On Wed, Jun 10, 2026, at 07:08, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Yes. And Martin is correct that a screen reader should get ">" right > (the one I used is freeware and not very good). But according to RFC > 20, "-" is either a hyphen or a minus sign. A screen reader cannot tell > them apart, so what is "α - β"? Similarly, "." might be a decimal point > or a full stop (a.k.a. period). It seems to me that if you want to be > sure that even trivial math always works, you need markup for > guaranteed accessibility.
This is a point where the bitter lesson [1] applies. Screen readers, like humans, can use context to make the right choices. The good ones are essentially LLM-backed, with very reliable discernment on trivialities like hyphen vs. minus or dot vs. period vs. times. In practice, I don't think that we should overly concern ourselves with these concerns. Having MathML will help, but it won't magically fix things either. I'm comfortable with progress here. Seeking perfection is worthwhile, but failing to bank the progress you make on that path does no service to anyone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson -- rswg mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
