Why must the PDF encapsulate all requirements? My understanding of accessibility requirements it that you must have a version that is amenable to automatic speech, not that all versions must be.
The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#12I 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 had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore
Am I correct in assuming that you are not working in academia/on research? In that case, I would argue that from your point of view latex was never needed. On the other hand, if you are working on math/cs/physics research latex is indispensable...
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#13Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago. Revisit this comment in 5 years.
It wasn’t because mathematicians were reluctant to change that math in HTML didn't take off. Rather, it was because browser developers were loathe to implement and maintain the enormous and complex pile of code that is MathML, and they said "Why should we, if you mathematicians already have LaTeX?" [0]
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#14I 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…
Not even considering the math formatting, Html is still lacking good footnotes, bibliographies, glossary generation, index generation, and table of context generation. Browsers also render things atrociously compared to a latex pdf.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#15>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…
It does seem that the OP constructs a bit of a strawman by claiming TeX's source code is too complicated for an average computer science graduate. I doubt even the top 5% of computer graduates could more readily understand the source code of most common programs.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#16An 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.
It's more than that.
I read more than one or two IT papers which donated variable types by using a different font between A and A and that difference was essential for reasonable understanding the papers.
Then the notation is overloaded.
Brackets are not even necessary enclosing something or are not necessary well balanced.
"Bar" based brackets and bars used for non bracket purpose are not necessary differentiate by noon visual clues. Etc.
It's already often confusing for people which can read the formula so I'm not surprised that really annoying for people which can't normally read the formula.
A super simple example is that [a;b[ is that "German"/(EU?) still to write an range with inclusive start and exclusive end. In the US [a;b) is used instead. But let's be honest something like rangeIE(a, b) or similar (Latex range_{ie}) is much better for a screen reader I thing and that's a trivial example not one of the really bad ones.
I think all formula should be written in a way which represents semantics not visuals and then be compiler to a classical visual representation (maybe using some additional non-semantic style annotation block).
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#17I 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…
Well, LaTeX is great for mathematical symbols. I have not seen a typesetting in the web space that can compare itself to LaTeX. This is why scientists from the exact sciences use it.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#18Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago. Revisit this comment in 5 years.
It wasn’t because mathematicians were reluctant to change that math in HTML didn't take off. Rather, it was because browser developers were loathe to implement and maintain the enormous and complex pile of code that is MathML, and they said "Why should we, if you mathematicians already have LaTeX?" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support
Firefox has had MathML support for a long time. Complain to Apple and Google (and vote with your browsing activity, by using the browser that is less driven by commercial considerations).
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#19>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?
1 + 1 = 2
Aren't formulas easy to insert in plain text?
The problem with maths notation is that it was invented by sighted people for sighted people as a short hand for very complex ideas, which at the time weren't fully understood.
If you want to type equations use s-expressions, the clarity you get from saying what you mean is astonishing.
(define integral
(lambda (function)
;; Implementation of Risch algorithm left
;; as an exercise to the motivated reader.
))
(define definite-integral
(lambda (lower-bound upper-bound function)
(let ((anti-derivative (integral function)))
(- (anti-derivative upper-bound)
(anti-derivative lower-bound)))))
If you want the implicit mess (and incredible power) of higher maths, be prepared to deal with the the mess of typography. Which is why you need TeX, or worse.
Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)
#20If you want accessibility, it would be better to convert your content to XML and run the LaTeX through MathJax first, using accessibility extensions (https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/). Then use a third-party converter such as PrinceXML to generate the PDF from the XML.