[Blindmath] Questions about complex formulas, tagging PDFs, and users' expectations

[Neil Soiffer]

I've got nothing new to add other than support what John Gardner and Michael
Whapples have said, and I concur with their order of preference:
XHTML+MathML (which will work with HTML5 eventually) or (less good) images
with latex as alt tex.

I have software that can read PDF that is tagged with MathML, but there is
no software to tag PDF with MathML yet, and there are no screen readers that
would call my software.  In the most rosy of all worlds, it would be another
year before work on pdftex comes to fruition and pdftex automatically tags
PDF with MathML.  But realistically, the person who is doing that work
thinks it will be several more years before it happens -- it is pretty
complex.

Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
www.dessci.com
~ Makers of MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy, WebEQ, Equation
Editor ~