[BlindMath] A question from developers

[Steve Jacobson]

Doris,

I was not part of that discussion so there could be aspects with which I am
not familiar.  However, the approach of somehow masking backslashes seems
somewhat problematic.  I would be curious to better understand exactly where
the issue is appearing, and whether the developers of the software involved
have been contacted to be certain there are not ways to work around this.

A related concern is with making a decision based upon a straw pole of how
math is being displayed.  I say this because braille display of math from
electronic sources is a fairly recent addition to our toolkit.  With the
coming of two relatively inexpensive braille displays and the likelihood of
an affordable multiline display potentially could increase markedly the use
of braille displays when using math.  To have such potential progress
impeded because decisions are made that don't take braille into account
would be very unfortunate in my opinion.  Again, my comments are only based
on a limited knowledge of the reasons you are raising this question, though,
so I am certainly interested to understand how my comments may be invalid.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson
  
-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Boris Veytsman
via BlindMath
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2018 11:00 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Boris Veytsman <borisv at lk.net>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] A question from developers


BV> Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2018 08:33:30 -0700
BV> From: Boris Veytsman <borisv at lk.net>

BV> At the recent discussion following the TeX accessibility workshop at
BV> Rio a question was raised: do people use Braille devices for
BV> math-heavy texts, or screen readers only?  Can we have an informal
BV> straw poll here?



Perhaps I should add why did we discuss this.

Suppose we add LaTeX code to the math to be sent to screen reader.
The code has backslashes in it, which may be incorrectly interpeted by
the software.  To prevent this, we can translate each backslash to the
word `backslash'.  However, this means 9 symbols instead of one:  not
a problem for a screen reader, but perhaps slowing down a Braille
device.

-- 
Good luck

-Boris

I'd rather push my Harley than ride a rice burner.

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