Canvas’s MathJax Needs An Update

[AustonStamm]

MathJax provides accessibility support for students with disabilities by enabling the rendering of math equations into a more accessible format and is compatible with various assistive technologies. Canvas is currently using MathJax version 2.7.7, which is outdated and lacks the core functionality necessary to continue supporting students with disabilities and to stay relevant with modern web technologies.

The latest stable version of MathJax is MathJax 3.2 which includes accessibility improvements that make equations more accessible to a wide range of students. MathJax 4.0 is in beta testing so Canvas’s version of MathJax will become two versions behind if it is not updated. Relying on an outdated version is counterproductive to instructors and creates barriers for students with disabilities.

Instructure should update MathJax to the latest stable version so that the Canvas learning management system can continue to be at the forefront of inclusion and accessibility. 

The following are just some of the updates that are now available in the more recent versions of MathJax 3.x. These updates improve how equations are rendered and make math content more accessible to students. 

• Nemeth Braille output 
• Improved equation generation that can enhance readability 
• Better support for equations with line breaks
• Additional languages supported by the Speech-Rule Engine (Hindi, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Korean) 
• MathSpeak only: Danish & Catalan 
• ClearSpeak & MathSpeak provides additional features for customizing spoken expressions 
• The accessibility feature includes additional magnification, highlight, and semantic options 
• Over 100 Bug fixes
• MathJax 4.0 Feature Changes

What is Instructure’s plan for updating MathJax? 

Any details you can provide will be greatly appreciated. 

Take care,

Auston

[mtuten · Accepted solution]

This was shared in the Educause's IT Accessibility Group by Miles from University of California, Berkeley:

We were alerted to this limitation by an instructor recently, and when I reached out to Instructure, they said that the reason they have not updated is that Mathjax 3.x does not yet support localization, and is only available in English. They're waiting for localization to be added before upgrading.

"The localization mechanism available in version 2 has not yet been incorporated into version 3, so currently MathJax v3 is available only in English. This is an important feature that will be added to MathJax v3 in a future release."

Upgrading from v2 to v3 - MathJax 3.2 documentation

I took a look, and see that "Localization [...] is on the roadmap for a future version."

https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/accessibility.html#accessibility

But I couldn't find anything more specific.

You might also try asking the Mathjax community if there's a more detailed timeline: https://groups.google.com/g/mathjax-users

Miles

[JenifferObando]

While I understand the desire to wait until localization and multilingual support is available, it's better to have something that works better, albeit without localization and multilingual support, while they work on the other features. This update is badly needed to continue supporting accessible math.

[brichwin]

At Indiana University we requested through our CSM to have MathJax updated some time back, and also got a reply back that MathJax v3.x did not meet Instructure's requirements for internationalization (i18n). Instructure provided a rather ambitious list of languages that MathJax would need to support. This was due to MathJax's context menu, not the underlying accessibility plugin (the Speech Rule Engine (SRE)). The SRE has the same language support in MathJax 3.x and 4.x as it did in MathJax 2.7.7. It's the SRE that provides the braille output and speech text renderings of the MathML.

The MathJax development community was seeking funding to have the i18n features developed. Happily, they have recently received the funding via the Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Hopefully this work will alleviate Instructure's i18n concerns. I am not sure though, of the timeline. I hope to have an update on that in the near future.

Alternatively, it would be great if Instructure could provide a configuration variable for Canvas admins to choose which version. I imagine many universities would be quite content with the language support already in MathJax.

It would also be great if Instructure allowed Canvas admins to customize the MathJax config. Moodle does this. For example, there are useful config settings that have MathJax parse mhchem LaTeX macros if your chemistry dept. wants to display chemical formulae in Canvas pages and Moodle's site admins have the ability to set the config settings used by MathJax to enable it. You can see where Moodle documents this process here: Chemistry notation using mhchem - MoodleDocs

If Instructure does not allow for customization of it, perhaps we should work as a community to determine the best MathJax configuration and recommend it to Instructure. This is important as many of the sites I've found that are using MathJax 3.x have MathJax configured by default to hide the underlying MathML. Unfortunately that makes tools like the older MathPlayer or the newer MathCAT+NVDA combo not work without a student knowing how to manually change the MathJax settings. On those sites, JAWS, VoiceOver, MathPlayer, and MathCAT simply skip right over the math.

[JeffWitt]

Hey all,

I am a platform Accessibility Specialist for edX.org. (parent company 2U also uses Canvas, by the way, so our interest are aligned here).  We have the same issues re keeping MathJax or other MathML rendering current.  I'll just add my notes to the great list you provided:

Relevant recent PRs to upgrade MathJax in learning units (some other places in the edX.org platform are already on v3.x) and discussion in Open edX Platform repo on GitHub:

https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/pull/32418

https://github.com/openedx/edx-platform/pull/33555 

Re MathJax 3.2.x: 

• There are know issues related to manual line breaks, or automatic line breaks to fit long phrases within the viewport (or both, it's unclear to me). But apparently those bugs are fixed with v4.x.
• The accessibility UI for v3.x+ is very different vs. v2.x, which means switching UI might be disruptive if done suddenly. I think it would be better to give some lead time, and ideally to allow course authors to opt into whichever version they prefer.
• There is another accessible solution available: MathCAT.  It looks fairly well supported but I don't know anyone who is using it. The author is apparently on the MathML committee. https://accessinghigherground.org/mathcat-and-the-future-of-mathml/ 
• There's also KaTeX, which is used by ChatGPT4.0 for rendering math in responses.
• I don't see the lack of localization options in v2.x after 2.2: https://docs.mathjax.org/en/v2.7-latest/localization.html 

These accessibility solutions seem satisfactory in one combination or another, but I'm not sure it is really necessary to push relatively large JavaScript packages to all users any more, given that Chrome and Firefox both support native MathML rendering now.  I can imagine that we could take MathJax or MathCAT and make browser extensions out of them for users who need the interactive UI -- at least theoretically.

Creating browser extensions doesn't seem particularly difficult. Here's a thorough framework that covers seemingly all use cases, but I think you'll find that ChatGPT4 can walk you through making a more minimal one quite easily. I'll probably experiment with this over the weekend.

https://github.com/msfrisbie/demo-browser-extension