Forum Discussion
New Formula Feature Not Accessible
I was very excited by the announcement of the new formula feature for text blocks today. However, as currently implemented, this new feature results in formulas which are not accessible, and which screen readers cannot read. This makes it fundamentally useless.
I tested the output of this feature on Windows 11, in the MS Edge browser (which is Chromium) and on the Mozilla Firefox browser. I tested with both the JAWS screen reader and the NVDA screen reader (two of the most used).
The JAWS screenreader isn't even able to see the short description or the long description that this new feature uses (in MS Edge or in Firefox). Neither JAWS or NVDA are able to actually read the equation, which is what is required for this to be accessible (devs, please look at MathML and MathJAX). Please implement a proper solution that renders MathML. This is not a new thing. Please give us a feature that properly uses MathML as per web standards, so that your academic and government clients can meet the legal requirements we are under to develop accessible online content.
It would be helpful to see the project you tried this on, given this is a brand new feature! I hope you shared your test course with support@articulate.com since you did not post it here. The support article on this feature indicates that the editor does support MathJAX commands so I'm curious what might have happened.
Thanks! I'll see if any developers or maybe Ronnie_Pilman want to chime in, but from my understanding in this article, the purpose of the math equations editor is to get them to actually display properly (since the text editor in Rise couldn't do that before and would just appear as normal body font with superscripts), but that the editor allows the equation to now be displayed as SVGs. So for a screen reader, the alt text and/or long description needs to do the heavy lifting, and in your example your long description would need to read something like "pi r squared equals"
Here's my example of a before/after: https://rise.articulate.com/share/Q6vh_v1l7XU3y6RUB_xdxZ37wwl8eDiE#/lessons/p7S8kMUttKJMWCJMCj3cg48dlPISYWNI
Agreed. This is great for display, not great for accessibility. I used the Pythagorean Theorem as an example (a^2 + b^2 = c^2 in LaTex) and "a squared plus b squared equals c squared" in the long desc and NVDA did read the long desc when it got to the equation using Chrome. But it would be really nice if it created MathML.
