Intent and style (mathcolor, CSS, others?) #441
Labels
intent
Issues involving the proposed "intent" attr
need specification update
Issues requiring specification changes
Recent trends in pedagogical enhancements over mathematical notation use a variety of styling primitives (traditionally realized on the web via CSS, or MathML attributes such as mathcolor, mathvariant, mathbackground , mathsize).
A recent medium-agnostic collection of resources in this direction is the awesome mathematical notation design showcase.
Here is a motivating screenshot from the first example paper in the collection:
Math Augmentation: How Authors Enhance the Readability of Formulas using Novel Visual Design Practices.
The screenshot contains a display equation, paragraph and diagram, all targeted at sighted readers, which use different colors for each separate conceptual piece in each modality. For example, the "incoming light" concept is highlighted in the text in purple, as is its
L_i
term in the display equation, as well as the corresponding arrows in the hand-painted diagram.The question for this issue is - how do such techniques fit with the
intent
paradigm, if at all, so that AT users can also benefit from the additional visual information.To start with the simplest possible example, consider a red variable x, with two possible MathML expressions:
Will AT be able to pick up the color information by default? Should it?
Alternatively, should an author be able to make it explicit that such information is important to also convey to AT users?
The first temptation is to reach for
intent="red-x"
, orintent="_(_red,$x)
, but one could of course also consider providing the information in the accessible description viaintent="x:red-color-variable"
.Another example would be the use of an
<mrow style="border:solid;">...</mrow>
to draw a rectangle border around a term, presumably as a means of emphasis or to designate a particular notation. In the case where this has a named notation,intent
can be used as designed.In the case of styling emphasis (as in "boxed"), we are probably closer to
intent=_boxed($this)
orintent=$this:has-rectangular-frame
, but I am quite unsure at the moment. In addition, if a larger sub-expression had a dedicated color (typically contained within an mrow) it is conceivable that AT may want to mark the "start" and "end" of certain colored zones.I think the group hasn't considered the relationship between the
intent
mechanism and the styling information in the presentation tree yet, so I am opening an issue to start a discussion.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: