[BlindMath] Accessible Math TeX Hour: Thursday 13 May: 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

Accessible math is not yet a solved problem. Every day blind persons
encounter problems that could be avoided. Recent progress include MathJax,
lwarp, PreText and work led by Chris Hughes and Volker Sorge. And the LaTeX
team has started a multi-year project to make its PDF output more
accessible.

Tomorrow (Thursday) the TeX Hour will focus on relations between these and
similar projects. The LaTeX project depends on research into how to best
enable math accessibility in PDF. The previously mentioned work is a good
starting point for this research. And using HTML as the platform will allow
an agile and flexible approach that can feed into the PDF standard.

Here's a 2020 blog post from the AMS on automated production of Braille
math textbooks from structured sources that use LaTeX mathematics. It's a
success arising from cooperation between different projects.
https://blogs.ams.org/jmm2020/2020/01/16/152/

The TeX Hour is Thursday 13 May to 7:30pm UK time. The time now in the UK
is at https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+time. The zoom link for the
meeting is
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09

At this point I'm hoping only for preliminary discussions, largely
involving TeX Hour regulars. It's important, I think, for the people
wanting and working for accessible math to meet each other regularly. I
hope the TeX Hour can help with this. All are welcome.

Looking back, video of last week is at
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw1FZfIX1w7h6fajdTgUOyJ6GYh82b-XQ

Looking forward, next week (20 May) Yihui Xie has kindly agreed to tell us
about his TinyTeX, and to answer questions. This is a small (90Mb)
distribution of TeX, that gives R users all they need to typeset R markdown
documents. It's also available as an R package.
TinyTeX: https://yihui.org/tinytex/
R Markdown: https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/

Next week the TeX Hour will run from 6:30 to 8:00pm, and Yihui will arrive
at 8pm. You can also arrive then, if you wish.

Jonathan