[BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX

Wed Jul 29 23:20:23 UTC 2020

I agree with all that is said, but since someone asked about current
developments, there is an ISO PDF/UA committee devoted to defining what
accessible PDF looks like. Sadly 14289-1 (that's ISO speak for the spec it
produced) did not include math. However, the main PDF document (32000-2)
does mention including MathML in tagged PDF and the current plans for
14289-2 (i.e., PDF/UA V2) specifies that, but that document is just at the
beginning of the draft stage and will likely be 1-2 years away. It's a
shame it has taken that long because NVDA+MathPlayer long ago (maybe
pushing a decade now) supports PDF tagged with MathML. No one generates it
though :-(

In terms of generating accessible PDF, Ross Moore has been working on this
for a long time. He has a website
<http://web.science.mq.edu.au/~ross/TaggedPDF/> with some details and links
to his work. He has an experimental LaTeX package for tagging PDF
<https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf?lang=en>; I have not tried it. I don't think
it handles math yet, but as I said, I haven't tried it.

    Neil

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 3:45 PM Godfrey, Jonathan via BlindMath <
blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Like Jason, I use HTML as my go-to format for maximising accessibility of
> the content, including the mathematical stuff.
>
> One of the critical points for making anything accessible is the amount of
> extra work required to do so. For many of the people making material blind
> people are expected to use, this is just too hard at present. There are
> notable exceptions though, including an increasing number of publishers
> that are making their journal articles available in HTML as well as the
> pdf. Publishers get a great return on their investment in terms of the
> massive number of pages they process.
>
> I used to use LaTeX for most documents; I wrote my doctoral thesis and
> many other long documents and several journal articles using LaTeX. The
> only documents I use LaTeX for today though are done this way because I'm
> still using content created ten years ago in one form or another. I am
> converting the more useful content from back then into more-friendly
> markdown to align with how I do my work today.
>
> There are a few things I loved about using LaTeX that aren't particularly
> easy in markdown, but they are the last 5% of a document. The effort
> required on the first 95% of content is considerably easier to create in
> markdown as compared to LaTeX.
>
> I can still create the pdf from my markdown source because that processing
> is done via conversion to a *.tex file first. I could of course just
> convert to word or html and print to pdf from there, but the reasons why
> people wanted pdf in the first place apply to HTML too, with one exception.
> Many pdf files were created so that people could not tamper with the
> content or the presentation. It is possible to tamper if the user has the
> right tools of course, but the basic consumer isn't going to do that. The
> same is true for HTML which is consumed via a browser and cannot be edited
> without use of a tool (sometimes part of the browser) to view and alter the
> HTML source. The consumer does have quite a bit of power to re-present the
> content in a form that suits them with font size and full screen viewing
> being the two things sighted people in my world like to be doing.
>
> So, Bert's question is important to keep tabs on, but we should also be
> asking why a format like the pdf (even if tagged) is actually what we want
> in the end. I accept that might be the case, but is that because we are
> asked to make a choice about which singular format the world wants to have;
> we might say tagged pdf, but the implication is that we cannot have
> multiple formats. The ability to produce multiple formats was a hard
> problem ten years ago; I suggest that it is much less so today.
>
> Jonathan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of White, Jason
> J via BlindMath
> Sent: Thursday, 30 July 2020 12:50 AM
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <
> blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: White, Jason J <jjwhite at ets.org>; Bert Van Landeghem <
> b.vanlandeghem at sheffield.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX
>
> To the best of my knowledge, these packages are rather experimental at the
> moment and require explicit manual tagging of the content using LaTeX
> macros that generate the PDF structure tree. There's a mailing list, and
> packages are under development, but they aren't at the point of working on
> typical LaTeX documents without a lot of extra work on the author's part.
>
> What I normally do as a pragmatic solution is to generate an HTML version
> alongside the PDF, using packages such as lwarp or TeX4HT. I take the view
> that HTML of reasonable quality is more accessible, on more platforms and
> devices, than tagged PDF is. My testing indicates that only users of Adobe
> Reader under Windows would benefit from PDF tagging anyway at the moment,
> and that it's simply ignored by other PDF readers. So, unless you're
> writing for a publication that insists on receiving tagged PDF, I would
> recommend generating HTML as your accessible format. For example, you can
> write a makefile that keeps both the PDF and HTML versions up to date.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Bert Van
> Landeghem via BlindMath
> Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 6:24 AM
> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
> Cc: Bert Van Landeghem <b.vanlandeghem at sheffield.ac.uk>
> Subject: [BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX
>
> Dear all,
>
>
>
> The content of a LateX document can be read with a braille display and
> allows screenreader users to access the mathematical content. However, the
> compiled output (such as PDFs) are generally not accessible if no special
> attention is given to the issue. We then first think about the formulae
> which cannot be read with a braille display, but these PDFs are also not
> tagged at least if you use the standard packages. I know that a lot has
> happened over the last years in this field, and that several packages are
> available to tag PDFs and to make formulae accessible in PDFs and other
> output formats. The only problem is that I do not find a comprehensive
> overview of the state-of-the-art. Could somebody point me to the most
> reliable and comprehensive packages that are available in this field to
> date?
>
>
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Bert
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