[BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX

Thu Jul 30 01:51:10 UTC 2020

Hi Jason, Hi Jonathan,

I truly appreciate both your observations.  All these  days, I have
been using only LaTeX for my work.  I would like to learn more about
how to generate HTML through markdown.  Any pointers or tutorials
where to  start?  Thank you.

Best regards,

Ramana

On 7/30/20, White, Jason J via BlindMath <blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> I am responding in support of Jonathan's central point that PDF should not
> be assumed to be the desired output format nowadays. Not only, as he notes,
> do some journals publish HTML alongside PDF, but the growing use of modern
> digital publishing formats such as EPUB represents a shift away from
> fixed-layout, page-based formats, and toward Web-based delivery via HTML and
> CSS.
>
> The advantage of PDF is that it captures the exact typography and layout of
> printed pages, just as Postscript did. It can also be viewed on a wide
> variety of devices (screen displays as well as printers). However, Web-based
> formats are better if you need to optimize the layout for desktop as well as
> mobile reading without creating multiple representations of the document -
> all you need are different style rules for the different display types. I
> predict that there will be a continuing shift toward Web formats as the
> primary publication medium.
> For now, as noted, I simply create parallel HTML and PDF. For my work, I
> often need features that aren't readily available in Markdown, such as
> cross-references and greater control over presentation, so I find myself
> writing documents directly in LaTeX. However, I write some simpler documents
> in Markdown, including presentation slides - converted via Pandoc to HTML.
> Git repositories provide revision control, and makefiles automate the
> document generation.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Godfrey,
> Jonathan via BlindMath
> Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 6:44 PM
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Godfrey, Jonathan <A.J.Godfrey at massey.ac.nz>
> Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX
>
> Hello,
>
> Like Jason, I use HTML as my go-to format for maximising accessibility of
> the content, including the mathematical stuff.
>
> One of the critical points for making anything accessible is the amount of
> extra work required to do so. For many of the people making material blind
> people are expected to use, this is just too hard at present. There are
> notable exceptions though, including an increasing number of publishers that
> are making their journal articles available in HTML as well as the pdf.
> Publishers get a great return on their investment in terms of the massive
> number of pages they process.
>
> I used to use LaTeX for most documents; I wrote my doctoral thesis and many
> other long documents and several journal articles using LaTeX. The only
> documents I use LaTeX for today though are done this way because I'm still
> using content created ten years ago in one form or another. I am converting
> the more useful content from back then into more-friendly markdown to align
> with how I do my work today.
>
> There are a few things I loved about using LaTeX that aren't particularly
> easy in markdown, but they are the last 5% of a document. The effort
> required on the first 95% of content is considerably easier to create in
> markdown as compared to LaTeX.
>
> I can still create the pdf from my markdown source because that processing
> is done via conversion to a *.tex file first. I could of course just convert
> to word or html and print to pdf from there, but the reasons why people
> wanted pdf in the first place apply to HTML too, with one exception. Many
> pdf files were created so that people could not tamper with the content or
> the presentation. It is possible to tamper if the user has the right tools
> of course, but the basic consumer isn't going to do that. The same is true
> for HTML which is consumed via a browser and cannot be edited without use of
> a tool (sometimes part of the browser) to view and alter the HTML source.
> The consumer does have quite a bit of power to re-present the content in a
> form that suits them with font size and full screen viewing being the two
> things sighted people in my world like to be doing.
>
> So, Bert's question is important to keep tabs on, but we should also be
> asking why a format like the pdf (even if tagged) is actually what we want
> in the end. I accept that might be the case, but is that because we are
> asked to make a choice about which singular format the world wants to have;
> we might say tagged pdf, but the implication is that we cannot have multiple
> formats. The ability to produce multiple formats was a hard problem ten
> years ago; I suggest that it is much less so today.
>
> Jonathan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of White, Jason J
> via BlindMath
> Sent: Thursday, 30 July 2020 12:50 AM
> To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
> <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: White, Jason J <jjwhite at ets.org>; Bert Van Landeghem
> <b.vanlandeghem at sheffield.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX
>
> To the best of my knowledge, these packages are rather experimental at the
> moment and require explicit manual tagging of the content using LaTeX macros
> that generate the PDF structure tree. There's a mailing list, and packages
> are under development, but they aren't at the point of working on typical
> LaTeX documents without a lot of extra work on the author's part.
>
> What I normally do as a pragmatic solution is to generate an HTML version
> alongside the PDF, using packages such as lwarp or TeX4HT. I take the view
> that HTML of reasonable quality is more accessible, on more platforms and
> devices, than tagged PDF is. My testing indicates that only users of Adobe
> Reader under Windows would benefit from PDF tagging anyway at the moment,
> and that it's simply ignored by other PDF readers. So, unless you're writing
> for a publication that insists on receiving tagged PDF, I would recommend
> generating HTML as your accessible format. For example, you can write a
> makefile that keeps both the PDF and HTML versions up to date.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Bert Van
> Landeghem via BlindMath
> Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 6:24 AM
> To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
> Cc: Bert Van Landeghem <b.vanlandeghem at sheffield.ac.uk>
> Subject: [BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX
>
> Dear all,
>
>
>
> The content of a LateX document can be read with a braille display and
> allows screenreader users to access the mathematical content. However, the
> compiled output (such as PDFs) are generally not accessible if no special
> attention is given to the issue. We then first think about the formulae
> which cannot be read with a braille display, but these PDFs are also not
> tagged at least if you use the standard packages. I know that a lot has
> happened over the last years in this field, and that several packages are
> available to tag PDFs and to make formulae accessible in PDFs and other
> output formats. The only problem is that I do not find a comprehensive
> overview of the state-of-the-art. Could somebody point me to the most
> reliable and comprehensive packages that are available in this field to
> date?
>
>
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Bert
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