Major accessibility regression in V3

Created by: NSoiffer

The accessibility features in V2 worked really well. I recently had the need to refresh my memory about some math content and found maybe 80% of the pages or more that I clicked on had accessible math thanks to MathJax. Images and PDFs are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. That great success is greatly endangered by V3. To be blunt, V3 is an accessibility disaster. Let me walk through why:

1. Out of the box, V3 is not accessible. Requiring people to turn on accessibility is a big no-no. First off, most people won’t know they need to do that, let alone how to do it. And without that knowledge, the page is not accessible.

2. If they somehow know they need to turn it on by using the context menu for math, doing so is difficult for screen reader users. I’m told that bringing up a context menu is something that only advanced screen reader users know how to do, so for a large number of screen reader users, they will require help from sighted users anytime they encounter a new site (assuming someone told them they need to turn on accessibility). The menu itself is accessible, but getting that menu to come up is the problem.

3. Once those barriers are crossed, the math still doesn’t read. You get a notification “clickable: <first char of math>”. No indication this is math and no smooth reading. Imagine if you had a page that had images in it and you had to click on the image to see it. That’s the experience screen reader users face in V3.

4. With NVDA and JAWS, I only occasionally got the math to read. Mostly (>90% of the time), I just heard the characters in the math. I tired both ‘enter’ and ‘space’ in both Chrome and Firefox. Maybe the focus wasn’t really on the math (despite it reading the characters), maybe it was some other mistake I made. If I made the mistake most of the time, I suspect others will make it also (some experts I consulted concurred that they had problems hearing the expression as math). That’s another accessibility barrier.

5. Even when it does read, it is an inferior experience to what V2 users had with NVDA. There is no prosody and the “a” sound is at the mercy of the speech engine, which will usually use the short “a” sound (e.g, “ah squared”). JAWS has this same (lower quality) reading experience, but for NVDA users, this is yet another regression.

I want to be clear that I am not criticizing SRE. The problem is the way in which accessibility is exposed by V3 -- it is not on by default, not easy to turn on, somewhat inconvenient to use, and flaky once turned on. Taken together, all the accessibility experts I consulted consider this to be a major regression compared to V2.

My suggestion is to do two things:

1. By default, put the hidden MathML back into the document as in V2. This gives out of the box accessibility to NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver users. That accessibility is in most ways superior to V3 for the reasons given above.

2. Add a ‘use Native speech’ option to the accessibility menu. If a screen reader user figures out how to activate the MathJax’s native speech (which should remove the MathML) and didn’t like the MathJax solution, the new menu item would give them a way to revert to V2 behavior.

I have a third suggestion that is somewhat independent of the above and was (I think) true for V2: make sure all the example configurations on mathjax.org and in the documentation are ones that result in accessible math out of the box unless specifically noting that they are not. Because V3 is not currently accessible, authors making use of V3 won't know that the pages they produce are not accessible.