Bug 54358 – VoiceOver on the iPad does not speak math tags in MathML

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: INVALID
• Component: New Bugs

[John Gardner]

MathML islands are permitted to have an alternate text attribute.  DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem www.daisy.org) specifies that “[t]he alttext value should unambiguously describe the mathematical expression.”  ViewPlus is developing practical methods for making sure that this text in DAISY-compliant documents is actually spoken by screen readers. We are adding an aria-label attribute either on the root MathML element or wrapping it in a <span>. For example:
  <span aria-label=”y equals m x plus b”>
    <math role=”presentation” alttext=”y equals m x plus b”>
      <!-- MathML here -->
    </math>
  </span> 
In Firefox for Windows, the JAWS and Window-Eyes screen readers speak that text under all practical methods by which the MathML can be displayed – either natively or by MathJAX.  The NVDA screen reader presently does not work, and we have contacted the developers with a request to fix NVDA.  We find that VoiceOver also does not acknowledge the aria-label, and we respectfully request that VoiceOver be fixed so that it does speak it correctly.  I attach an example.

[John Gardner]

Created attachment 82266 [details]
Text file

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Does this occur in Safari for Mac? Please file iOS specific bugs to Apple via <http://bugreport.apple.com>. iOS WebKit isn't built directly from webkit.org sources, so we cannot track them here.