[BlindMath] Accessible PDFs from LaTeX

Thu Jul 30 07:57:51 UTC 2020

Thanks all for your responses.

Does anybody have hands-on experiences with the axessibility package?

https://ctan.math.illinois.edu/macros/latex/contrib/axessibility/axessibility.pdf

Best wishes,

Bert

*From:* Brandon Keith Biggs <brandonkeithbiggs at gmail.com>
*Sent:* 29 July 2020 16:39
*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

Hello,

Pandoc with the Prince package produces very nice PDFs from Markdown, I'm
not sure about from LaTeX, but I'm sure they will look nice from LaTeX as
well:

https://www.princexml.com/

Thanks,

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

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:59 AM White, Jason J via BlindMath <
blindmath at nfbnet.org> wrote:

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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