[Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

[Michael Whapples]

I feel that ideally you should be providing a way for people to read 
your documents naturally. I think mathml gives this opportunity. However 
there are some who feel at the moment LaTeX is what they want to read, 
so make that available. In general if you offer a choice then people are 
free to choose what they want.

As an extra note, I do feel mathml is the way of the future, more mathml 
out there more reason we need tools to give good access to mathml and 
hopefully then someone will come forward with something to fill the gap.

In some ways with your LaTeX source using macros, well it may affect the 
tools for converting to mathml, may be check what mathplayer makes of 
the equations to see what will come out for a screen reader user (you 
should be able to use the self voice feature of mathplayer, right click 
the equation). If you get it working with mathplayer then I say possibly 
don't worry about how complicated the LaTeX would look to an outsider, 
its their choice to read it in that form, you aren't expecting sighted 
readers to use it so why expect visually impaired users will. May be I 
am being slightly unfair in saying the following, sometimes its hard to 
learn from someone saying something so we have to let them experience 
it, I feel LaTeX can be hard to read at times (particularly when it 
isn't your own document) but there seem to be some who feel there isn't 
a problem (may be they have always been given nice clean LaTeX, I know 
that when I was at university I was handed slightly modified LaTeX in 
most cases but then one day handed something which may compare or may be 
worse than yours is on the use of macros and I stood no chance, it 
changed my mind about LaTeX as a global, single solution). If those who 
feel LaTeX is a good solution for reading still feel that way after 
reading complicated LaTeX (possibly yours), then you've not caused them 
an issue.

Realising that may have gone a bit biased, going to leave it now.

Michael Whapples
On 06/11/09 12:21, Andrew Stacey 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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