Making Mathematics Teaching Inclusive - Access for Disabled Students to Symbolic Languages in Electronic Media

This article considers a range of interconnected issues that impinge on the teaching and learning of mathematical subjects and how this is made accessible to disabled students. It focuses on the issues that arise from the now common use of electronic media such as word-processed documents or web based presentation and how mathematics is represented, encoded and manipulated in these. This is an area of long standing challenge and one that a comprehensive and agreed approach for dealing with is yet to be arrived at. This challenge emerges from the potency of the highly developed symbolic language of mathematics and the fact that most electronic formats have been devised to present alphabetical rather than symbolic languages….The article goes on to cover: Specific issues for disabled students; Possilble encodings of mathematics and disabled students; Textual descriptions of mathematics; The issue of “chunking”; Graphics with Alt – Texts; Approaches Originating from Mathematics in Print; Overview of MathML Recommendation; OpenMath; Practical Issues in adopting MathML Browsers supporting MathML; Presentation Mark-Up; MathML to speech; MathML to Voice Mark-up eg. JSML; Looking into the future;