[BlindMath] Accessibility of Latex to PDF

[Paulius Lėveris]

Hello,
Personally, as I'm a 2nd year student of Computer Science, I'm quite
familiar with LaTeX. From almost one and a half year of experience
working with LaTeX files, I think it is possible to be able to read
math content in LaTeX.
After some time spent looking how these files are made and structured,
personally I found that reading, analysing and even writing math with
LaTeX system is either the best solution for completely blind person.
Why I say this? Because from LaTeX file you can read a formula symbol
by symbol, and if you are a bit familiar with this system, it does not
take long time to understand even very long formulars.
Yes, some of you may say that doing it in MS Word environment in MS
Equasion is more comfortable... Well, I think LaTeX is my 1st choice
now after trying out lots of things that somehow (more or less) works
with math content and screen readers.
Aditionally, in my opinion, LaTeX is a good (if not best!) solution
for not only reading, but also for writing math content. Yes, it takes
really long time (even for beginner), but it's possible. After writing
your tasks given by your professor, you can just put your LaTeX source
to be compiled to PDF file that is a standard way to give to your
professor. This way your work should look very clear to your
professor...
Hmm... Sorry if I was too advanced here (I don't know if this is
helpful to you, but I say these things from my personal experience).
If we'd talk about how LaTeX source could be compiled for reading,
yes, sometimes converting LaTeX to Word may ssound good in order to
avoid reading LaTeX tags while reading math content, but I'm not so
sure how complex formulars panda can understand from LaTeX, well, it's
not a bad point I guess. For compiling LaTeX to PDF as a ready paper
(to send to your professor for example), I prefer using MikTeX
application, where is automatically builtin pdflatex compiler. You can
easely call it from command line, something like this:
<pdflatex my_work.tex>
And if there are no source errors, it should give you <my_work.pdf> in
the same directory.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, MikTeX is able to make html documents from
LaTeX source, that would also not be very bad solution for screen
reader users I'd say.
Again, I'm sorry if this sounds too complex..
Besst regards,
Paulius