Hello all:
I am a highschool student now doing some more advanced math and functions, and though I have experience with both jaws and windows, and mac with voiceover, both have been a bit glitchy with this.
I do love my mac but moving forward, i'll soon decide if i'd like a new mac or new windows for the university, where there'll be more math and word processing, and also programing coding. any advice on that too would be appreciated, how is vo with that?
Anyway coming to the main question here, we use google docs generally for all things. The way the math is written in the doc, voiceover like the other screenreaders, is horrible and abstructive with how it reads. a whole bunch of backslash frac and backslash this and that, and instead of reading symbols it just says next parameter, and it reads brackets in a lengthy and unnecessary way. Anyway i can make math work better on the mac? I've asked windows users already, who said to try different formats and such. i'm curius if math with voiceover is doable.
Thanks for your time.
By I talk Tech and More, 2 September, 2025
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
I always use mac over windows for math and here's why
I'm fully blind and proficient screen reader on literally all major desktop platforms you can think of.
I use my mac to work with most math thing because voiceover does at least generally work reliably out of the box with mathml/mathjak online on sites like webwork especially. And this backslash frac thing is the reason. Mathjax can natively offer to extract the math content to latex. In fact latex will be ultimately your life saviour no matter what platform you end up choosing, it's recognized as an official by most if not all universities in STEM field. Also for courses like calculus 1 and higher it's just easier to write things in latex rather than ascii math, something I wish my local readaptation org can understand hopefully before the next century :(
If you work a lot with math content in word though, maybe windows will be better. I have never used math expression in google docs. Give me a few days and I can explore that for you.