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While LaTeX makes a good language for writing maths, I always feel I want to add it is an awful system for accessibility. The PDFs / outputs created by other sy
by CJefferson 7y ago
While LaTeX makes a good language for writing maths, I always feel I want to add it is an awful system for accessibility. The PDFs / outputs created by other systems like Microsoft Word are much more accessible.
For blind users, LaTeX Tables come out as an unreadable mess. The large-scale use of Latex to generate PDFs makes academia extremely unfriendly to anyone who needs accessible documents.
- nerdponx 7y agoCouldn't that be fixed though? Would be a shame to have to give up on the Tex language because pdftex is out of date.
- goerz 7y agoI suppose new development would happen as part of luatex. It would be really nice if latex could compile to more accessible documents!
- ncmncm 7y agoWe need a program to extract an accessible representation from PDFs produced by LaTeX.
- dubya 7y agoOn the Mac, the Equation Service or LaTeXit (?) included the source in the PDF so that it remained editable. Maybe the source would be easier to parse, especially if no macros were used.
- nicodjimenez 7y agoCheck out Mathpix snipping tool https://mathpix.com https://mathpix.com (disclaimer: I’m a founder)
- mcchew 7y agoI work in disability services and I can add a (perhaps slightly less biased) take that MathPix really is the real deal!
- extra88 7y agoHow does MathPix compare to EquatIO?
- nicodjimenez 7y agoEquatIO is a MathpixOCR customer.
- copperx 7y agoCool! But how do you make money off of it? I understand MathPix is a company.
- nicodjimenez 7y agoSnip is currently free. We charge companies for MathpixOCR API. We will probably charge heavy users of Snip in the future, so we can keep Snip free for light and medium usage.
- snazz 7y agoHow hard would it be to do some kind of OCR (maybe combined with machine learning) to “scan” anything that looks like a table into a more accessible format? It seems like there’s a lot of room for ML to improve various aspects of screen readers and other assistive technology.
- dan-robertson 7y agoI claim such a solution would be morally wrong (I am not going to comment on whether such a solution would be good in practice or not) because latex largely throws away the data it has on the table structure and this solution tries to piece it together again. I claim a morally better solution is to have latex not throw away the information it had, but I concede it’s often harder to modify something big and old and complex than to produce something new which is supposed to always work.
- mwcampbell 7y agoReconstructing content and formatting from a PDF through OCR, machine learning, etc. may not be the best possible solution. But it would still make more information accessible to more people. So I must vehemently disagree that it would be morally wrong.
- pishpash 7y agoMorally wrong? What the actual f. The proposed is a perfectly reasonable and decoupled solution that would solve the problem for troves of existing, unstructured paper documents, too. In fact, it likely already exists.
- GavinMcG 7y agoCan you elaborate on the moral principles you're employing here?
- sjy 7y agoI assumed your parent was using 'morally' as it is sometimes used in mathematics: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1434043/sources-of-morality-of-results-in-mathematics https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1434043/sources-of-...
- dls2016 7y agoAs a developer I know this is bad, but I’m not familiar with accessibility tools. Surely this is a result of the compilation of the TeX source, right? In theory it seems like a text-based format would be more amenable to processing by screen readers and the like. What can authors do to make their documents more accessible? Distribute the source? Stick to some formatting guidelines?
- wodenokoto 7y agoI haven’t seen it lately, but there was a time where it was common for latex systems to not use space characters and instead add extra spacing after the last character in every word, because apparently that looked better ...
- CJefferson 7y agoThe best thing authors can do is distribute their latex. In fact, concretely, upload your paper to arxiv which will demand the latex source of your paper.
- dls2016 7y agoIn my academic mathematician life the path was clear: write a paper, place on the arXiv then submit. However I have sets of notes I'd like to put out there (some day), but are in much too fluid of a condition to commit to the arXiv.
- pmoriarty 7y agoEditing LaTeX documents is actually far more accessible, since they're all plain text. Every formatting instruction in a LaTex document is just text, while Word and PDF documents have non-text markup like bold, underline, italic, etc, which is WYSIWYG (with the emphasis being on "see" -- you must be able to see to be aware of the markup).
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoLast time i edited some latex document, i ended up in dependancy hell with diffrent packages excluding one another or distorting the results of elements used by other packages. Has that become better?
- comicjk 7y agoI have run into that problem, but only when merging Latex documents with different packages. If you find something that's really difficult and requires a lot of packages, ask why other users haven't made it easy already - maybe it's not a good design.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoI would have finnished that document Sir, but then i had to refactor the documents codebase to improve the architecture. Yes, i know i turned a documentation job into a software project, which promptly consumed three times the time budget - yes i will show myself out.
- myhf 7y agoYes, now most people use online services that run on a standard platform with the dependencies already sorted out.
- gus_massa 7y agoFor example if you use \usepackage[spanish]{babel} to change the hyphenation tables, it also change a lot of things. For example it makes < and > active characters, so they can be used as a special kind of quotes. This breaks other packages like xypic that expect that < and > are normal characters to recognize the arrows.
- impendia 7y agoHere are some thoughts on this topic, together with software designed to help make LaTeX more accessible, by a blind mathematician. http://latex-access.sourceforge.net/ http://latex-access.sourceforge.net/ The software is designed to work with the LaTeX source, rather than with the ensuing PDFs. From what I can tell, it's not very complete -- but it certainly suggests to me that LaTeX provides a platform which can be built upon.
- CJefferson 7y agoGiven the academic world we are in, there are people making heroic efforts to make latex more accessible, and I don't want to discount that work. However, none of these systems work well, and I think it'd an unsolvable problem due to the fundamental foundation of TeX, which is actually a text rewriting system, so when using packages there never is a nice semantic description of the page. The only thing to do is to rewrite every package in another language, which describes semantically how to latex should be interpreted.
- impendia 7y agoSince you seem knowledgeable about the topic, could I ask -- What would an ideal solution look like? Say I have a complicated equation. How could I present it (in any format) so that a blind person could read it, and understand it as easily as possible?
- CJefferson 7y agoCurrently, the best practical option is do it in latex, but ensure the raw latex file is available as well as a pdf.
- impendia 7y agoMy question is more hypothetical than practical: what would an ideal solution look like? I literally have no idea.
- AnaniasAnanas 7y agoYet another reason to upload your (La)TeX source as well rather than only the pdf output.
- mr_toad 7y agoI hate the banal lack of imagination that goes into producing documents that look the same as dead tree documents have looked for the last 100 years, even though few people actually print them out any more. This isn’t the 1980’s. We have better technology. Given source code there’s no reason the document couldn’t be made available in a variety of formats, including more accessible formats than PDF. But we stick to avatistic document representations because that’s what everyone has always done.
- forrestthewoods 7y agoI utterly despise the layout of academic papers. They’re garbage. Two column layouts have no place in the digital age. Academic papers should have rich media. High resolution images and video. Bah hum bug!
- garmaine 7y agoStrange, I find the compressed width of two columns perfect for mobile phones.
- godelski 7y agoI also find it easier to read on physical paper. Honestly I read faster when things are two column (speed readers will tell you why)
- forrestthewoods 7y agoReally? I find myself scrolling down then up, down then up. I also have to manually control the zoom so text fills my screen width. Then I had to scroll left and right. And when I want to scroll vertically I have to be careful to not screw up my horizontal position. It’s super frustrating. I don’t think a single blog in the world uses a two column view. If it were an actually useful format for sharing information digitally then it would be more prevalent.
- garmaine 7y ago
- summm 7y agoQuite the contrary: A blind friend of mine studied math. He got scripts and exercises as latex source code from his professors and read them on his braille display.
- CJefferson 7y agoYes, getting the latex source is fine. However your friend would have been in serious trouble if they then went on to do a PhD, and then couldn't get the latex source to every paper they wanted to read.