Category Archives: ethical software

Edit (Math) or Bust – Sprint Nov. 16 – 19 (Part 1)

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Thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation, where I had a fellowship from 2011 to 2014, OpenStax (my current employer), and all of the participants (listed below), I was able to host a sprint at the OpenStax offices Nov. 16th – 19th to investigate easier ways to edit and convert mathematics within open textbooks, as well as to make it easier to adapt and customize OpenStax college textbooks.

Participants sitting in a u-shape with laptops, and large screen showing demo.
Some of the participants at the sprint during demos.

Themes

Two themes emerged at the sprint around common pain points. Encouragingly, we (the developers among us) were able to create prototypes that start to address those pain points.  

Different math formats result in tedious re-work. First, we realized that a substantial number of education institutions and one major OER partner have been using Pressbooks with the BCcampus textbook extension to adapt the OpenStax textbooks. However, because Pressbooks and OpenStax use different math formats, if the textbooks have mathematics in them, after import, the math has to be hand recreated which is very time consuming.

We need a simple visual math editor, with a LaTeX-editing fallback for complex cases: Secondly, although there are many individual math editing tools, there is not a simple, easy to use math editor (that will also support advanced features) for the web that can be plugged into different tools, and that can produce the right math output for the plugged in environment.

Here is what we did during the sprint

  • Because participants had experience with a wide variety of editing tools and math conversion tools, we spent the first part of the sprint demoing a wide variety of tools and processes to create and adapt textbooks that have mathematics within them.
  • Then we generated an extensive list of “pain points” within these processes.
  • Next we generated a set of users stories from the points of view of three different users: faculty adapting and customizing textbooks, students answering homework problems for scientific and mathematical subjects, and professional teams copy editing and maintaining open textbooks.
  • From those we generated an extensive list of ideas of things that we could realistically do together at the sprint and tied those to the user stories they could serve.
  • Two technical themes emerged and the developers divided into
    • Team A that would concentrate on getting textbooks from one of three editing environments represented at the sprint (OpenStaxCNX, Pressbooks, Manuscripts), and especially solving the problem of getting OpenStax math format converted to Pressbooks math format.
    • Team B worked on an editor widget for writing equations visually or using LaTeX and then getting them back into a document as MathML, LaTeX, or an image.
  • Both teams were composing existing tools, not writing things from scratch, which is one of the fantastic results of opensource software. More details to come.
  • Each day we did demos and retrospectives from the sprint.

The next blog post will have more information about the prototypes that were created with links to demonstrations and source.

    Participants

    • OpenStax (openstax.org) – Kathi Fletcher, Phil Schatz (philschatz.com), Ross Reedstrom, Dante Soares, Ryan Stickney. The OpenStax team is interested in improving math editing for their internal textbook production and interested in making customization of the textbooks less cumbersome for organizations adapting the textbooks. Two of those organizations are here at the sprint.
    • OERPUB (oerpub.org) – Marvin Reimer is an experienced developer who worked with Kathi during her Shuttleworth Foundation (SF) fellowship (shuttleworthfoundation.org) and works with pybossa.com and crowdcrafting.org. Marvin wrote a google docs, latex, etc converter that also publishes to OpenStaxCNX.
    • Katalyst Education (katalysteducation.org):  Christopher Sweeney, Tomasz Stach, Wojciech Ludwin, Krzysztof Mędrzycki, Iris Gau, Michael Moran. Katalyst Education has been working with OpenStax on Internationalizing the OpenStax user interface (OpenStaxCNX) and will also be publishing free college textbooks in Polish. They are helping with OpenStax’s efforts to create online versions of the textbooks that have the same numbering and collation as the PDF versions of the books, and they are committed to developing an easy tool for authors and editors who wish to adapt OpenStax textbooks.
    • BCcampus – Lauri Aesoph and Brad Payne (remote). BCcampus has been managing the B.C. Open Textbook Project since this project was announced by British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education in 2012. Brad Payne, Senior Technical Analyst, developed the Pressbooks Textbook plugin for Pressbooks and provides technical support for and continuing development of this and the B.C. Open Textbook Project. Lauri Aesoph, Manager of Open Education, manages the ongoing effort to import all OpenStax textbooks into Pressbooks to allow easier adaptation of these books by faculty in B.C. and elsewhere.
    • Matias Piipari of Manuscriptsapp.com – developer of the scholarly authoring tool Manuscripts, which includes MathJax based math rendering, an equation editor, and ability to convert between math formats on importing and exporting documents.
    • Omar Al-Ithawi – Software Engineer at  Edraak, an Arabic MOOC platform based in Jordan. Omar recently released a MathJax extension for Arabic and RTL.

    Next Steps from the Accessibility Sprint

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    A lot of why we got folks together for a sprint on accessibility when creating and using web-based scholarly and educational materials was to make sure that the different participants got to know each other, had a good feel for the kinds of expertise and tools that each organization (see list below) specializes in, and could put faces to names. I think we accomplished those goals, and we also made some concrete plans for next steps. We spent the third half-day of the sprint looking at next steps for some realizable opportunities arising from the sprint although some teams kept coding (see note below).

    In case you missed my earlier posts on this sprint, here are some quick links to those and links to other posts about the sprint. one from Adrian Garcia, UI intern with OERPUB):

    A Service Using MathJax and ChromeVox to generate MathML, SVG, and text-descriptions of math.

    Benetech is eager to move forward with support for more accessible mathematics in a tangible way, because this fits into an existing project. So a group of us spent the last morning of the sprint determining which of our ideas and prototypes around accessible mathematics could be implemented relatively quickly and efficiently. The group working on server-side mathjax for taking MathML and producing images and descriptive text for voicing math, had created a prototype quickly. Making it really work could be done fairly straight-forwardly, by building on the work of people at the sprint. It would need the following:

    • The prototype server-side code that builds on Phil Schatz’ code.
    • MathJax running server-side via PhantomJS.
    • ChromeVox’s mathematics description generation made into a separate service called by the code and running via PhantomJS.

    Why building this server-side tool would be immediately useful

    • It could make EPUB books with mathematics accessible for learners using screen readers. EPUB3 calls for supporting MathML directly, but support for that is not available in most readers. Currently, publishers must produce images instead, which aren’t helpful for visually-impaired scholars and learners. With this server-side component, publishers can use MathML as the source, and deliver images with descriptions for reading the math aloud.
    • Pre-converting mathematics allows publishers more control over the generated mathematics and could make the reading experience faster for learners. Connexions, for instance, would like to ensure that their EPUBs and PDFs have mathematics that looks the same across devices. They would like to be able to generate both using MathJax.

    Benetech, MathJax, and ChromeVox are working together to move this project forward. If you would like to help or keep up with the progess, please email Anh Bui, anhb at benetech.org, to be added to the mailing list.

    Aside about sprint lengths

    A few of the teams building prototypes really wanted to continue their work and kept coding. I am sure they would have used at least a full day more coding. My friend Adam Hyde always recommends a week-long sprint. He organizes book sprints where a group writes a book in a week. Last summer, my team participated in a coding sprint with Adam’s Booktype project and about five other organizations. That sprint lasted a week. It was fabulous. We picked the editor that we based ours on, determined what approach we would take for mathematics editing, and explored options for real-time collaboration. You can read about it in earlier blog posts on that sprint.)  

    Participating organizations at the accessibility sprint

    This sprint was supported by generous funding and in-kind support from