[Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

Thu Nov 12 19:39:16 UTC 2009

Andrew (and all).

What would you recommend to be an easy (or reasonably easy) beginner's guide
to Tex and LaTeX, LaTeX is what I am thinking specifically.
I amresonsible for choosing technology and teaching to get blind and VI high
school students and, hopefully, university students in my native country of
Iceland into math/science. Thre has been a close to 100% drop out or
switching rate away from science (of course we have very few students,
between may be 1 and 3 per year, so the population sample is tiny). Part of
this problem,I am convinced, is math text books. We sortof made our own
standard although we have never formally dfined it and the text and all
examples have to be more or less typed by hand and thus students tend to get
the material late ish with lotsof pressure to perform. Also there has been
no way for them to turn in clear and legible math home works, because they
use a similar system or invent their own rather than using an editr or
technology to create math documents they can turn in and discuss.
I managed my way through a rather math intensive fiancé program at
university this way until last year I finally adapted LaTeX for some of mmy
homework and it really made a huge difference.
Now it is up to me to figure out how to improve the situation.
As I see it there are three ways. To use "the good old" systems, may be
Nemith, lambds or GCSE (I believe tyat is what the UK math system is
called), to use pure LaTeX both for encoding books and teaching it to
students so they can compile or translate their homework, to w pdf file, .ps
file or other or to go with math ml and use math player and other
technologies and spoken math or combine it with Braille. There are solutions
such as DotsPlus I find very interesting too and I am not sure where it
falls into my mix of methods.
What seems to be to be a clear starting point though is that the students
need to be able to write professional documents and it seems like
understanding and learning LaTeX is essential to that, even if they use,
say, CahttyInfty (which I am about to try myself) it is still important to
understand what it generates. And for our brailling staff, ideally, they
need to try to push publishers to give us material in math ml or LaTeX, from
there we can, at least in part, use software to translate the material into
Nemith, math ml or leave it in LaTeX format for the student to read.
We have a unique situation in that all the Icelandickids have Braille
displays and Braille is a very common first approach to problems, since we
did not have Icelandic tts speech engine for the longest time and the one we
have developed now is not really good, also because any talking software we
get, such as MathPlayer, we'd have to translate and that is very expensive
(Icelanders speak excellent English so after, say, 2nd year of high school I
am sure all users would have no probem using the English version, still it
is official policy to provide as much material in Icelandic as possible).
>From this list I gather there is no obvious, single solution to this problem
and my priorities, unless someone points me in a different direction, would
be to play with DotsPlus and find material I can use to teach students and
Braille production staff LaTeX. I'd be happy with other suggestions but it
seems like a reasonable start. For that I would very much like a book or web
page with easy introduction or manual for LaTeX, something akin to
programming books "for dummies" or teach yourself so and so in 24 hours, big
fan of those as a programmer.
Any pointers/thoughts/ideas would be welcome. We are in the unique position
to reinvent the system and I want to do things right, or as close to right
as possible.
Thanks
-Birkir

-----Original Message-----
From: blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Andrew Stacey
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 4:46 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Accessible LaTeX

Thanks for all the interesting replies!

Some of the comments, and the interview that was linked to by someone, made
me
wonder why I'm so obsessive about (La)TeX and why I don't want to give it
up.
I was particularly taken by that sentence in the interview about wanting to
enter a source that validates, and how he thinks that backslashes and braces
are just so wrong.  To me, that says that the person speaking is someone who
supports TeX-users rather than someone who writes copious documents in it.

For me, TeX is just so right!  And on so many different levels.  I've not
tried to think this through before so I may misstate my thoughts, but here's
a first go at why I like it so much.

Firstly, it is discrete.  When writing a document in (la)tex, then I hardly
notice that I'm writing anything other than the contents of the document
itself.  I don't need to worry about formatting, what it looks like, or
anything like that.  When I do need something more complicated, say
mathematics, then TeX discretely offers a nice simple way to do it.

Secondly, (as someone said in one of the replies) it is a programming
language.  When I need the power of TeX then it's there.  I can define
macros
to save my poor fingers: typing \R instead of \mathbb{R} is fantastic!  And
I can make it easy to change global settings, say by changing all
composition
of functions from right-to-left to left-to-right, and just know that
everything's going to be alright.  I can do really complicated stuff when
I need to.

Thirdly, as a mathematician then TeX is the epitome of design.  The process
"read, expand, read, expand" is exactly how we parse mathematics!  Keep
expanding the definitions in a proof until you reach something that you
understand.  So it's just beautiful that something so close to what I do
professionally is also at the heart of how I present the results.

So I'm not going to give up TeX without a huge fight.  No one's going to get
me to have input that can be "validated".  Yuk!  What a horrible phrase!
I want my mathematics to be validated, sure, but I'd like the freedom to
really mess up the paper in the meantime.

However, lest the mathml brigade lose heart, just because I'm going to go on
writing TeX for as long as I've a finger left to hit the keyboard with,
doesn't mean that I expect anyone other than me and TeX to read that.  Those
who say that they like LaTeX on the web have probably never tried reading
the
source of one of my papers!  What I expect they mean is some sort of
simplified LaTeX with no funny macros and the like.

As far as reading what I write is concerned, then I'm convinced by the
MathML
argument.  So for me, an ideal situation would be to have a decent, robust,
(La)TeX to MathML converter.  To my mind, MathML is an output language, like
PDF, PS, or DVI.  So I'm quite happy to compile my LaTeX documents into
MathML
to make them more accessible.  If only there were a converter that could
cope
with my macros ...

Andrew

PS As an indication of my level of TeX addiction, I even wrote the
invitations
to my daughter's birthday party using TeX.

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