[BlindMath] I'm blind! I love math! I want to go higher than high school geometry.

[David W. Farmer]

We will set up a Zoom session for people who are interested in learning
about about what we are doing.  Here are some brief comments for now.

The placement of labels on diagrams is indeed difficult to automate.
David Austin is working on a lightweight markup language which can
be used to generate both the visual diagram to go in the PDF and also
the tactile diagram to be embossed.

The hope is to generate both types of diagrams automatically,
without human intervention.  I believe he is close to
having an approach for the diagrams which typically occur in a
precalculus or single variable calculus textbook.  (Avoiding
collisions between the content and the label is a specific design
point.)


Descriptions of diagrams are possibly even more complicated and I think
there is no hope of doing that automatically.  The issue is that the
exact same diagram (or photograph or other image) needs to be described
differently in different contexts.  The author had a reason for
including that diagram, and that diagram is meant to illustrate something
specific.  I am not optimistic about AI reading the author's mind.

As a simple example, consider the graph of a line on the Cartesian plane.
I might describe it as the line with x-intercept 5 and y-intercept 12.
If you are familiar with the subject, then I just told you everything
you need to know to imagine the graph.  And depending on context, that is
all that needs to be said.  A more wordy description from AI would waste
valuable time.  (For example, I might now ask: which quadrant does the
line not intersect?  Or "What point on the line is closest to the 
origin?")

But what if the graph occurs in an exercise for someone learning what
"y-intercept" means?  Then the description certainly should not explicitly
say what the y-intercept is!  It would take some skill from a knowledgeable
person to describe the graph in a way that conveyed the necessary
information without giving away the answer.

Regards,

David