The MathJax Consortium is pleased to announce that it will research new methods for semantic enrichment and universal rendering of mathematics, supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation.

The grant covers a two-year period. The work will improve the speech-rule-engine and leverage the new semantic information in MathJax’s rendering. The refinement of the existing heuristics in the speech-rule-engine will provide the basis to expand the semantic analysis using new input information (e.g., from TeX macros) as well as contextual information (both equational and textual). This new information will be used enhance MathJax’s output options, in particular for tactile output and server-side rendering.

“This research allows us to once again push the envelope for math on the web”, says Peter Krautzberger, MathJax manager. “The support from the Simons Foundation enables MathJax to significantly broaden the scope of semantic enrichment for STEM content. We believe the resulting tools will help revolutionize universal rendering of mathematics on the web and beyond.”

More details on the goals of this project are available on GitHub. The results of the work will be published under open licenses and will feed into our ongoing work towards improving web standards, in particular as part of the W3C Math-on-webpages Community Group.