[BlindMath] Accessibility of Latex to PDF

[nspohn0 at gmail.com]

Hi Paulius, 

I appreciate the points you have brought up. I have been using Latex for
about a year and a half to write my math work. I have found myself sometimes
toggling tex from Math ML to latex in order to understand the equation being
read. The latex is easier to understand in some cases. Therefore, I am
getting to the point where I am asking myself the same questions you are
raising. I think the only reason that math ml is popular and accepted is
because there is the potential to delete one character in the latex which
could completely change the question you are looking at. Math ml tends to
make the math content less likely to be accidentely manipulated. Not sure if
that makes sense, but that is my thoughts. 

Nick 

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Paulius Leveris
via BlindMath
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2021 1:53 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Paulius Lėveris <paulius.leveris at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Accessibility of Latex to PDF

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

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