Spoken Mathematics Using Prosody, Earcons and Spearcons

Bates, Enda; Fitzpatrick, Dónal

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-14100-3_61

Cited by 18 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Discussions with stakeholders, and, as noted previously, our previous work (see Frankel et al, , and Frankel & Brownstein, ), and information in the literature (see, e.g., Bates & Fitzpatrick, ; Ferreira & Freitas, ) strongly confirmed our belief in the importance of interactive navigation for math expressions; accordingly, building that functionality was an important part of this project. This section briefly describes the navigation tools developed, all of which are controlled via keystrokes.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…In the second report, we described our findings that while the prosodic enhancements studied did not appear to improve comprehension of the math expressions studied, certain lexical cues did appear to have some value and that further study into the usefulness of prosodic enhancements might be fruitful. Not surprisingly-and consistent with findings by previous researchers (see, e.g., Bates &Fitzpatrick, 2010, andFerreira &Freitas, 2005)-both studies suggested that interactive navigation would be an important enhancement to students' ability to understand spoken mathematical expressions, particularly expressions that are long and/or complex. In anticipation of such a finding, we had already planned to incorporate interactive navigation into the speech system we were developing.…”

supporting

confidence: 89%

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Expanding Audio Access to Mathematics Expressions by Students With Visual Impairments via MathML

Frankel

Brownstein

Soiffer

2017

ETS Research Report Series

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Since its 1947 founding, ETS has conducted and disseminated scientific research to support its products and services, and to advance the measurement and education fields. In keeping with these goals, ETS is committed to making its research freely available to the professional community and to the general public. Published accounts of ETS research, including papers in the ETS Research Report series, undergo a formal peer-review process by ETS staff to ensure that they meet established scientific and professional standards. All such ETS-conducted peer reviews are in addition to any reviews that outside organizations may provide as part of their own publication processes. Peer review notwithstanding, the positions expressed in the ETS Research Report series and other published accounts of ETS research are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Officers and Trustees of Educational Testing Service.The Daniel Eignor Editorship is named in honor of Dr. Daniel R. Eignor, who from 2001 until 2011 served the Research and Development division as Editor for the ETS Research Report series. The Eignor Editorship has been created to recognize the pivotal leadership role that Dr. Eignor played in the research publication process at ETS. This report describes the pilot conducted in the final phase of a project, Expanding Audio Access to Mathematics Expressions by Students With Visual Impairments via MathML, to provide easy-to-use tools for authoring and rendering secondary-school algebra-level math expressions in synthesized speech that is useful for students with blindness or low vision. The pilot evaluated the authoring and speech-rendition tools, including interactive navigation. Teachers participated in the portion of the study that evaluated the authoring tools. Secondary school students with blindness or low vision participated in the portion that evaluated the speech-rendition and navigation tools, comparing those tools to each student's usual method (braille or print) for working with math. The teachers received an interactive authoring tutorial and the students received an interactive navigation tutorial before using the tools studied. Prior to the pilot, feedback studies on authoring and navigation gathered information that was used to fine-tune the tutorials and the functionalities being evaluated. In the pilot we attempted to simulate a likely use-case for each group. In the students' case, the tools for reading and navigating spoken mathematics were compared directly with the methods each student typically used for reading math (braille or print in a size appropriate for the student). Teachers and content providers were instructed to author math expressions that matched those used in the pilot instruments given to the students. The studies showed that the authoring tools were easy for teachers to use as intended and that little observable difference existed between students' success in answering math and math-parsing questions when using the spoken math tools and their success in answering parallel qu...

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 84%

supporting

confidence: 89%

Expanding Audio Access to Mathematics Expressions by Students With Visual Impairments via MathML

Frankel

Brownstein

Soiffer

2017

ETS Research Report Series

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“…Bates and Fitzpatrick () described the advantages and disadvantages of lexical and prosodic cues, spatialization (particularly left‐right localization of start‐ and end‐sounds for fractions and other structures), and nonspeech sounds. They proposed a model that combines these cues with spearcons (sped‐up TTS) with the aim of achieving improved comprehension while minimizing the cognitive “overhead” required to process the various types of auditory information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Evaluation of the Usefulness of Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Understanding Synthesized Speech of Mathematics

Frankel

Brownstein

2016

ETS Research Report Series

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The work described in this report is the second phase of a project to provide easy‐to‐use tools for authoring and rendering secondary‐school algebra‐level math expressions in synthesized speech that is useful for students with blindness or low vision. This report describes the development and results of the second feedback study performed for our project, Expanding Audio Access to Mathematics Expressions by Students With Visual Impairments via MathML. That study focused on the use of certain prosodic and lexical elements in the ClearSpeak speech style and served as a basis for further refinements in that style's definition and implementation in the MathPlayer software. The primary parameters evaluated are students' success in drawing conclusions about the content and structure of certain math expressions and their perceptions regarding the helpfulness of the pace and wording of different text‐to‐speech renditions of the same or similar mathematical expressions. Please see Appendix A for information on obtaining a version of this report that is fully accessible using the tools described.

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“…To illustrate the other cases we first consider the following rule that is applicable if we have a msup node whose second child, i.e., the superscript is equal to 2: self::mathml:msup; ./* [2][text()=2] −→[n] ./*[1]; [t] "square" The rule's action specifies that first the content of the first child node is spoken by applying the engine's procedure re cursively (line 13), followed by speaking the string "square". We can observe that the rule is indeed applicable to the msup node in Fig.…”

Section: Describing Math Via Speech Rulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, the work on mathematical screen reading has explored adaptive techniques to customize output with re spect to mathematical domains and personal preferences [15,1], the use of prosody and pausing to convey meaning [15,2] as well as to enable better understanding via multi-modal presentation of equations [9]. But generally these efforts have been restricted to specialist systems [15,18,5,21], which either are not web-ready solutions or are restricted to single markup formats and offer limited customizability, which has to be done by users rather than by the providers of web content.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards making mathematics a first class citizen in general screen readers

Sorge

Chen

Raman

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference

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The text to speech translation of mathematical expressions has always been a challenging problem, which has not dimin ished by more and more content moving to the web. In this paper we present our efforts of making the speech translation of mathematical formulas a first class citizen in ChromeVox, a general screen reader for the Chrome browser. We exploit ChromeVox's ability to handle alternative representations of DOM elements for translation of mathematical content given in a variety of web formats into uniform utterances. We present a format of flexible and adaptable speech rules that support the customization of aural rendering of mathematics and introduce a specially semantically enriched representa tion of expressions that allows for a more natural reading experience. To further aid understanding of the math we exploit ChromeVox's idea of letting users engage with con tent on different levels of granularity to enable interactive exploration of complex mathematical formulas.

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Spoken Mathematics Using Prosody, Earcons and Spearcons

Cited by 18 publications

References 5 publications

Expanding Audio Access to Mathematics Expressions by Students With Visual Impairments via MathML

Expanding Audio Access to Mathematics Expressions by Students With Visual Impairments via MathML

An Evaluation of the Usefulness of Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Understanding Synthesized Speech of Mathematics

Towards making mathematics a first class citizen in general screen readers

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