2020-01-14 11:16:43

Hi,
where can I found most popular mathematic formulas like for geometry, trigonometry and so on presented in an accessible way? Most resources I find online are very graphical.,

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2020-01-14 13:02:02 (edited by Rastislav Kish 2020-01-14 13:02:38)

Hi,
a goodone is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/
They use mathml, so if you know what topic are you searching for, it's a good place to checkout.
Another nice website, for physics, is:
https://physicstasks.eu/
It's a Czech website, which contains a collection of solved physics problems from various areas of the science. They are translated to English and Polish and they use mathml as well, so it can be useful if you need some physical equations.

Best regards

Rastislav

2020-01-14 13:06:52

Oh good, as polish is my first language. Thank you.

If you want to contact me, do not use the forum PM. I respond once a year or two, when I need to write a PM myself. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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2020-01-14 14:29:51

I'm starting to study physics in university, so those things could help. Thanks, although I don't have a teacher for that anyware yet, but we can know.

73 Wj3u

2020-01-14 21:48:53

I am going to study computer science and data science in university next year, so these resources come quite in handy right now, especially as I am not particularly good at physics, but I really enjoy math and programming so I am going to follow along with my passion.
Btw, is there a beginner friendly tutorial for writing and compiling math ml or latex? if there is, can you initiated folk post some resources? Preferably in ebook format but any other will do just fine, I suppose.

2020-01-14 22:40:16

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/mathml/index.htm

If you want to contact me, do not use the forum PM. I respond once a year or two, when I need to write a PM myself. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Telegram: Nuno69a
E-Mail: nuno69a (at) gmail (dot) com

2020-01-15 00:25:43

https://openstax.org/subjects
If you download MathPlayer, you should be good to go with the Math and Physics text books.

2020-01-15 01:49:11

@6, 7: thank you both verry much, I am going to read that tutorial about math ml more in depth soon enough, but as far as I've read so far it's verry good. The best part was when VO begun to recognize math in a verry structured and understandable way something like this:(trying to reproduce from memory)
fraction start -13 over X-2+(Y-2z) fraction end raised to the power of 2pi.
Note: this snippet wasn't in the tutorials, I made most of it up, though it can certainly be considered a math expr, in vo's terms, of course. My point is that one can read even complex expressions without getting lost, especially with the rotor  options for math. Do all iPhones have that, or did I modify something to make it do that? If vo can do it, is it the case with android?
I spoke to a person who tould me that, when I must take nots or exams, math ml would be too slow to be able to finish in time. Is this true? If so, do you think latex might be better? If not, what do you recomand?
I got some math and physics books that I think will serve me during the first year. I took some more advanced algebra, trigonometry and calculus, but I need to step down a level or more in phisics because I really have to understand and practice the knowledge required for concepts, I think the problems from the website posted above might help me a long way forward. Btw, how do you do at optics? More exactly, how do you imagine the concepts so you might solve problems? Is it even required for what university profile I choose?

2020-01-15 09:32:16

@7, is Math Player free? I thought it is very, very expensive.
@8, android supports it through CSR and the node browse mode.

If you want to contact me, do not use the forum PM. I respond once a year or two, when I need to write a PM myself. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Telegram: Nuno69a
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2020-01-15 12:11:29

Hi,
as far as I know, Mathplayer isn't required anymore, Mathml is integrated directly into Jaws and Nvda, although Nvda's implementation seems somewhat strange to me as Nvda gives unnecessary pauses between all element markings on my computer for some mysterious reason. Jaws works fine, although it crashes on some long and complex equations, although complexity doesn't seem like the reason as others work okay.
It happened on my computer just in few cases so far, so it isn't a problem.

Basically, I don't know what is the state of mathml accessibility on Android, as I have never been thinking about studying math related things on my phone.
I like to do these things on computer, as it's not just much faster and confortable, but I have also all sorts of other functionality under my fingers such as notepad to work with equations, Python to do some quick calculations in repl mode etc. But it's subjective of course.

I personally don't like LaTeX. When it comes to writing documents, I prefer combination of Markdown or Html and AsciiMath.
Even for equations alone, LaTeX form is quite messy to decypher. It could be done in simpler equations,     but for more complexones, it's very confusing.
Like when I was reading about Taylor series with equations in LaTeX, on the very first formula, my first, second and third thought: What to the hell is this supposed to be? big_smile
Just try it out yourself, here it is:

${\displaystyle \sum _{n=0}^{\infty }{\frac {f^{(n)}(a)}{n!}}(x-a)^{n}}{\displaystyle \sum _{n=0}^{\infty }{\frac {f^{(n)}(a)}{n!}}(x-a)^{n}}$

In Mathml, the equation above is quite acceptable and even nice. Luckyly, there are online conversion tools, so if you're dealing with equations in this form, you can convert them quite easyly.

Also, on formulas of this complexity, mathml is the best option imo, to get the idea as quickly as possible. Because it shows the structure directly, so you don't need to infer it from a long linear representation.
On the other side, simpler equations like:

s=1/2*G*t^2

Or its modified form:

t=sqrt(2s/G)

Are quicker read in AsciiMath, as you can easyly infer all necessary structures on the fly and do modifications very quickly if needed.
Note that this applies for Slovak synthesisers, as Slovak language is very direct and straightforward in pronounciation, which is very general and is thus almost always possible to infer exact text representation from hearing computer's output only. That's not the case with English voices on normal text, I don't know what is the situation for math.

So you'll probably do best by combining both types, AsciiMath and Mathml. Former for simpler, more straight-forward equations, the latter for complex and rich formulas.

There are many online conversion tools between these math representations, so you should be  able to combine them without big troubles, if you have original in suitable format.

Best regards

Rastislav

2020-01-15 14:05:13

Good to know MathPlayer isn't really needed. It's been about a year and a half since I've had to deal with math. It was such a hassle when I was working as a software developer and I was working on an Equation Editor. Basically, because of MathPlayer, we wrote our own speech system for speaking equations. Anyway, for what it's worth, I used LaTeX for all my Math university and I majored in CS and EE. Although, I also wrote a tool that would convert plain text and some custom notations into most common formats, MathML, LaTeX, and others. I have to dig that out from my many projects. lol

2020-01-15 18:49:59

LaTeX is pretty easy to pick up if you Google around. I'd suggest using Pandoc to convert from LaTeX to HTML. Duxbury can even put it in Braille if that's something that would benefit you. I'm taking Calc 2 using LaTeX for notes and converting into Braille (someone else takes notes on my behalf to make life easier for me).

What game will hadi.gsf want to play next?

2020-01-15 22:23:02

So a question. How do you guys deal with math worksheets? I had hell of a problem finding some. Most are PDF files, and even with InftyReader (Demo version) I wasn't really successful at converting them to mathml. I was actually thinking to obtain a braille display, but not sure if that could braille the math formulas correctly. Plus Braille Displays cost an arm and a leg here, so this won't work. I'm really interested to hear your advice. Openstax is good at explaining the concepts, but what I need is to say, be able to grab math worksheets and start solving.

2020-01-15 23:15:03

A braille display won't make any difference, infact in my opinion, its completely useless in math. May be for those who are used to it for some reason it is a way to keep going with old methods, but if you didn't need it before, you perhaps won't need it at all.
All braille displays need a converter for them in first place, which in turn needs math formulas in proper, semantic format.

As for the worksheets, I haven't found any usable as well. May be if we alerted Wolfram to include accessibility in their problems generator, it could be a big help, because you can get unlimited amount of exercyses there. They were improving accessibility of WolframAlpha few times already, so it seems like a promising way. Especially when we take in, that all what's needed to do is to include problem's text in the image.

Best regards

Rastislav

2020-01-16 17:24:02

This topic has some really helpful information; thanks for sharing! I still have Math Player installed and Wikipedia works with it but I'm interested to try out Math ML now.

2020-01-23 22:56:44

I hesitate to say that using a Braille display is useless and that it's just to continue using old methods, especially since I'm one of those people. However, I will say that if you're not an advanced Braille reader, you're significantly better off doing math with a screen-reader. It certainly can be done. I just personally find it to be a faster and more enriching experience using Braille - quicker navigation, a more tactile and physically-engaging way of interacting with the math, and typing in nemeth is a smoother ride than LaTeX, unless you come up with your own short-hand notation. Not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with @14, but don't disqualify what could be a perfectly useful option.

What game will hadi.gsf want to play next?

2020-01-24 08:32:26

I wish I knew half of what I know now when I was doing maths and physics in undergrad. I had a very tedious method of reading the question in latex, writing out and solving what I needed to on a braille machine, then retyping the solution in latex. Having something on a braille page helped a lot in solving things that got complex, I agree with rastislav that latex's notation makes understanding complex equations a pain. I ended up dropping maths modules in second year because I just couldn't keep up, it was too time-consuming.

2020-10-27 09:53:26

I'm not quite sure whether this would be a suitable topic to discuss about it, but it's somewhat related anyways.
So as for reading mathbooks, isn't there any opensource alternatives to Inftyreader? I'm not quite sure if Tessaract  is fit for the task, and quite frankly googling didn't give me any satisfying results.
Thanks to Openstax, I have renewed my rusty skills and currently pursuing its  Precalc textbook. I'm planning to learn Latex soon, but even a few sites I looked up that offer free books don't offer them in Latex source  here and here, to name a few.

2020-10-27 17:33:31

like others already said, interesting resources here. I thought wikipedia was the only accessible math source.
In faculty, some of my courses were in latex. The ones which weren't, I had to transcribe manually in braille. I don't agree that it is useless. It is hharder to navigate with a braille display, the brailer offers the most flexibility, but this might change with the introduction of page-size displays. it is true that, IN my time, the only option to get accessible latex was latex-access, which didn't offer the option of exploring math expressions in a tree like structure, the way nvda and jaws do now. maybe, this way, I could have done it via speech. But then, hearing all the expression at once made it difficult to comprehend and navigate. I wrote my exams directly in braille and dictated them to my professors, but I think latex would be faster to write than mathml, because it is more compact. In fact, if your goal is writing math quicly and showing it to the sighted, ascii math seems even more compact. the problem is re-reading what you previously wrote to go to the next phase. It might not be as easy as mathml. I guess you could keep a translator open and have the mathl from ascii math transformed in real time.

2020-10-27 18:14:36 (edited by Saman 2020-10-27 18:31:34)

Mathml is alright, but I've been tolled it would get tricky when traversing more complex formulas later. I suppose getting adapted to Latex would bring me more advantages rather than writing everything in ASCII math, plus it is being used in almost any specific  technical documents. I cannot afford a braille display. I suppose I wouldn't be able to in the near future, say 5 years, so I'm seeking out other alternatives.
I also have tried printing the books in braille, but the one place that does it (as far as I know) won't bother to do so, since it requires accurate checks to make sure the braille-version complies with the digital, which needs highly trained editors, which there isn't, or at least, not willing to engage  in the laboring task.
Edit: I'm self studying math, since the technical/vocational school in Iran does not concentrate on teaching mathematics, which I find a bit weird since I'm studying in computer field. University curricula includes the continuous math however, but given that I fall under the minor handful of blind people who major in CS, I shouldn't be expecting support from the government institutes, not with brailling the books anyways.