[Blindmath] Magnified or Screenreader-magnifier enabled LaTeX editors. Also Screenreaders/Magnifiers enabled for Mathematica.

[Michael Whapples]

As you have stated the use of ZoomText, I will constrain my answer to 
editors I know which work on Windows, why have to go through the process 
of learning a new OS, screenreader and editor when just changing the 
editor might work. obviously if the student is interested in using other 
computer environments then this may be another case which they may want 
to consider when trying Linux or a Mac (there are certainly accessible 
options for those platformss as well).

First to mention probably is TeXnic center. I have a memory that a 
couple of settings need changing to get best results, but I cannot 
remember what those settings are. As I remember it did seem to be quite 
a good option and seemed to work well with various screen readers. Also 
it is an editor specifically designed for writing LaTeX and I believe is 
quite powerful.

Second to mention is Eclipse and the texlipse plugin 
(http://texlipse.sf.net). Eclipse is a more general editing tool, 
probably best known for writing Java applications, but it supports many 
plugins to allow it to be used for other things, one being LaTeX with 
the texlipse plugin. Eclipse is quite accessible out of the box, but may 
be confusing due to it having other uses than just LaTeX editing and so 
having many options which one need not bother about. Once one gets used 
to it then its pretty good.

The third I will mention is edsharp 
(http://empowermentzone.com/EdSharp.htm). I don't know how well its been 
designed to work with magnification but certainly has good speech output 
support (it can do self voicing if no suitable screen reader is 
installed). I have not found it to be as powerful as other editors can 
be, but may be I never quite got it properly set up for editing the 
documents I was dealing with. Its probably still worth a look though.

I will briefly mention that some of the editors like emacs and vi/vim do 
have versions for windows, but I don't know how well these will work 
with ZoomText. I am only acknowledging their existence as they can be 
popular with some people (particularly those with unix backgrounds), but 
I am not going further as they do work in quite a different way to most 
Windows based applications and so can have a bit of a learning curve. 
Something for if other alternatives do not work or if one has an 
interest in these particular editors.

Michael Whapples
On 14/11/2012 15:41, Dr Rachel K. Holdforth wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I'm supporting a visually impaired student who needs to use LaTeX to 
> write reports for her postgraduate Mathematics degree, and who is also 
> likely to need to use Mathematica next year.  She has some useful 
> sight and currently uses ZoomText under Windows to access documents.  
> However she is finding LaTeX editors a bit tricky, is there a 
> particular LaTeX editor which users of this forum would recommend for 
> a visually impaired student?
>
> Also, she hopes to go onto do a PhD next year and will then need to 
> use Mathematica, do you know if Mathematica and ZoomText are 
> compatible, or is it better to use something like SuperNova?
>
> With thanks.
>
> Rachel Holdforth
>