Scheduled at 10:15 am in Matchless on Friday, November 21.
#41597Speaker(s)
- Corey Navis, Director, Kurzweil Education, Inc.
Session Details
- Length of Session: 1-hr
- Format: Lecture
- Expertise Level: Beginner
- Type of session: General Conference
Summary
For years, Kurzweil users have asked for better support in reading and highlighting math equations—a notoriously tough challenge in assistive tech. After seven years of research, we're thrilled to unveil a breakthrough. Traditional OCR engines struggle with math and specialized solutions are often prohibitively expensive. Kurzweil has been able to develop a solution to this issue by leveraging several open-source libraries that combine into a powerful solution that meets our Math OCR needs.
Abstract
For years, Kurzweil users have asked for better support in reading and highlighting math equations—a notoriously tough challenge in assistive tech. After seven years of research, we're thrilled to unveil a breakthrough. Traditional OCR engines struggle with math, and specialized solutions are often prohibitively expensive. Kurzweil has addressed this by leveraging several open-source libraries that combine into a powerful solution meeting our Math OCR needs.
Combined with MathCat—a library that transforms MathML into natural-sounding speech using ClearSpeak or SimpleSpeak—we’ve created a system for reading and highlighting math aloud. Processing math into a format suitable for vocalization and highlighting was a major challenge.
Kurzweil broke the process into two phases:
- Obtain OCR data from an equation image.
- Process the OCR data into a form usable for highlighting and vocalization.
We introduced an updated Kurzweil ePub Reader Control on installed versions that support reading ePub documents with MathML-tagged equations. This update leveraged existing functionality to display, highlight, and vocalize math content.
Next, we advanced to supporting selection and reading of math from any document. This is done using a selector tool that clips math from a document, processes it, and displays, highlights, and vocalizes the selection using a pop-up viewer dial.
The Kurzweil Math Reader feature was released in August 2025 for Kurzweil 3000 Web License editions for Windows and Mac. The next phase is to include this in our Kurzweil 3000 for the web product, currently in development.
While early versions don’t retain processed math, future updates will support storing processed math data to Kurzweil documents.
This talk will showcase how we turned a long-standing challenge into a transformative solution.
The future of accessible math is here—and it speaks clearly.
Keypoints
- Accessible math has been one of the most time consuming problems facing alt media specialists.
- There is no OCR engine that read language and math well.
- Using AI, open source resources has to provide math reading solutions.
Disability Areas
All Areas
Topic Areas
Alternate Format, Assistive Technology, Uncategorized
Speaker Bio(s)
Corey Navis
Corey Navis joined Kurzweil in 2014 as an account representative. In July of 2018 he became the general manager. Prior to his work at Kurzweil Education, Corey was a teacher and principal in K-12 education in Michigan and Wisconsin.