Math Share with the Diagram Center

PAC consulted with Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center initiative on Math Share, helping shape and test an accessible web application for students to solve math problems, show and revise their work, and submit it in formats teachers, including blind users, could review.

Project Description

PAC consulted with Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center initiative to support the development of Math Share, a web application that allowed students to solve math problems, show their work, and review their steps accessibly.

Math Share addressed a persistent challenge in math education: students need to do more than provide a final answer. They need to lay out their reasoning, organize multi-step work, revise their approach, and submit that work in a format their teacher can review. For students using screen readers and other access technology, that process can become difficult when math editors, visual layouts, and symbolic notation are not designed accessibly from the beginning.

PAC helped Math Share account for both sides of the instructional exchange: students needed to enter, review, revise, and submit math accessibly, while teachers needed to review that work in a usable format. That included blind teachers as well as blind students, since the accessibility of the authoring and review experience mattered throughout the full workflow. A screen reader user could work through problems, enter mathematical notation, review each step, and interact with submitted work accessibly, while the same work could also be presented visually for teachers who expected a conventional math layout.

PAC’s work included early ideation around how the tool could support inclusive math workflows, followed by extensive accessibility testing as the application developed. Particular attention was given to the live math editing experience in speech and braille, navigable MathML, and dynamic updates within the interface so that users could understand what was happening, move through their work predictably, and participate in the same educational process. The result was a stronger, more inclusive tool for math learning, one that supported students and teachers without requiring separate or diminished workflows.