Mathtype is the inverse of Mathplayer and useful, because it lets you enter stuff into Word in LaTeX. I don't have any problem with that one.
I have to start by describing why Mathplayer is bad, because it's not obvious.
The problem with Mathplayer is the same sort of thing as Quorum. You can either make math easy to understand for some subset of people, or you can work out how to convey the information efficiently. Mathml is itself a terrible, terrible way to do math accessibility in the first place, but the solution everyone adopted is "we will try to convert this to semantic English". it works fine for trig and polynomials and basically everything else you'd encounter in high school/the beginning of college, but starts falling down at calculus, and just breaks beyond that point--algorithmic complexity is not chemistry just because it involves lots of O and N. The solution for complex stuff is their objnav-like navigation mode, but when you actually get to complex stuff that's like 8 or 10 levels deep half the time and doesn't necessarily even break in the right places, since it's trying to consume Mathml, which is a purely visual description of the content that doesn't care about us in the least (I am glossing over semantic MathML because no one uses it and probably never will for other reasons). SO basically the failure mode here is you have to switch from "I am reading text" to "I am reading math" mode 5 times in the same paragraph and try to explore it with the objnav thing, assuming that it didn't misidentify the field you're doing, and if it doesn't have support for the field you're doing it falls back to an incredibly annoying "let's be literal" speech mode that no one put any time into because, circling back, the objective "make it easy for newbies" is incompatible with "make it generally useful".
Then you hit things like how paper authors invent new notations and there's like 5 ways to write the FFT (a DSP/3d audio thing), and so on. Get to something like abstract algebra (I've only done a bit) and just watch it come crashing down. Once you're at the point of abstract algebra and probability and things like that, there is literally no English equivalent. Everyone forgets that math notation exists because it's necessary and you need a dedicated way to talk about it because you can't just throw it all into words. So most of us around my level and higher just end up using LaTeX because you can navigate LaTeX meaningfully by word and stuff, it's semantic enough to get the author's point across, it doesn't like get postprocessed by this giant rule engine that tries to put an interpretation on it because it thinks it knows best, and the authors who wrote the content wrote it in such a way that they themselves could read it before rendering--kind of like writing good Python code, if that makes sense. There's also Mathml to Nemeth, which probably works out well enough, except that complex equations in braille are way longer than 40 cells and often longer than 80 cells, and you still have the back and forth context switching problem, plus good braille displays with fast refresh rates are $5000 or more and also not portable.
SO, why is this a tragedy? It's a tragedy because when you solve something for blind people, the first solution eats all the funding and momentum. Mathplayer sucks for anyone doing high enough level math, but it solves the K-12 problem which is why you can find people who are like "but it works on polynomials and trig". It does because they *specifically* went and designed a huge number of rules to support that. And because it does so, there's now no need to do anything else for the K-12 people. But most of the funding for this stuff is for the K-12 crowd because how many blind people ever do anything beyond calculus? Not many. So we've basically permanently sacrificed the upper end of this unless someone like myself stops everything and spends a year on it, so that we can let a bunch of blind people do algebra and then never use it again once they graduate. But! There were probably even solutions! You could probably do cool stuff with audio, or convert it to a text format like code, or figure out how to let you navigate it by "word" instead of this complicated thing where you go and use a second navigation mode that's like opening a separate window, or I don't even know what else. But well, too late. Mathplayer exists, everyone copies it. And as someone who tried to do this myself, it takes like a year of full-time work to build one of these and like, what are you going to do, pull one of the qualified blind people off their job for free? Because as with audiogames anyone qualified to work on this probably makes 6 figures or is on their way there. I have yet to meet a higher level math person who has anything good to say about it, there aren't enough of us for anyone to really care, and because we failed at this there aren't going to suddenly be more of us in the future, because as soon as you get beyond what Mathplayer supports it's as difficult as it was before Mathml existed in the first place and you've solved nothing, save for inserting this brick to the head where whoever is trying to go down the road of math reaches the end of Mathplayer and has to entirely rework how they do everything. I would say, without any real evidence, that the number of blind people with my level of mathematical knowledge in the world is probably around 10000 people, and my level of math knowledge isn't very high at all, and no one else gets to join that club. Because. We. Failed.
Quorum is kind of the same, in that the resources in blindness land that go to it are going to be taken from solving real programmer problems, and because we have an accessible programming language for learning there's no reason to go work on other things like it. So instead of a bunch of people who might have tried to solve the general IDE accessibility problem or something, everyone in blindness learning land gets to feel good about Quorum. Like with Mathplayer, most of the people working on Quorum aren't working programmers, they're HCI and UX people who have some paper that says that it works and their study is all that matters because everything else is opinions. One of the truths about accessibility is that the people working on accessibility stuff are usually not the people who have to use it, they're some PHD in one of the softer sciences and often sighted. So you just end up with useless stuff. The only reason I'm not calling Quorum a clusterfuck and going on a crusade is that unlike with math, we have something like 20 accessible programming languages you can go use instead without a problem, if you don't mind maybe not having an IDE, and if you really really need one there's things like Emacspeak, Eclipse is passable, VSCode is now good, and so on. Lots of kind of subpar options, but you can still function at a very very high level and Quorum can't take away from that, it's just going to make it a lot harder to add to it, because anyone who's not a programmer isn't going to understand why people who learn Quorum can't get a job in it or whatever without switching off. At least switching off is easier than getting off Mathplayer, so there is at least that.
It may be possible to argue that Quorum is good for sighted people, in the sense that for sighted people there's tons and tons of options and tons and tons of money and so on that you can just go out and get, and whatever else, as well as lots of ways to migrate off. SO maybe there it's worth it. But in blindness land we have to be way more careful about where we let our resources go, not just money but in terms of how unqualified people/people outside the field in question perceive it as being solved or not, because they're the ones who set the priority. And I'm not okay with sacrificing the parts that you need to actually get a job and stuff like that for "it's easy to learn" because what's the point of it being easy to learn, if learning it is useless? Now it's the accessible programming language. There's a contingent of people who believe that it has solved programming accessibility. I can't even begin to convey how angry this makes me. We trade off productivity and efficiency and all those things like that for "it needs to be easy for kids" or "it needs to be easy for people just learning the screen reader" or whatever over and over and people either don't notice or don't care in the slightest. And the people like me, those of us who made it out for lack of a better way of putting it, who went out into the world and found jobs in the fields rather than entering the blindness accessibility black hole where you make it accessible for other blind people who probably become accessibility people and so on, or stay at a university forever with a reader and a ton of human support--well, we're lucky if we're even asked what we need in the first place, let alone actually listened to, and these sorts of tools like mathplayer or the first-party screen readers or whatever are the future and slowly, slowly coming for us. And like, I mean this post probably makes it clear that I'm angry, but I can't actually properly convey how angry this makes me, when I ask myself what the worst answer to the question "where will we be in 10 years" is and the answer is "I'm on Linux writing my own tools because everyone else dropped the ball and the OS locked down accessibility and most people think what we have now is a good thing". Which I guess is kind of off topic. But hey, if I'm ranting I might as well rant, I guess.
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