Forum Discussion
New Formula Feature Not Accessible
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
That provides no improvement over using an image. Using a text alt tag is simply not feasible for Engineering, Math, or Statistics courses. We need the ability to have accessible formulas. People have been asking for this here for at least 7 years.
I think it is an improvement over using an image if you want your equation in line with a block of text. If I have a paragraph text explaining what a circle is and how to calculate the area of a circle, I should be able to put that in my same paragraph and not have make/source the image from elsewhere, adjust the padding of the blocks to try to make it look seamless, then add new text underneath. Having it in the same paragraph seems like a win. That said, I am looking forward to seeing others' feedback on this and love seeing new features!