[Blindmath] questions about LaTeX and accessibility for blind people

[Trevor Saunders]

HI,

Personally I like latex a lot for writing documents.

so far as equations in pdf go, afaik nobody has a clear idea how to make
them accessible, so its hard for pdflatex to create accessible
equations.  However is there is a way you could consider providing a
patch to the maintainers of pdflatex.

I think I've seen the one word per line issue you decribe, however I've
also noticed that pdftotext run on a pdf made from latex suffers a
little from the ligatures, but doesn't have the one word per line thing,
I don't know what the issue there is.

personally I feel like providing source is generally useful, and for
know a pretty good way to get around the accessibility issues.

Trev

On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 04:47:19AM -0600, Joseph C. Lininger wrote:
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> Hi all,
> I originally posted some questions about LaTeX on the NABS and NFBCS
> mailing lists. Someone recommended I try asking my questions here. So,
> here's a copy of my original post to those lists.
> 
> Good evening folks,
> The subject says it all. I'm exploring the use of the LaTeX typesetting
> system. I can use it to generate math equations and the like, but if i
> do so it's not accessible once I generate the final product. That's fine
> as far as writing goes, since I have the source I know what it says.
> However, I'd rather not contribute to the problems we already face where
> blindness and access to this sort of information is concerned. So, can
> anyone provide me with information on formatting these types of
> documents so they're accessible? Can it even be done? Even making it so
> the LaTeX source appears for the blind where the equations would go for
> the sighted would be a good thing.
> 
> Also, I've noticed that when using pdflatex from the texlive-latex
> package under Linux, the resulting document appears to have one word per
> line when read by Window-Eyes and adobe Acrobat. I can tell you visually
> that it appears correctly on screen though. I see this as another
> potential access problem. Any clue how to fix that? Using latex2rtf and
> hevea for generating rtf and html result in documents that don't have
> this property and can be read just fine, save for the problems with
> equations which I've already discussed.
> 
> If I had to, I could always provide LaTeX source along side what ever
> other formats I offer for my own work. However, in the case of
> publishing and that it may not always be an option to do so. So I'm
> exploring my options. LaTeX is one that math and computer scientists
> seem to use heavily, so that's the obvious choice if I can make it work.
> - - --
> They say god has always been. Linux and I will now disprove that:
> $ ar m God
> ar: creating God
> There you have it. God was created by the ar program. Good news is, God
> really does exist!
> Joseph C. Lininger <jbahm at pcdesk.net>
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