Target Group

MathPlayer currently supports the notion of speech for three different vision related disabilities: blindness, low vision, and vision-related learning disability such as dyslexia. The words that should be spoken for these groups differ. In particular, if someone can see the math, they do not want to hear begin/end delimiters such as "begin fraction". However, if someone is blind, it is often very important to use them so that the person knows where notation begins and ends.

The target group is set in the MathPlayer control panel under "Generate speech for". Based on those settings, the global variable ::target_group is set to one of the values "Blind", "Low Vision", or "LD". Some speech rules test for this. For example, one of the rules for fractions is:

UIWord ? (ruleRef=="RR_fraction" && wordRef=="before")
 => UIInput( string{text= ::target_group=="Blind" ? "fraction" : "";} )
 { ruleRef="RR_fraction"; wordRef="before";};

The line

text= ::target_group=="Blind" ? "fraction" : "";

is a similar to C++ and Java syntax. If the global variable "target_group" is the string "Blind", then the variable "text" is assigned the value "fraction". Otherwise, it gets an empty string. In other words, if the target group is "Blind", then we say "fraction" at the start of the fraction, otherwise we say nothing.

Currently, the speech rules only differentiate between someone who is blind and everyone else.