How To Make STEM Content Accessible Using MathType

True STEM accessibility can feel like a monumental task to accomplish as a math or science educator.

You might spend hours learning how to build math equations and science formulas with programs that output usable code that text-to-speech (TTS) programs can read—and that’s on top of your other work, like actually building out lesson plans and creating assignments.

If you’re still swimming upstream trying to figure out how to make your math or science content more accessible for students who need audio assistance programs, take a look at MathType.

Want to provide the best possible learning experience for your students in the simplest way possible? We’ve put together a webinar on making STEM accessible. Give it a listen here.

Turning MathType to Voice for STEM Accessibility

What is MathType?

MathType is an equation editor created by Wiris, a company that builds math and science tools, to make creating math equations for the web and offline documents easier.

If you’ve ever tried to write advanced math expressions in Word documents or on a standard web page editor, you know how difficult it can be to get the formatting just right and find the correct symbols and alt codes.

With MathType, instead of looking up symbols manually and fighting with the formatting elements, you can click on the symbol you need and select the right format from a menu. If you need to clarify the positioning of the numerator and denominator of a fraction, for example, you can simply hit this button in the toolbar:

The program will then recognize your selected characters as a fraction.

To get an idea of everything you can accomplish with MathType, check out the live demos on this page to see how you can build equations with just a few keystrokes and button clicks.

How does MathType make your STEM content more accessible?

Not all students learn the same way. Some people learn by watching, some by doing, and others by listening. Still, others need a combination of learning techniques before advanced concepts like math and science can really sink in.

Students with dyslexia, ADHD, visual impairments, or other disabilities that make learning math with purely visual presentation difficult often appreciate—and do far better work with—the ability to listen to math equations out loud as they work.

The problem is that it’s traditionally quite hard to build math lessons in a way that can be spoken aloud by text-to-speech programs as naturally as you could read them out loud to students in your classroom. That means if your students work remotely, do homework outside of the classroom, or attend online classes without an in-person instructor, you need to figure out a way to make that work readable by assistive technology.

MathType allows TTS programs to read and “understand” the math equations you’ve written. It provides the crucial formatting clues and computer-distinguishable symbols that tell your TTS program what to pronounce and how.

Do you need to learn how to use MathType if you want to provide accessible math content?

Not necessarily, but it can’t hurt!

Using MathType is fairly straightforward; it’s far and away easier than learning LaTeX, MathML, or any of the other HTML-esque markup languages designed for STEM content designers to publish math both online and offline.

If you like to build math equations for your students without being limited to working within your school’s learning management system (LMS), MathType could be a great option. You can use it on Mac OS or Windows as a downloadable desktop application or as a plugin for use with Google Docs or Slides. In other words, it’s versatile, powerful, and relatively simple to use.

With that said, you don’t have to use MathType. Your school’s LMS likely includes a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) math equation editor that allows you to do roughly the same thing as the MathType editor. So, if you’re accustomed to using your LMS math editor to create your STEM lessons, by all means, continue. The results will still be readable by TTS programs such as ours at ReadSpeaker.

It’s also worth noting that you can create accessible STEM content with nothing more than your usual MS Word doc editor. This is handy in case you ever find yourself authoring STEM content offline or on a different computer without access to your LMS or any third-party software that makes building math expressions easier.

Look for the equation editor within your document application, and use it to make your math expression. By default, most text document programs (Microsoft Word included) will add your finished equation to the document as an image. This is fine for many students, but it’s not sufficient if you want to make your math content readable by text-to-speech software for students who need audio help with their work.

To allow TTS programs to read the equations within your document, you’ll have to right-click the image and edit its alt text to say exactly what you want the TTS reader to read out loud. That’s because the vast majority of TTS programs can’t read images aloud, but they can read the alt text attached to that image.

For a simplistic example, you could edit the alt text of this image…

…to read…

“six divided by two, open parenthesis, one plus two, close parenthesis, equals sign.”

That alt text will guide your TTS program of choice on exactly what to say that will make it easier for dyslexic, visually impaired, or neurodivergent learners to understand.

Keep in mind that this solution has nothing to do with MathType; it’s simply another option for when you don’t have access to or don’t want to use MathType or your usual LMS.

If you want to use MathType within a Word doc, you can do that as well! The MathType download page has a number of tools you can download to enable MathType in Word, PowerPoint, Google Docs, or a number of other programs you might work with on a daily basis.

Take a look at the LMS plugins MathType offers while you’re on the download page. Depending on your LMS, you might be able to install MathType to use with your chosen LMS, so you can stay in familiar territory as you begin to branch out with building advanced accessible math.

Your accessibility solution is only as good as your TTS engine.

You can build the most beautiful, accessible math content in the world, but if your students don’t have a STEM-focused text-to-speech option to read their work aloud, your hard work will be for naught.

Your average screen reader is built only for language, not for numbers, symbols, or specific equation formatting. These programs won’t be able to speak anything more than the most basic math problems out loud correctly without running into pronunciation problems or skipping over crucial details.

What you need is a TTS program like ReadSpeaker that was designed with STEM in mind from the very beginning.

With ReadSpeaker, you can make all of your math content accessible— even advanced math, such as this formula for standard deviation: