Make STEM Accessible With LaTeX and ReadSpeaker

As a STEM educator, you know how important it is to get your point across clearly. Your field is complex enough as it is without any added confusion due to formatting errors or incorrect math symbols.

You might also be all-too familiar with how difficult it is to teach math effectively using computer tools. Somehow, math equations that flow so easily when handwritten on the chalkboard or on a piece of paper don’t often translate well to a computer document.

But short of scanning a handwritten document and sending it to your students to work on—which leaves your visually impaired and neurodiverse learners out in the cold, with no way to translate your handwritten math expressions to speech—what can you do?

After all, your job as an educator is to provide accessible STEM content to all students—even the ones with disabilities and diverse learning needs that can make teaching math more difficult.

After talking to numerous STEM educators—and hosting a webinar on the topic—we believe the easiest way to make offline math documents accessible is this:

Use a Learning Management System (LMS) that converts math to LaTeX as your primary publishing tool and then choose a text-to-speech (TTS) solution that reads your math expressions aloud for students who need audio help.

If you’re unfamiliar with LaTeX and audio assistive technology, don’t worry. We’ll cover the details below.

Want to dive deeper into how you can provide an accessible STEM experience for all your students? Tune into this webinar episode or contact us with your questions.

Turning LaTeX to Voice for STEM Accessibility

What is LaTeX?

If you’ve ever tried to use Microsoft Word or another “regular” text editor to write complex STEM materials for your classroom, you know how frustrating it can be.

That’s because standard word processors lack features that can help you format mathematical content in a way that visually makes sense to readers. You can add in superscript numbers to represent exponents and you can manually input some special math characters using alt codes, but for anything more complex than that, you’d have to upload images or use the Word math editor, which essentially just builds image files for you.

LaTeX, on the other hand, is a system designed to help you write documents with technical science and math content. It’s a markup language that helps computers understand and display advanced math and science concepts.

For instance, the quadratic equation would normally be written as:

If you tried to write that using MS Word, you’d have a tough time.

Using LaTeX, however, you could write the same expression as:

The end result displayed in your document should look exactly like the quadratic equation you know and love, instead of the jumbled mess you’d get from trying to format it all on a regular word processor.

LaTeX is best used to create offline documents like text docs and PDFs. It’s a go-to tool for making worksheets, sending homework assignments through email, or teaching lessons to remote students. (Interestingly, LaTeX is also a fantastic typesetting and design tool apart from its usefulness in math!)

With that said, if you include lots of tables, scientific notations, graphs, and graphical drawings—or you simply enjoy making your worksheets look nice—LaTeX is well worth learning. It is a markup language with its own unique syntax, so you’ll have to practice it just like you would HTML or XML. However, once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to save yourself a lot of time you would have otherwise spent trying to get your text document to display your math correctly.

Plus, as we’ll get to in a moment, LaTeX documents have distinct accessibility advantages over standard Word docs. That’s because some TTS engines such as ReadSpeaker convert the LaTeX output from your equation editor to MathJax, which can then be conveniently read aloud. This means you can build accessible math equations easily, just by using your familiar WYSIWYG equation editor.

If you want to learn more about LaTeX (and MathML and a few other options for writing math on the computer) this tutorial is a good place to get started.

Why is it important to use LaTeX (or an LMS equation editor that outputs to LaTeX) for accessibility rather than simply using images of mathematical expressions in your lessons?

Using LaTeX isn’t just about making your life easier as you create worksheets. Crucially, LaTeX is a great way to make accessible math content for students with low vision or anyone who needs audio assistance to complete their work.

That’s because LaTeX is easily recognizable by TTS screen readers as content that should be spoken aloud.

In contrast, if you were to use images to build your math worksheets, a TTS program would not be able to read the equation in the image out loud. Instead, it would read the alt text associated with the image, which by default is just the file name you used when uploading it.

It doesn’t help students with visual impairments to know the file name of the image you used; they need to hear the actual equation! Not only that, they need to hear the equation read in a way that makes sense and clues them in to the formatting of the expression.

Using LaTeX (or an LMS that converts to LaTeX) is useful because LaTeX can be detected and read by TTS engines. However, in order to make your lessons truly accessible by providing TTS assistance that actually makes sense and preserves formatting, you’ll need to choose a TTS program designed with STEM content in mind.

What’s the best TTS platform to use for STEM accessibility?

To a standard TTS program, complex math can look like a jumble of numbers, letters, and symbols.

While those characters may be spoken aloud more or less correctly, a visually impaired student or someone with learning challenges like dyslexia or ADHD might have a hard time understanding the format of the equation. Lots of mistakes can happen if a TTS program gets even one advanced math symbol wrong—which can sometimes happen, if the program runs into a symbol it doesn’t recognize.

ReadSpeaker addresses this issue with a customizable pronunciation library. If you need to program it to recognize and say symbols in a certain way, you can do that.

Secondly, our platform isn’t your average TTS program. With the right plugin, you can run it natively in Windows or Mac OS, in your browser, or directly in your LMS. This means students don’t have to tab out of the LMS or copy and paste anything to receive clear, correct audio redouts of their math and science problems.

You can test out how our TTS engine handles advanced math by visiting this page, hitting the “Try it” button, selecting webReader, and clicking on Advanced Math Reading in the sidebar. Feel free to pause, rewind, and customize your listening experience using the hamburger menu (three lines stacked vertically on top of one another) near the top of the demo page. This will help you get a feel for how the ReadSpeaker platform will help your students learn in a way that works best for them.

Contact ReadSpeaker with any questions or ask for a more advanced demo and a free quote here.