[Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

[Andrew Stacey]

My second barrage of questions concerns the general issue of making
mathematical papers accessible.  I write my papers in LaTeX (naturally) and
have no intention of changing that.  I'm quite happy to publish it in
different forms, and I'm quite happy with hacking style files and messing
around with TeX primitives.  So what's my best strategy for making my
mathematics accessible?

Reading back in your archives, there seem to be two formats that would be
reasonable: tagged PDF and XHTML+MathML.  I've tried using TeX4ht to convert
to MathML a couple of times and it didn't seem too hard, though I can't say
that I thought that the output looked very pretty!  I asked this in my barrage
of n-lab questions, but let me ask it again: if I add a stylesheet to make it
look nice, does that affect the accessibility?

>From reading your archives, then getting pdfTeX to output tagged PDF is
a little way off as yet.  I'm quite happy doing a little pre-processing and
post-processing (so long as it can be automated) so is there any way that
I could modify the PDF to be tagged?  I'm afraid I know very little about what
tagged PDF is so can only speculate, but I'm thinking of something along the
lines of the DVI specials: redefine the mathematics environments to insert
specials which a later program converts to tags.  I'll wait to hear if that's
even feasible before speculating even further.

When writing papers, are there any tidbits of advice which would make the
resulting paper easier to follow?

I'd imagine that my webpages score low on accessibility.  For a start, the
layout is controlled by tables which, I dimly recall, are a Bad Thing.  Are
there any websites that explain how to design a website that's accessible?

Thanks,

Andrew Stacey