[Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

[Neil Soiffer]

TeX is a programming language, and therein lies its power and its peril.
The principle of equal access means that if you don't expect your sighted
readers to understand the macros, then you should not expect visually
impaired readers to understand them in order to read your paper.

If tex4ht didn't produce good results, there are some other translators.
You might try LaTeXML (http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/) and see if you get
better results.  If you use a custom .sty file, you'll probably have trouble
with it unless you write some extra stuff to handle the defs in the .sty
file.

I do recommend that you make the source available as there are people who
find reading TeX works best for them for math.  But there are also plenty of
people who, for whatever reason, would prefer to hear a more natural
notation or prefer braille... just as many sighted readers would prefer to
read the output of TeX and not read the source.  So I hope you find a way to
produce MathML from your TeX source.

As to your question about producing tagged PDF:  it is extremely difficult
to do.  I do not believe it is a viable option for you -- the only solution
is to modify pdftex.  If you are interested in helping out with that
project, I'll put you in contact with the lead developer on that -- he wants
more people involved so the project moves along faster.

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, WebEQ, Equation
Editor ~


On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 4:21 AM, Andrew Stacey <andrew.stacey at math.ntnu.no>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 11:21:31AM +0000, P. R. Stanley wrote:
> > 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)
>
> Assuming that this is true (yours is the first reply, so I don't wish to
> presume on what the others may say), may I refine my question.  The
> conclusion
> of this is that I should make the source available (well, it is already as
> it
> is on the arXiv, but I should also make it available from my homepage).
> Here's an extract from one of my papers:
>
>  We denote \docat by \(\docat\) and \socat by \(\ocat\).
>  We refer to the functor \(\docat \to \dcat\) which assigns to an \doobj
> the
> underlying \dobj as the \emph{forgetful functor}.  We write the underlying
> \dobj of an \doobj[\doobj] as \(\abs{\doobj}\).
>
> How accessible is that?
>
> I'm afraid that I have a rather heavy reliance on macros.
>
> As a brief explanation, these particular macros are a sort of object
> oriented
> TeX.  The last three characters, 'cat' and 'obj' in the above, indicate the
> property that I'm referencing and the preceding characters, 'do', 'so',
> 'o',
> and 'd' in the above, indicate the specific instance.  Thus 'dcat' is
> a particular category, 'scat' is another (in this case the category of
> sets),
> 'dobj' is an object in the category 'dcat', and so forth.  As an author, it
> was an incredibly useful bit of programming and I've been using it in
> subsequent papers.  I realise that this may make me a bit of a special
> case,
> but then I'm asking for advice for what I can do as well as general
> principles.
>
> Andrew
>
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