Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines

> Switch the language on foreign terms and names so that screen readers can pronounce them in the right voice.

Screen reader user here. Don't actually do this, this is bad advice.

Just like a lecturer won't suddenly switch to a German accent when saying words like "schadenfreude" or names like "Friedrich Nietzsche", neither should a screen reader. Having your voice constantly change under you for no apparent reason is distracting more than anything else.

What you should do this for are longer pieces of text in a foreign language, like a multi-paragraph piece of text to analyze in a foreign language textbook.

Yea, I hate that. Words are pronounced differently in foreign languages. Do we say Moscow or Moskwa? Do we say ka-tana or ka-ta-na? If Freud is not spoken with the typical Gemran diphthong, then suddenly someone comes along and corrects you. I do speak German, I know how Freud is pronounced and I will pronounce it as it should be pronounced when speaking German, but when speaking English, it is Frood for me.

So, I am with you. We shouldn't learn the pronunciation of 200 different languages. If Kirchhoff's laws sound like Captain Kirk, who the fuck cares. Different languages pronounce stuff differently.

> I do speak German, I know how Freud is pronounced and I will pronounce it as it should be pronounced when speaking German, but when speaking English, it is Frood for me.

That... isn't the normal English pronunciation. The English pronunciation would rhyme with "joyed", if "joy" were a verb.

/'sɪg.mənd fɹɔɪd/

There are some other big names where the same vowel sequence isn't recognized: Euler (usually pronounced with /ɔɪ/) and von Neumann (not so much).

Euler suffers from beginning with the "eu", which makes it look more Greek.

> There are some other big names where the same vowel sequence isn't recognized: Euler (usually pronounced with /ɔɪ/) and von Neumann (not so much).

I always have trouble finding a reference for the sounds corresponding to IPA symbols, so I'm not sure what you're claiming for the pronunciation of either of those. But, at least among the mostly American mathematicians I know, the 'eu' in 'Euler' and 'von Neumann' are usually pronounced the same way we pronounce the same way we pronounce the 'eu' in 'Freud' (which I agree is essentially how I'd pronounce the 'oy' in 'joyed').