[HappMacDonald]

> If we assert that some topic can’t be discussed with plain prose, then the only logical conclusion is that you can’t discuss the topic at all.

Please bear in mind that mathematical notation is a language, and that mathematical formulas are perfectly valid plain prose in that language.

I imagine that some screen readers will fail gracelessly when faced with Chinese script or Hindu as well. Especially if they're not unicode compliant.

But once you hit that threshold you are simply in a battle of dueling accessibility concerns. Not everyone is sighted, but neither does everyone rely on English as a primary language.

Nor should they as the English language was not designed to convey all concepts accurately. It excels mostly in conveying concepts germane to anglophone cultures. And three guesses what concepts are not popularly relevant to your standard anglophone? That's right.. calculus and theoretical physics.

That's not to bash on English as a language. It really is a flexible beast with a far reaching vocabulary. But there literally exists no language that is ideal for encapsulating every single idea under the sun. One must have a way to support many of the most diverse ones at the same time. And modern mathematical notation belongs on that short list along with English.

[psychoslave]

>Please bear in mind that mathematical notation is a language, and that mathematical formulas are perfectly valid plain prose in that language.

In that sense its more a DSL than a generalist language. And anything you can express in a DSL, you can also express it with a more generalist language. Most likely the DSL will provide a far more compact way to communicate what it allows to express, but that compactness doesn’t come for free: it takes time to compress and decompress and you have to also communicate the DSL specification in some preexisting medium.

On my side, I suppose "discuss" to mean we can talk on the topic face to face with spontaneous expressions means like oral expression and listening comprehension, or sign language. I don’t mean that there is no other mean to discuss, but when we can’t transpose the topic in such a medium, we are probably beyond the realm of discussion. For example when we make love, there is more happening than what can either hope to realize through mere talk.

Once again, I’m not again DSLs and so on. I just mean that there are not the proper tools for maximizing accessibility.