Ever tried reading out mathematical formulas and notations? Sounds interesting but can be pretty tiring and difficult when you have an entire curriculum for the students or a site that uses mathematical notations excessively. And while a basic mathematical equation like 2 times 4 equals 8 sounds easy, think of reading out the following times and again:
cos(θ+φ)=cos(θ)cos(φ)−sin(θ)sin(φ)
Difficult by all means and I for one can relate to it. Not everyone is good at pronouncing the mathematical symbols and many a times users searching for content find it easier to hear than actually read. A service from Sweden, ReadSpeaker boasts solving the problem. The team behind the service isn’t new to the industry and have been providing speech enabling web services since 1999. Anyways coming back to the new launch, the purpose is simply to make understanding math content easy.
Content providers can take advantage of the of the ReadSpeaker system that reads aloud the notations in the standard MathML languages and demonstrated as plain text. The readability currently comprises of 100 most common symbols in mathematics, with more that can be added upon customer requests. Following are some of the most common mathematic items it can read out:
- Latin and most common Greek Letters
- Functions like Trigonometry and logarithms
- Algebraic expressions, etc.
You can visit a sample link here to get an overview what the service does.
We think that there is a high demand for such services, especially when you want information, especially educational stuff to be readily available and understandable for the masses. Think about thee doors this service opens up for educating those with visual disabilities or other reading problems. The inability to read shouldn’t be a hindrance whatsoever. Stating that such services have great usability will sound clichéd, but that best describes its advantage.
