The accessibility layer for doing mathematics without sight has been built largely by blind researchers themselves, not by the proof-assistant, LaTeX, or notation toolmakers

Across the systems the capture reached, the software that lets a blind person read and manipulate mathematics was built by blind researchers or by mixed-ability teams including them — not by the makers of the underlying mathematical tools. T. V. Raman, blind since fourteen, built AsTeR and then generalized its audio-formatting idea into Emacspeak, a full "audio desktop" (in the Smithsonian's permanent collection), authored via Emacs Lisp "advice." StereoMath came from a co-design pair, one member a blind researcher with over 23 years of screen-reader experience. Neither Lean, Coq, Isabelle, nor LaTeX supplied the accessibility; the layer was added from outside, by the people who needed it.

This extends a pattern the vault already tracks in the pre-digital record: blind mathematicians repeatedly improvised their own systems rather than inheriting a supplied one — claim-blind-mathematicians-independently-reinvented-private-notation, with Pontryagin's mother-invented oral glosses and Saunderson's tactile board as cases. The braille-notation leg shows the same authorship: Nemeth built his math code privately, "studying after work." What is new in the sonification cases is only the medium — structured sound instead of touch, speech, or braille — not the authorship (see moc-blind-mathematicians-working-methods).

The observation is bounded: it is drawn from a handful of well-documented cases, and does not claim that no toolmaker has ever shipped accessibility. It claims that the load-bearing work, in the cases reached, sat with the users.