Building a Spoken Dialogue System for Supporting Blind People in Accessing Mathematical Expressions

Mathematical expressions are complex hierarchical structures of symbols that are usually accessed by visual inspection. These expressions are seldom rendered with natural language since users are not usually required to read them aloud. People with a visual impairment generally use LATEX with screen readers to acquire mathematical expressions. However, LATEX can be verbose, slow to listen, and difficult to learn. This work proposes a way to make mathematical expressions easier to be accessed by people with disabilities by exploiting their hierarchical structures. We describe and evaluate a dialogue system to vocally navigate mathematical expressions in English. In contrast with standard screen readers, the vocal interaction allows people to query the system about sub-parts of the expressions.