The universal mathematics accessibility (UMA) system includes translators that freely convert mathematical documents transcribed in formats used by unsighted individuals to formats used by sighted individuals, and vice versa.

Many unsighted individuals are trained in the use of Braille, a six-bit code that was developed well before the computer age to handle literary or plain text. Braille does not lend itself to the encoding of mathematical expressions, particularly those that involve two dimensions. Thus, a form of Braille called Nemeth evolved in the US, and another called Marburg evolved in Germany. These codes support the encoding of mathematics.

The mathematics most sighted individuals read more often than not has been encoded in one of these markup notations: LaTeX, Math-ML, or OpenMath.

The UMA system has two subsystems: an interconversion platform (IP) and the navigation platform. The IP provides transition between the digital formats for mathematics that were previously noted, as well as Braille-based formats. The interoperability is based on the use of a common interchange format (CIF), used to bridge between any pair of formats. The second subsystem is employed to provide interactive visual and aural output of mathematical entities; the navigation relies on the representation of the expressions in the CIF.

For unsighted individuals, useful outputs could be either Nemeth or Marburg encodings, or aural (spoken) renditions. A sighted individual not familiar with Nemeth or Marburg could nonetheless “read” such encodings, thanks to UMA’s ability to produce equivalent print or aural output.

The handling of two-dimensional objects, such as matrices encoded using Nemeth, requires user intervention. For instance, spatial arithmetic/algebra must be enclosed by the user with @@—@@ symbols.

The authors believe it is quite reasonable to require users to enclose different parts of the document within special symbols, because the goal of the UMA system is not to convert legacy mathematical documents; rather, it is to enable students and scholars of mathematics to communicate with their sighted counterparts.

The UMA system is very much under continuous development, by multiple institutions. Techniques are being investigated to incorporate its various subsystems with the industry standard VoiceXML (an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based notation for marking up aural documents) to provide interactive navigation.