NVDA does not read the symbols inserted by the word 2013 equation editor

[nvaccessAuto]

Reported by pranavlal on 2014-11-18 14:07
NVDA does not read the symbols inserted by the word 2013 equation editor. The editor uses a font calibry Math as far as I can tell. Moreover, it does not report if alphabits in that equation are sub script or super script. To duplicate the problem, do the following.

1. launch word 2013.
2. Navigate to the insert tab in the ribbin and then to equation.
3. Insert an equation from the grid.

Try reading the equation such as that for the area of a circle. No go, the special symbols are not read.

Pranav

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 1 by nvdakor on 2014-11-18 18:01
Hi,
Confirmed - when I attempt to find out its hex value, NVDA does not announce them.

[nvaccessAuto]

Comment 2 by jteh on 2014-11-18 22:39
Word doesn't seem to expose standard Unicode math symbols as far as I can see. Even if it did or we could map them, being able to read the symbols isn't enough. You'd still have no idea whether they were part of a fraction, etc.

Does anyone know whether any screen reader supports the Word equation editor?

[bhavyashah]

@michaelDCurran @jcsteh @Qchristensen What priority do you think should be assigned to this ticket? Since the implementation cost seems to be non-trivial, I am leaning towards P3 or P4, although I have little knowledge about the feature's value and impact.

[jcsteh]

It'd be good to be able to read native Microsoft Word math using NVDA's math support. (We do support MathType, but that requires a separate product.) However, there are a few challenges/considerations here:

1. Office doesn't use MathML internally; it uses OMML. It includes an XSLT style sheet to convert between the two. We'd need to bundle an XSLT transformer to make use of this, perhaps lxml.
2. Math occupies more than one character, whereas we really want a single character stop and then the user uses NVDA/MathPlayer commands to interact with the math in a more screen reader friendly way. I'm not sure how to get around this. Perhaps all we can do is let browse mode fake the math as a single character stop. I'd be very reluctant to override the character movement commands in focus mode.
3. Microsoft have done some work to expose math speech via UIA. This doesn't expose the markup, though, which means it's completely different to NVDA's own math support and cannot support braille. Still, it's possible Microsoft will do more on this, so we should make sure we're fully aware of what's happening there before considering any implementation.

P3 for now, though there will probably be a high implementation cost, so this may get dropped to p4.

[Adriani90]

This is now fixed in #16521. @LeonarddeR it would be great if you enable that by default and make it a checkbox.