MathJax 3 localization status / roadmap?

[Brian Richwine]

Hi!

Is there a roadmap or sense of when the localization features of MathJax 3 will be available? 

Why I am asking:

As an accessibility professional in Higher Ed, I have been advocating for our Learning Management System (LMS) vendor to move from MathJax 2.7.x to MathJax 3.x. This would enable us to take advantage of the braille output and other accessibility improvements.

However, they pointed out the MathJax 3 docs where it states the localization mechanism available in version 2 has not yet been incorporated into version 3, so currently MathJax v3 is available only in English. The vendor requires supporting multiple languages and thus will not consider migrating to MathJax 3 until that is complete.

As part of the group that helped fund the development of the braille output feature, getting our key vendors to move to a version of MathJax that supports the braille output is important to us.

Thanks for any info!

  Best regards,

   Brian Richwine

Brian Richwine, CPACC
UITS Senior Accessibility Strategist – Learning Technologies, Indiana University

[volker...@gmail.com]

Hi Brian,

It depends what exactly you mean with localisations  There are effectively three areas of localisation in MathJax:

1) the context menu

2) MathJax messages (in particular TeX error messages)

3) the a11y component, i.e., it's speech output.

Localisation for 1 + 2 is on the roadmap but has been pushed back a bit. We are hoping to get some localisation into the next major release 3.3.

We is a chance that we might carry over some translations from MJ2. But in particular for the context menu there are a number of messages that need to be newly translated. We previously used via translatewiki.net, which can take a bit.

3 is quite independent, as this is part of SRE (https://github.com/zorkow/speech-rule-engine) This is more involved and is generally either done via sponsorship (e.g., like the Nemeth work) or contributed by dedicated organisations. The locales for speech that are currently implemented are en, de, it, es, fr, hi, all available in MathJax 3.2. Other locales that are actively worked on are no (nn/nb), bn, ca, and ko. 

So what are the LMS vendors mainly concerned about? The context menu? And would you know what the main locales are they are looking for?

Best,

Volker