New Mexico State
University, Las Cruces. Their program is called Mathematics to Visually
Impaired Students or Mavis (http://www.nmsu.edu/~mavis/mavisTeX.html), and
their aim is to create filters that will turn mathematics created in LaTeX, a
version of TeX, into formatted ASCII Nemeth code.  

The Mavis filter works with the text files created by Scientific Notebook, a
word-processing package that includes the Maple math engine (from Machichan
Software, http://www.mackichan.com) and saves its output in LaTeX. Other math
packages, such as Mathematicia, Maple, and Macsyma, create TeX or LaTeX
output as well, but they generally support different subsets of LaTeX, a
decided complication.  

The Mavis team expects all major math scripting applications, such as
Mathcad, Matematicia, and MathType, to spit out MathML in the near future,
and is therefore developing a MathML-to-Nemeth filter.  Since the language
was developed as a standard for Web publishing, there should be no problems
similar to the complications in designing filters that will work with the
different LaTeX flavors now in use.  

If MathML does not become popular for math publishing on the Web, the filter
will be a boon to visually impaired users. Ultimately, a user should be able
to produce printed and Braille versions of math documents simultaneously,
either from Web pages or from math programs directly.  

"Mavis wants to make electronic mathematics universally available to blind
and low-vision students," Chris Weaver, Mavis program coordinator, recently
told IEEE Spectrum. "Our MathML-to-Nemeth filter will do just that." The
graphical user interfaces of modern programs remain a real barrier for
visually impaired users, however.