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Blind person here. I've been using LaTex for note taking since age 15. Since braille typewriters are heavy and clunky and electronic braille notetakers are expe
by miki123211 5y ago
Blind person here. I've been using LaTex for note taking since age 15. Since braille typewriters are heavy and clunky and electronic braille notetakers are expensive, I decided it was the right thing to do pretty early on. I started doing this when I transferred out of blind school. Being able to compile my notes into a PDF was definitely useful, considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before.
When I got to college, I started requesting all the materials that students normally get in LaTeX. PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.
Obviously, what I write for myself isn't pure, compilable LaTeX, I usually omit the dollar signs, write things like 2^32 instead of 2^{32} etc.
By the way, the linked post was almost unreadable to screen readers, the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable made my screen reader say every syllable separately, which breaks the pronunciation rules.
- wolverine876 5y ago> the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable What CMS or editor outputs that? It's insane. I tried copying the text into a text editor and it displayed all the dashes: "math-e-mat-ics".
- BbzzbB 5y agoHum, so when you copy the text and post it into Notepad, it's written with a ton of dashes at places I can't make sense of (not syllables or every word). If you post it in this text box or in Word, it looks normal, I can't even figure out how to share it here (without manually "dashing") except this screenshot : https://imgur.com/DWRJlKf https://imgur.com/DWRJlKf. I am very confused, what's up with this?
- jturpin 5y agoI think they are some weird line wrapping hint characters? If I paste it into Pop OS's text editor I can only see the dashes if I shrink the editor to cause word wrapping, and it will insert the dashes at the wrap. It seems like some UTF magic that I hate!
- wolverine876 5y agoThe character is Unicode U+00AD, the soft hyphen: "= discretionary hyphen" / "commonly abbreviated as SHY" / "an invisible format character indicating a possible hyphenation location" https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf I know of it, but apparently I've never previously pasted text using it into my text editor, because it's displayed there as a hyphen (though it is still U+00AD). I'm wondering what CMS/editor outputs so many SHY characters.
- c0balt 5y agoIt appears to be a site generated with react+Gatsby. Would be interesting to figure it out which text component is responsible for this odd text decoration
- createunderrate 5y agoLikely, the site was set up before all browsers supported automatic hyphenation (fairly recently), and the soft hyphens were added to assist with hyphenation.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before. Sorry you had to pave the way. > PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine. That's... sad. Is Word any better?
- necovek 5y agopdflatex, just like TeX, comes from an 8-bit past, so it will frequently resort to custom encodings to fit all the glyphs in a single 255-character font. That means that any 8-bit "character" (in PDF bytes, what is really copy-pasteable or readable by TTS system) can actually stand for any displayable character. Perhaps XeTeX is better? (I am not intimately familiar with what pdf(la)tex does, but this is how TeX works, and I've seen those PDFs, esp with eg. Cyrillic, which on select show up garbled text)
- mwcampbell 5y ago> Sorry you had to pave the way. It's something I think we're all used to, and will likely always be the case, because non-elderly blind people are such a tiny minority (perhaps we're even over-represented here on HN).