[BlindMath] TeX Hour tonight: The context for TeX // next week: Case study on accessibility of CLI

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

NOTE: Description of next week's TeX Hour on accessibility of Command Line
Interfaces at end of this message.

Reminder: TeX Hour tonight, 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09

The topic will be Basics: The social, economic and technical context for
TeX: Past, present and future.

The past will start the release on 1 May 1840 of the Penny Black, the
world's first postage stamp. It was part of changes as revolutionary then
as email was in the 1970s. The bank note printer Perkins Bacon produced the
Penny Black, and they were sold at the Post Office. Today many of us pay
electronically for a barcode label which we print ourselves.

In modern language, each Penny Black was a fungible token, and the barcode
label a non-fungible token.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token

The future will conclude with two definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography*: *Typography is the art and
technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and
appealing when displayed.

Me, last week: Modern Typography for the Blind is the art and technique of
audible, tactile and interaction conventions that make written language
legible, readable and appealing when rendered for a blind person.

Reminder: TeX Hour tonight, 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09

Looking forward, next week the TeX Hour will be a case study of a paper on
"Accessibility of Command Line Interfaces" by Sampath, Merrick and Macvean
(all at Google, Seattle).

HTML & PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445544
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b_dlMBUAw8

In part we will follow McLuhan, that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message.

Of particular interest to LaTeX users is that some of the CLI examples are
inaccessible in PDF, and in HTML rendered as an image together with a
no-display paragraph giving a figure description.

Of interest to all is that screen shots seem to be the lingua franca
(bridge language) for sharing CLI interactions on a web page.

wishing you Happy TeXing

Jonathan