[BlindMath] Resources For Composing Accessible Research Papers

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hello Bhavya,

The vast majority of research papers and other academic works are drafted in either MS Word or a form of LaTeX. I'll save my evangelism on the merits of markdown for another day.

Reading MS Word articles and improving their accessibility is well-documented elsewhere so I won't pretend to have any expertise worthy of sharing. I haven't opened a new Word document since 2015 (perhaps earlier) except to test a specific feature relating to access. I must consume content written by people who like to suffer MS products often of course, and they must get sick of me demanding the docx file instead of the pdf they chose to make just so that I can read the content.


Most authors drafting their work in LaTeX generate a pdf and this is what I will have to admit, irritates me to distraction. There is little stopping an author from generating HTML in addition to the pdf except their own ignorance. The proliferation of pdf over the last twenty-five years (before that we used post-script files not pdf) exists because the tools to create pdf are at the fingertips of the authors. The editor software they have gives them a button to click; generating HTML is as simple for any author using 20th century techniques and today's software. In the really old days, we used to process our documents using command line instructions. We would quite literally type `latex mywork.tex` and wait for it to do its stuff. That command became `pdflatex mywork.tex` but there has been another command `htlatex mywork.tex` in the standard miktex distributions for well over a decade. This last command generates quite tolerable HTML but some improvements can be made to split long works into multiple pages with navigation links etc.

Unfortunately though, generating HTML is not sufficient to provide access. Adding alt text tags for example requires effort from the author, use of an additional package to handle that effort and therefore is bound to drop down the priority list. 

I find the notion of adding alt tags via post-hoc manual labour to be abhorrent, but I do understand why this practice is necessary. In the end, this practice makes access the problem of someone else, not the author. There is a massive industry in adding the access into such documents, and the perpetrators of the inaccessibility are not the ones paying for the problems they create (albeit unwittingly).

An excellent resource worth sharing is the www.arxiv.org e-print archive with its complementary www.ar5iv.org repository of the same works in HTML. The team at arXiv have seriously taken notice of the needs of this community in recent times and one day soon, authors will have to proof their HTML versions in addition to the dreaded pdf.
Directing your interested academics to these efforts may well prove the most expedient way of getting the necessary messages across. The team has produced a report on its efforts that I found well worth a read, and not just because I was quoted therein 😊.


Hope this helps,
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Bhavya shah via BlindMath
Sent: Thursday, 12 January 2023 8:59 am
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <Blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Bhavya shah <bhavya.shah125 at gmail.com>
Subject: [BlindMath] Resources For Composing Accessible Research Papers

Dear all,

What resources can I share with researchers who may be interested in improving the accessibility of their publications? I can point out simple things like alt text for graphs and figures, but I wonder if there are more comprehensive yet highly practical guides (covering things like, say, PDF tagging) for researchers seeking to make their work accessible. This question isn't strictly about Math research, but I ask it here since visual representations of data are a decent component of what makes research papers across disciplines inaccessible.

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts or inputs!

Kind Regards,
Bhavya

--
Kind Regards,
Bhavya Shah
B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science | Stanford '24
LinkedIn: https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fbhavyashah125%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ca.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz%7C9630bc36df224834512508daf40e7bac%7C388728e1bbd0437898dcf8682e644300%7C1%7C0%7C638090640306445069%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2BRaqVSasFTc8oyakOW5x5iHErA%2FFH7R2g8OwY1e3Pg0%3D&reserved=0

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnfbnet.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Fblindmath_nfbnet.org&data=05%7C01%7Ca.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz%7C9630bc36df224834512508daf40e7bac%7C388728e1bbd0437898dcf8682e644300%7C1%7C0%7C638090640306445069%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=PU3ElS47%2Bi%2F9g5cYKV8wHZDWZtnKEwN32dXRW2Wzxp8%3D&reserved=0
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnfbnet.org%2Fmailman%2Foptions%2Fblindmath_nfbnet.org%2Fa.j.godfrey%2540massey.ac.nz&data=05%7C01%7Ca.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz%7C9630bc36df224834512508daf40e7bac%7C388728e1bbd0437898dcf8682e644300%7C1%7C0%7C638090640306445069%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=UF7jGVwMs4gfc5ZhZBzgBx2y48hr2Drs9f7mvkhGp%2Bs%3D&reserved=0
BlindMath Gems can be found at <https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blindscience.org%2Fblindmath-gems-home&data=05%7C01%7Ca.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz%7C9630bc36df224834512508daf40e7bac%7C388728e1bbd0437898dcf8682e644300%7C1%7C0%7C638090640306445069%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=nwb8DdPQXOPxQXvS%2BKwRK7VQraa0YjtFDd7HFhFrxk0%3D&reserved=0>