Math on the web is broken, the the affected people should be up complaining about that. This site did the most accessible thing possible; the fact that every tool broke here, just like they do for every other method is not really the author's fault.
What mathematicians did for thousands of years arose in a culture of oral proofs supplemented by prepared diagrams: Euclid's proofs were meant to be recited aloud in front of an audience while pointing at an image labeled only with single letters/numerals – not read in a book. The society was substantially illiterate, there was no access to paper or good pens, algebra had not yet been invented, and all arithmetic was done mentally or using fingers or physical tokens.
Compared to mathematical notation, natural language expressions are often incredibly large and cumbersome, can make following the argument extremely difficult, and make many kinds of symbolic manipulations all but impossible.
Providing a visual way to interpret and manipulate mathematical expressions was a revolution in mathematics without which most modern mathematics would never have appeared. Eliminating that is comparable to writing computer programs via punched cards because "that's how they used to do it".
If we assert that some topic can’t be discussed with plain prose, then the only logical conclusion is that you can’t discuss the topic at all.
> Math on the web is broken, the the affected people should be up complaining about that.
There is really two different topic there.
One is, how can screen readers deal appropriately with symbolic notations — be it astrological esoteric formula or mathematical abstruse formula.
An other one is how you chose to express ideas. Using symbols only is always possible, whatever the topic. Using prose only is always possible. Using multiple representations is also always possible, including audio record, alphabetical text, ideograms, pictures, video.
Note that I didn’t blame the author for any fault here. I just pointed out that, if one take as a goal to be the most accessible as possible to general public, using academic symbols is not the way to go. It doesn’t mean that people with some matching academic curricula might not prefer to have a document full of esoteric symbols, be it for real actual communication advantages or mere bigotry and vulgar elitism.
We all know here, I guess, that anything written with this kind of symbols can be just as well and without any ambiguity transcribed into a programming language which use exclusively mundane words or turned into a series of two signs that no one can grasp instantly.
That conversation make me think about comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36433212
Please bear in mind that mathematical notation is a language, and that mathematical formulas are perfectly valid plain prose in that language.
I imagine that some screen readers will fail gracelessly when faced with Chinese script or Hindu as well. Especially if they're not unicode compliant.
But once you hit that threshold you are simply in a battle of dueling accessibility concerns. Not everyone is sighted, but neither does everyone rely on English as a primary language.
Nor should they as the English language was not designed to convey all concepts accurately. It excels mostly in conveying concepts germane to anglophone cultures. And three guesses what concepts are not popularly relevant to your standard anglophone? That's right.. calculus and theoretical physics.
That's not to bash on English as a language. It really is a flexible beast with a far reaching vocabulary. But there literally exists no language that is ideal for encapsulating every single idea under the sun. One must have a way to support many of the most diverse ones at the same time. And modern mathematical notation belongs on that short list along with English.
Equations and mathematical notation aren't simple illustrations. They're in many ways more important than the stuff around them.
