Intro

[David Tseng]

Hi MathJax list,

Wanted to drop a quick introductory note and a few questions.

I'm a developer who wishes to contribute to MathJax to better
understand how math gets rendered, to see a fairly complex front-end
in JS/hopefully appreciate JS more, and to see where accessibility
fits into the picture.

I'm a heavy user of many screen readers (I've even dabbled into
AsTeR), so I'm curious to know what the state of generating accessible
math falls in the project's goals. Has anyone for example tried to
write an outputJax that generates a JS DOM made up of nodes that have
keyboard handlers to say move focus to traverse through the IL
representations?

Also, has anyone done any work on the client side to package MathJax
as an installable extension (i.e. on Chrome's webstore, a GreaseMonkey
user script, etc.)? From my admitedly brief read through the docs, the
target audience seems to to be content providers rather than end
users.

Finally, if I wish to help out with patches (perhaps even adding
features), are there any instructions of processes or even any starter
docs to look at? Are there any timelines/roadmaps?

Thanks!
David

[Robert Miner]

Hi David,

I don't think anyone has tried to write an output jax other than Davide.  I know of some input jax, but not output.  Though I think Davide himself has done a couple as experiments.  I'm sure no one has looked at doing one to add traversal support.

Several people have packaged MathJax up as a GreaseMonkey extension, though as you say the focus of the project has been more on content publishers. It works fine though.  I recall a thread on the mathja...@googlegroups.com forum from perhaps a year ago about using MathJax as a GreaseMonkey extension to extract TeX from wikipedia, convert it to MathML and hand it off to MathPlayer for accessible rendering.

We are currently trying to finish up a 2.0 release in the next couple months, and there is a develop wiki https://sites.google.com/site/mathjaxproject/ with a rough roadmap at https://sites.google.com/site/mathjaxproject/design-documents/mathjax-1-1-specification/mathjax-1-2-specification. 

What developer documentation we have is on that site. DavideCervone, the lead developer for MathJax is teaching the fall semester and has little time but there might be some possibility of setting up a Skype conference to run over getting into MathJax development.

I'm out the rest of this week, but I'll try to pick this thread back up next week.

--Robert

Robert Miner
MathJax Project Director

[Davide P. Cervone]

Several people have packaged MathJax up as a GreaseMonkey extension,

Try googling "mathjax greasemonkey userscript" and you should find several examples.  There are also some examples at

http://www.mathjax.org/docs/1.0/dynamic.html#mathjax-and-greasemonkey

in the MathJax documentation.

as you say the focus of the project has been more on content publishers.

That's mostly because users don't have to do much (it should just run for them).  Some end-user help is at

http://www.mathjax.org/help/user/

which is the "MathJax Help" link in the MathJax contextual menu.

Davide

[David Tseng]

On 10/20/11, Davide P. Cervone <dp...@union.edu> wrote:
>> Several people have packaged MathJax up as a GreaseMonkey extension,
>>

Great; just making sure there wasn't an official package.

>> as you say the focus of the project has been more on content
>> publishers.
>>
> That's mostly because users don't have to do much (it should just run
> for them). Some end-user help is at
>
> http://www.mathjax.org/help/user/
>
> which is the "MathJax Help" link in the MathJax contextual menu.
>

I suppose I'm thinking of a slightly different use case. On a page
without MathJax included in the head of the page, the user would need
to inject MathJax using GreaseMonkey or a Chrome extension. Also, for
screen readers, a user could configure an output jax that could render
"accessible" math regardless of the choices made by the content
provider. For example, an output jax with keyboard handlers, or even a
self-voicing output jax.

[David Tseng]

On 10/20/11, Robert Miner <rob...@dessci.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> I don't think anyone has tried to write an output jax other than Davide. I
> know of some input jax, but not output. Though I think Davide himself has
> done a couple as experiments. I'm sure no one has looked at doing one to
> add traversal support.
>

Ok; I'll dig in further then :).

> We are currently trying to finish up a 2.0 release in the next couple
> months, and there is a develop wiki
> https://sites.google.com/site/mathjaxproject/ with a rough roadmap at
> https://sites.google.com/site/mathjaxproject/design-documents/mathjax-1-1-specification/mathjax-1-2-specification.
>
>
> What developer documentation we have is on that site. DavideCervone, the

This is helpful.

> but there might be some possibility of setting up a Skype conference to run
> over getting into MathJax development.
>

I would appreciate a call if time permits.

> I'm out the rest of this week, but I'll try to pick this thread back up next
> week.
>

Great; I'm planning on reading through the source this weekend, so
will probably have more to ask next week.

Thanks,
David