[BlindMath] Resources For Composing Accessible Research Papers

Tue Jan 17 22:21:23 UTC 2023

Hello,
1. PDFs are slow to open and often crash the viewer.
2. PDFs can't show math.
3. It's so difficult to make a correctly tagged PDF, it almost never
happens in the real world, even from governments who have section 508.
4. There isn't really a good pdf viewer that allows you to accessibly take
notes.
5. If you want to show interactive application demos in JavaScript, PDF
doesn't allow that.
6. If you want to show videos, PDF doesn't allow that.
7. If you want to manually edit the internal code, PDF is really not meant
for that.
8. For low vision users, PDFs don't allow for complex sizing and color
manipulations.

PDFs are at the bottom of my document preference list. Epub and HTML are so
much better because they do everything above, as well as everything PDFs
can do.
Thanks,

Brandon Keith Biggs <http://brandonkeithbiggs.com/>

On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 11:25 AM Bhavya shah via BlindMath <
blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Dear Jonathan,
>
> Thanks for your detailed inputs! One question I have always had is
> about the accessibility of the PDF format. If made correctly, are
> accessible, well-tagged PDFs as good as accessible HTML? If not, what
> are the structural features inherent to PDF files that make them less
> preferable than alternatives like Word or HTML?
>
> Thanks.
>
> On 1/11/23, Jonathan Godfrey via BlindMath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> > 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
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>
>
> --
> Kind Regards,
> Bhavya Shah
> B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science | Stanford '24
> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhavyashah125/
>
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