The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
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The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
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Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#2An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors.
This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#3>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there?
Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf
I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate programs.
>My point being that if we wouldn’t rely on TeX itself and use ANT (or whatever alternative) which is written in the quite elegant OCaml, than hacking it would be at least possible for mere mortals. Although I have to admit, despite being in love with OCaml since my PhD days, it’s also a quite niche language. But imagine if the whole thing was written in Python, or at least C.
Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies.
>I wish someone would design a new space shuttle because while it's a neat project I only understand MKS units and it's too much effort to use a calculator for converting between them and Imperial units.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#4One pattern I like to use is to write my documents using markdown which can be compiled into pdf via latex with a template of my choosing. It is also capable of compiling to other formats which may be more accessible such as plain text, html and docx.
[edit to add link to pandoc]
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#5An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors. This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.
Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only.
If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#6>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there? Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate p…
> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies.
Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#7I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this:
https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf
Need a page break? Here you go:
https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after
Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I have seen some pretty wild stuff in CSS, so surely its possible:
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#8Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago.
Revisit this comment in 5 years.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#9I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I…
I get that things like proper kerning are probably doable with CSS.
LaTeX still does a better job out of the box, which goes a long way for my understanding of its typical use cases (resumes or long form reports).
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#10>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there? Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate p…
> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?
You don't.
Maybe to edit such a complex program that you're using to convert your equations to some other pretty format you should.