I'm a researcher and as such not familiar with commercial solutions, but what you need is a screen reader that can be programmed with simple rules to read maths. It's relatively straightforward to add rules to a speech synthesis system that pronounce maths symbols. One company you could talk to is CereProc, www.cereproc.com; they might be able to do a simple bespoke solution.

Jaws can be setup to read mathematics, you need the plugin MathPlayer. See if this link can help you otherwise, send me a message and I'll try to help you further.

http://learnaccessibility.org/2010/07/learning-to-read-math-using-jaws/

Hello I have done with a student of mine a "natural" reader of math equations that actually works like this example: "x^2" is "x square " or " square of x" instead of "x exponent begin exponent two end of exponent". Please refer to http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/79/chp%253A10.1007%252F978-3-540-85980-2_36.pdf?auth66=1364470859_c3c9101430ee23f7f4685c6041716d6e&ext=.pdf

for full text

Lambda editor, from Lambda project

http://cidat.once.es/home.cfm?id=582&nivel=2

A lot depends on the complexity of the formulas involved. My group started to develop an OCR system that generates the correct markup (MathML or LaTeX) from which it would be relatively simple to read out the formula aloud, but we had to stop for lack of funding.

Lambda in English: http://www.lambdaproject.org/

I was a member of the project which produced this software, as well as other related projects (MAThS and MathTalk). Get in touch if you want to discuss.

Prof. Art Karshmer developed a software called MathGenie that allows interactive navigation of mathematics. His email is: [email protected]

Hello,

Andras gave the good answer: it totally depends on what do you mean by "mathematics". Simple maths can be efficiently processed through screen reader and speech synthesis, but mathematics have a bidimentional notation which generate a lot of problems for visually impaired. A voice (like braille notation) gives a single dimensional representation of mathematics, as for music or chemistry. There are two main challenges: providing a good spoken sentence as close as possible to natural language, AND supporting interactions with formulas to help visually impaired people to UNDERSTAND the formulas, not only to have access to the content of formulas. There are several project in these field, as mentioned by Andras, Gopal or Alistair. You could additionally have a look at the MAWEN project (D.Archambault, K.Miesenberger, et al.). For math support in Braille (but for me the issues are very closed), you may check Heumader et al, Mascret et al(;-)), Archambault et al., ... Look at the procedings of the last ICCHP conference in Linz (and former ICCHP).

Best regards,

Bruno

Mathplayer (http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathplayer/) is a freeware plug-in to Internet Explorer that can read aloud mathematics written in MathML using the installed Text-to-Speech software. MS-Word 2007 or 2010 include a MathML editor to write mathematics.