[Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

[P. R. Stanley]

Andrew
you do not need to change anything. LaTeX source is just fine.
I should expend my efforts on educating the readers on the benefits 
of LaTeX rather than trying to make it less complicated with the 
so-called solutions that are advertised on these lists.
Blind people, most blind people, are smart enough to cope with a bit 
of complexity. ( smile)
What was the famous quote from that economist, give a man a fish or 
teach him to fish? Teach a blind person to read and use LaTeX and 
you've set him up with a powerful tool for years to come.
Paul



>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
>
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