Welcome to the Accessible Equation Editor!

Frequently Asked Questions

Braille Display Questions
Can MathML and TeX be exported out of the Equation Editor?
  • Humanware Brailliant
  • Humanware BrailleNote Apex
  • BAUM Vario Ultra
  • HIMS Braille Sense U2
  • HIMS Braille Edge

NVDA does not support emulation of the backspace key from the Brailliant keyboard with Dot 7, but this keystroke is supported internally by the equation editor.

NVDA does not support emulation of the escape key from the Apex keyboard.

The equation editor contains a custom rule-based translator that converts directly from content MathML to Nemeth braille. There is no dependency on Liblouis or Duxbury. This is a completely new translator.

The equation editor braille input only supports single-line math input (at the moment). Multi-line math input, as well as text+math input, is on our roadmap. A visual user will see a scroll bar in the main input area, the braille window will wrap braille to additional lines, and the braille display will do what it normally does with lines that are too long in a standard document.

The user can clear out the input at any point, either with Backspace, Delete, Undo, or Clear All.

Screen Readers

Right now NVDA is the screen reader that has been most used to test the equation editor, with JAWS being used to a lesser degree. It is our goal to support as many screen readers as possible, but currently the AEE is not compatible with VoiceOver or ChromeVox.

The mode switch tells the editor how to interpret the keys it receives. If you are in QWERTY mode and still want to type from your braille device, it should work just as if you were typing from the QWERTY keyboard.

The voicing of math is its own difficult problem and we do not support that yet. So most times what NVDA says isn’t going to be very helpful. This is because NVDA tries to read the MathJax output, and gets confused. The MathJax folks have made some excellent progress on that, and we are working to use what they’ve been able to do.

Arrowing through a math expression is another area where we have some substantial work to do. We have recently made some advances supporting cursor tracking in braille, and expression navigation is on our road map for future development.

General Questions

There are cases where the Nemeth spec gives a braille encoding for an operator and we want to show it, but we don’t currently have strong enough font support to provide a unique button label for sighted users. We hope to improve button labels, especially with some of the geometric shapes, as well as circled and squared operators.

The equation editor uses content MathML as its internal format, which means that export to content and/or presentation MathML and Nemeth braille are easy, and we plan to allow exporting those formats in the stand-alone version of this editor in the near future. The only blocking factor in the web version is the inability of a web-based tool to save and load files. Translations to TeX/LaTeX are not currently supported, but if there were a specific use case, going from MathML to TeX is not that difficult. Importing from TeX/LaTeX is much harder, and is not currently a near-term target.

When we are able to deliver a stand-alone desktop application we will have the ability to save/load files. Exporting to Unicode braille and ASCII braille are easy. They are there now, but just not made visible in the web version of the equation editor. Likewise, exporting to a .BRF or Duxbury file should not be difficult.

A web-based application does not have access to the system clipboard, but when we are able to deliver a stand-alone desktop application, we should be able to do exactly that, and allow content and/or presentation MathML to be placed on the clipboard.

The equation editor provides math in Nemeth Code. There is not a version for UEB math, but we do plan to support UEB for text with embedded Nemeth for math at some point. From a technical perspective, we are not certain if similar support for UEB math is possible.