Well Supernova at least will read basic equations so long as they're written with ascii characters, (though I usually need to fiddle with the verbosity to alter what punctuation is spoken), and if a recognized tabula format is used such as those in microsoft word or in microsoft word or reasonably good html, you could have vertical organization as well.

The problem however seems two fold. firstly, even if you have all the information, hearing your screen reader rattle off two plus two squared times three to the power of six multiplied by eighty four is a little hard to follow on a basic sonic level (I noticed this when playing Kerkerkruip and trying to follow the formulae given for damage and hit chances during combat). Even if you go character by character, you still have the problem of needing to remember thee first steps of the formula. This is where visual scanning helps, sinse a sighted person always has access to the hole! formula, but even in braille it's possible to read different parts of the line as needed where as a screen reader makes the information linniar.
this is basically to do with the fact that processing mathematical information is rather different from processing normal spoken information.

There is however a more serious problem which occurs at higher levels of mathematics, and one which always prevented me from progressing. What I always found at school, is if you simply gave me the numbers written down I could always juggle them successfully, but the moment that the information analysis became spacial and graphical I struggled.

I know personally I tend to have problems comprehending space, but these actually seemed to translate into for example graphs representing data, ---- or at least so I found, indeed at one point when the teacher say produced a graph showing the convertion from farrenheight to centigrade, or the sequence of fibbenachi (I'm probably misspelling that), numbers, he'd always just tell me the necessary numeric relations and let me work them out where as he'd give the rest of the class a graph and have them measure the curve and gradient and what not to find relations.

This info switch went on at university, indeed my lectural in formal logic even offered to teach me a different calculus to the tree diagram based one other people had, (in the end I worked out my own numeric representational system for labelling tree branches, though spotting actual relationships with it was a nightmare).

Of course this might be me specifically rather than a problem with the basic representation of spacial information for blind people, sinse I know my own ability to hold and map spaces is less than average and a lot of blind people have hugely better mental spacial mapping skills than I do (I can't even play sudoku).

Still, I do wonder if perhaps there is something involved in the spacial nature of representations in maths,

Braille wouldn't be a feasible solution in my case. I've written to the InftyReader developers to see if they can improve recognition of matrices.

Simple answer, the screen reader companies just haven't focussed on the problem.

The more complex answer, as someone who took a unit in discrete maths, is that there doesn't seem to be any recognition of the more advanced symbology built into the screen readers. As Dark says there are likely problems with perceiving the equations via speech but often we simply don't get the chance to even try, because the screen reader doesn't read the notation for things like implication and equivalency. Don't even get me started on things like ven diagrams and Dextra's shortest path.

As to why braille isn't feasible for me, its expensive (financially and time-wise) to obtain material in braille, so much so that I've switched to using latex for my math needs wherever possible. I took a closer look at the book and it seems that only the augmented matrices of linear systems aren't recognizing correctly. The matrices in other chapters all come out fine, maybe its some difference in the way they're formatted?

@CX2: as of jaws 16 anyways, I've actually not had any problems with discrete math so far. Jaws now reads the symbols for logical and, or, the arrow for implication and equivalent. Granted, we're still in chapter 1, and I may come up against something else in the future.

Urr... depends on the university?
Tigers were $10k, last I checked. There's a whole one in my state. Easier to use one of the lesser embossers with dedicated software.

Brailling a whole STEM book at once isn't what we're talking about, though. That is ludicrously expensive, indeed. But what course ever uses the entire book? Ever? My braillist got into the habit of just doing one chapter at a time (well, he'd try to stay a couple ahead).
When I visited Purdue, they told me they just print the materials a student needs on as short a notice as is logistically feasible. Financially, they have things much better than a university not set in a rich city, but the method is practical on a less equipped campus as well.

Victorious, good to know. My experiences were admittedly around ten years ago and it was rather awkward to say the least. I ended up having to invent my own notation which I can't remember any of now.

Camlorn, $10,000 is a lot when you need to get the university's beancounters to sign off on it. Even having a third party produce the braille on the university's behalf could be tricky to get past the beancounters simply because it involves a new outgoing to a new supplier. I'm not saying this is right but we have to be realistic, and regardless of the benefits a $10,000 expenditure would need to be reviewed by some relatively senior people because that's quite a chunk of money. Sure it might not break the bank for the university but they can't just drop that much cash on something without going through proper process, though often it should be easier to get the process moving than it is in the real world.

@Camlorn,  I think this is a cultural difference here. Bare in mind in Britain universities are already struggling for cash anyway (one reason student fees are so insane and getting insanerer), and will reffuse disabled students places if they believe the expense or inconvenience factor is too great (I have known it happen).

Also remember in Britain no student is forced! to go to university and do maths, indeed at one university which shal remain nameless, *Cough! York *Cough! I was told "why are you studdying philosophy, why don't you do computer science that is what blind people usually do and the stuff is already prepared"

Equally, bare in mind in Britain even if the process of funding works correctly, it is the student! who is given their own personal grant for equipment, not the university who must provide for some hypothetical disabled students. Depending upon how the over all battle goes, the university's disability services might recieve the student's individual grant and distribute it, or the student might get some say over it (in my case sinse the disability service at Durham are morons I completely administrated my own). This means rather than the university having to purchice the braille embosser and fund someone using it, it's left up to either the student themselves to arrange accessible material be created, or the university to pay an external agency to provide materials out of the student's own disabled student's allowance, like the Rnib, ---- indeed the Rnib have quite the nice monopoly going on braille creation. This is what one totally blind doctor off Chemistry I know did.

Ultimately a university would be very! unlikely to use several thousand quid to purchice their own embosser for some hypothetical future blind students, and the individual grant any specific blind student might have would not be enough to afford one of their own (and even if they did, they'd take it with them when they left the university).

Equally however, this system isn't perhaps as unfare as you might think, ---- well not if you don't count the university disability services often laying down the law on what a disabled student can or cannot do with their own grant. In the Uk, people are required to either buy their own text books or borrow them from the university library (and there is no guarantee on that). While subjects like maths and science will print out papers and exercises for students, the actual text books will not be.

The plane fact is while Braille production perhaps is not expensive for an institution, it is! for an individual, (disabled student grants are not that generous), and at least in the Uk, universities work far more on an individualistic level even as far as sighted students go, ---- indeed I'm personally not in favour of those disability services who try and tell! a student what they should spend their own grant money on as though an institution would know better than the individual person themselves what they need for their own educational needs.

This is why Cx2 is correct in his "Be realistic" statement, at least as far as universities in Britain go. yes, it would be awsome if everywhere owned braille embossers, but the plane truth is they don't, and on an individual level the dam things are too expensive.

This is another reason I'd love to see a comparatively cheap, (ie under usd 500), full screen tactile display in the future, sinse far more people could afford and use it on an individual level and we'd have none of these wars with institutions or monopolising so called charities.

For me, I can't' imagine having to do maths without braille.  I tried it once, and the amount of time it took me to process the information was ridiculous.
I know what you mean about the disabled students allowance Dark.  I was told before university that 'no, you will have a laptop.   you won't need a braille note'... a year on and with research, I realised that having a braille sense or whatever it's called would make my life about 10 times easier.  I've put my case forward multiple times, with the backing of my senco, and they won't budge.  I've definitely realised after going from a school where getting braille was incredibly easy due to them having a specialised unit for VI students, through college and now university, where it is far, far scarcer, that braille provides me with access to information in a way that listening to a screenreader never can.

I don't think that I'll have to do math at a higher enough level to require braille.

I was looking for something to alleviate the pain of reading tonnes of formatting spam in a latex source document for tests and such, and I found a programme called pandoc that may be useful for some here. It is an open source command-line converter between numerous text formats, and has good support for math rendering in html documents. I was able to feed in a latex source, and get an easy to read html file with the actual inline math preserved as latex.

Btw, is it possible to convert tex into latex? One f my  professors uses tex instead of latex, and right now the document he sent me causes an error in pandoc when I try converting.

Converting in.tex to html:

pandoc -f latex -R -s -m -t html -o "out.html" "in.tex"
pause

There are other possible switches you can use for math rendering, one of which renders the math in graphics but with accessible latex captions.

I do see your point about braille support. Right now, the level of braille support present is 0; no embossers, transcribers etc. By the time any requests I put in for braille support get processed and set up, the course will likely be over. It'll probably be something that'll be useful for future semester though. Its also been years since I've touched braille (let alone math), not to mention the changes that I'll have to get used to with the transition to UEB, so I don't think it'll work for me right now.

I'm in introductory math courses right now, so pandoc dying on more complex documents is not something i'm not too worried about for now. Can you elaborate on what you mean by a latex toolchain and how to set it up? It sounds like something worth doing.