On 2026-06-10 06:08, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 09-Jun-26 22:46, Carsten Bormann wrote:
On Jun 9, 2026, at 11:59, Martin J. Dürst <[email protected]> wrote:
If a screen reader reads "x > y" as "x y" rather than as "x greater
than y" (or at least something that not just drops the ">", such as
"x greater-than sign y"), then I think this is the screen reader's
fault, not the author's.
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.
I agree that characters such as "-" and "." may be difficult to read
according to context. But I'd guess that 1) if the screen reader can
handle MathML, it's probably also sophisticated enough to address these
characters reasonably well, and 2) assuming that there's at least some
minimal amount of context, a person using a screen reader will be able
to understand "α - β" as "alpha minus beta" even when spoken as "alpha
hyphen beta", because they had to get used to the idiosyncrasies of
their screen reader.
Of course, 2) is not ideal, but it is not a major problem.
Regards, Martin.
Brian
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