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One of the reasons is to make the papers more accessible to people with disabilities, especially the blind. I participated in a conference they hosted on this a

• miki123211 3y ago
  Blind person here, can confirm this. Reading PDFs with a screen reader is bad, reading PDFs that come from LaTeX is worse, reading LaTeX math is pretty much impossible. All the semantic info you need is just thrown away. You can make decently accessible PDFs but it's lots of work, you need Acrobat on the producer' side and might also need it on the consumer's side. Free tools don't even come close. There's also the fact that the process of making accessible PDFs in Acrobat isn't itself accessible. With that said, the way screen readers treat HTML math certainly isn't perfect, it's geared more towards school children than anything above calculus. I'm probably going to stay with my LaTeX source files for now. At least ArXiv offers those, not many sites do. To be fair, that approach also has its own set of problems (particularly when people use some extra fancy formatting in their math equations, making the markup hard to read), but I find this to be the best approach for me so far, at least on AI/ML papers.
  • saurik 3y ago
    Huh. It would seem like, of all the things which should make it easy to generate the correct accessibility information, the pipeline of compiling a paper from source code in LaTeX should nail it... maybe we should all pitch in to some pool to pay someone to put in the required effort to connect all the dots?
    • semi-extrinsic 3y ago
      Kind of tangential, but it's also kind of surprising how difficult it is in LaTeX to make a plot of an equation. Say I have Equation \ref{eq}. Why can't I just say "plot \ref{eq} for x from -6 to 11" and get my graph? And yes, I know about pgfplots, PSTricks, TikZ etc. But in all those cases, I need to define the same equation twice, in different syntax to boot. It's kind of unsatisfying.
      • fsh 3y ago
        TeX is a very arcane language, and it doesn't support floating point numbers. Few languages would be less suited for making a plotting library.
        • semi-extrinsic 3y ago
          Both pgfplots and PSTricks and TikZ are plotting libraries. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to let them plot an equation written elsewhere in different syntax.
      • IlliOnato 3y ago
        > Say I have Equation \ref{eq}. Why can't I just say "plot \ref{eq} for x from -6 to 11" and get my graph? Pretty much for the same reason you cannot press a word and get a pop-up dictionary definition in a paper book.
        • semi-extrinsic 3y ago
          To be clear, I meant in the LaTeX source code. And there I can already write code that plots equations, I just have to re-type the equation in a new syntax.
          • IlliOnato 3y ago
            TeX is about representation, not semantics, by design. To do anything useful with a function (like plotting) you need to get semantics. An often cited example: what is f(x+y) ? Is it function f with x+y as its argument, or constant f multiplied by (x+y) ? TeX gives you no clue. Or what is this i in your equation? Is it an index variable, or a square root from minus one? You as a human figure this out by looking at the context and using domain knowledge. So does a "TeX to HTML/MathML converter". It is ultimately built on heuristics, and cannot be otherwise. That's why I said basically "for the same reason a paper page is not interactive". It was designed this way! The goal of TeX was to generate beautiful printed page. The need for semantic structure was not anticipated. To do semantics you need a "semantic version of MathML", or a language used by Wolfram's product, etc.
    • jahewson 3y ago
      Surprisingly it’s not easy, and depending on the field it can be quite challenging. The reason for this is that TeX captures the visual aspects of typesetting, not the semantic meaning of the mathematics. A simple example is ‘\sum’ which provides no way to capture the expression being summed over - because that’s not necessary for typesetting. That’s not the case in, say, MathML. Writing MathML is no fun though because mathematical formulae are visually ambiguous and we rely on the context to know how to read them, e.g. does ‘f(x - 1)’ mean function f called with argument x - 1, or does it mean variable f multiplied by x - 1?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • ldenoue 3y ago
    I wrote an app called PDF Reflow that reflows the original PDF using image processing to cut out words into tiles so you see the reflowed version of the text in their original look. https://www.appblit.com/pdfreflow https://www.appblit.com/pdfreflow
    • sydbarrett74 3y ago
      Any chance of releasing an Android version?
      • no_identd 3y ago
        +1
      • hedora 3y ago
        Gv (part of ghostscript) used to do a good job of this for two column documents. When zoomed in to show one column width of text, the spacebar ran through the top of column 1, then the bottom of column 1, then the top of column 2 and so on. The amount it scrolled probably depended on the aspect ratio of the window, so it might be multiple key presses to scroll an entire column.
      • ldenoue 3y ago
        It’s using web technologies so yes it could also be on Android. I’ll see what can be done.
      • IlliOnato 3y ago
        +1
  • jakderrida 3y ago
    Hold on... Are you telling me that all these complex sentences are being typed out based on your voice alone? That's insane.
    • ehPReth 3y ago
      ? blind people can use keyboards
    • kzrdude 3y ago
      Hm tangential question but shouldn't touch typing be well accessible for many blind computer users?
    • topato 3y ago
      I'd say it would be simple to talk type these using windows 11's redux of voice typing. Pretty damn accurate and easy to modify/variate text/options. I use it all the time to make tech/engineering blog posts, faster and more organic than typing, typically, and it learns your technoacronyms. Combined with voice access, it makes it trivial to fully operate your computer (well, at least, browse the web, email, and media apps) from across the room. For anyone who hasn't tried the updated version, highly suggest hitting windowskey+h and giving it a shot.
    • spookie 3y ago
      There are braille keyboards too
      • Blikkentrekker 3y ago
        Or normal keyboards? Many people can type blind. Some learned to do so while born blind, others became blind after they had already learned this skill. I would assume that the majority of persons on HN are not looking at their keyboard as they type.
        • spookie 3y ago
          I was just giving an additional way to use a computer not known by many. Either way, we shouldn't rely on the skills of a few to interact with a computer.
  • anthk 3y ago
    Emacs with Emacspeak has a math reading module.
  • ahepp 3y ago
    Do you think there's potential for language models to play a role here? I know that AI can get tossed around as a buzzword, but hasn't it proved quite successful in fields like computer vision? I'm not deeply familiar with the state of that art, but it seems like recovering the metadata from a PDF generated by LaTeX would be no more impressive than many other things we're currently seeing language models achieve?
    • staunton 3y ago
      I'm absolutely positive a few million dollars could get you a system that can "read aloud" pdf math papers in no time. I guess people will wait for it to become cheaper though.
      • hutzlibu 3y ago
        You can also have that cheaper already. But having it stable and reliable - will take some time and possibly more money, depending on your definition of reliable.
    • throwaway287391 3y ago
      You wouldn't need to use computer vision on a picture of the PDF. arXiv has the tex source for most of the papers. An LLM trained on code could do a pretty good job of translating tex to readable html with a bit of effort.
    • miki123211 3y ago
      Mathpix is trying to achieve something like this, and they do consider the visually impaired market AFAIK, but it's pretty expensive and I have no experience with it personally, so I can't say how good it is.
  • spookie 3y ago
    Yup LaTeX math doesn't make sense. I've been trying to hack my way into getting a voice model to read it but no real progress.
    • IlliOnato 3y ago
      LaTeX is a programming language for generating beautiful pages, basically a typesetting system. It serves this purpose fantastically well. It was not designed to provide semantic information, unfortunately. So getting anything other than visual representation out of it is hard.
  • Blikkentrekker 3y ago
    I made these arguments two decades ago when I was still in university that PDF is a horrible format because it's purely præsentational, especially for people with disabilities whose software relies on semantic information. LaTeX last time I used it didn't even have a different symbol for uppercase Alpha and A because the glyphs are indistinguishable. They argued that PDF was superior because the publisher could control how it looked and it looked the same everywhere but the point is that it should not. Things such as font size and line spacing should be at the control of the consumer, not the publisher. This isn't simply blind people but for instance also persons with dyslexia who use particular fonts to make it easier to read for them. Or in my case, someone who simply gets a headache from fronts and line-spacing that is too big. I've also been using darkmode everywhere for so long now that reading black text on a white surface on a screen gives me a headache.
    • seanhunter 3y ago
      To write uppercase Alpha you need a modern version of latex (ie xelatex or lualatex) and to include the unicode-math package https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/485593/how-to-write-capital-alpha https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/485593/how-to-write-...
    • IlliOnato 3y ago
      For scientific articles pagination is still important, because it's how you refer to a particular part of a paper. If things like font size and line spacing are at the control of the consumer, pagination is not preserved. This problem is harder than you one would think naively.
      • Blikkentrekker 3y ago
        No, the problem is very easy, referring by page number is simply ridiculous. As well as all those “(<Family Name>, <year>)” citations, Besides, in HTML one can directly link to the relevant part.
        • IlliOnato 3y ago
  • phlakaton 3y ago
    For the math equations, I'm curious: does MathML do any better for you than LaTeX?
    • seanhunter 3y ago
      Not the person you’re asking the question to, but it’s worth noting (if you don’t already know) that MathML is really not designed at all as an input language for practitioners who just want to write a few equations in some document. It’s designed as an output/presentation language so that devices that want to render some maths can do so faithfully[1]. As such, if you’re a human being who wants to typeset some equation, you’ll want to go to latex every single time rather than mathml and then someone else has to figure out the conversion. [1] Great explanation here https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/57717/relationship-between-mathml-and-tex#57730 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/57717/relationship-b...
      • IlliOnato 3y ago
        On the other hand, "semantic" flavor of MathML (as opposed to "presentation") is much easier than TeX for things like screen readers, both conceptually and in practice.
  • kkylin 3y ago
    I teach math at a university. A couple years ago I had two blind students in my section of first-year calculus, and I really struggled with the tooling. Using latexml, I could produce documents that one of the students could use with a screen reader, but the other student never managed to make it work on their machine. Both students prefer braille but I didn't find anything open source that could typeset mathematical braille easily. Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks. Anyway, if you (or anyone else reading this) has suggestions I'd really appreciate it!
    • lostlogin 3y ago
      > Our disability resource office sends things out to a contractor to typeset into braille; the turn-around is measured in weeks. This seems a massive gap in the market - many institutions have funding earmarked for such things.
      • hedora 3y ago
        I wonder if this is a useful service that an llm could actually outperform humans on.
    • Saigonautica 3y ago
      Interesting! I never thought about this, thank you for sharing. What kind of turn-around time would be practical? Could you point me to any typeset mathematical braille that would be an example of a solution to your problem? Is Nemeth the only important standard, or are others important for you too? I'm wondering if it's practical to set this up as back-office work here in Vietnam. There are some outlying provinces here where there are very few job opportunities. Job opportunities for the blind also round down to zero here (e.g. I could hire for proofreading). Maybe there's room to do something cool here.
      • kkylin 3y ago
        Our textbook of choice didn't have a braille version, so we sent it out to be converted one chapter at a time. Since textbooks don't change often, a turn-around of weeks is not so bad if we knew the students were going to be in the course. What would be very useful for me to be able to typeset myself are small things -- homework, quizzes, and (to a lesser extent) exams. Since homework and quizzes often have to adapt to what I actually covered in class, which may or may not match the syllabus, it's hard to rely on sending this out to be typset by others. (Exams are a little easier since they're usually done days ahead of the actual date.) AFAIK Nemeth is the only standard that matters. If I can typeset a document, send it to the student, and they can get it on a braille display (no need for this to be on paper), it would solve a ton of problems.
• wilg 3y ago
  For accessibility purposes (and regular reading), it would be so much better to drop the justified text. Ragged edge is the way to go! https://www.boia.org/blog/why-justified-or-centered-text-is-bad-for-accessibility https://www.boia.org/blog/why-justified-or-centered-text-is-...
  • jonatanheyman 3y ago
    Not necessarily: https://heyman.info/2023/fill-justified-text-on-the-web https://heyman.info/2023/fill-justified-text-on-the-web
    • wilg 3y ago
      Perhaps someone can publish a paper to arXiv that provides a meta-analysis. But still there doesn't seem to be a clear reason to justify it, given that almost all internet text is not justified.
      • dginev 3y ago
        To me one of the exciting aspects of HTML is that we can theme the same article in different ways, tailored to individual preferences - just swap in a different CSS file. Having a two-column theme, or left-aligned vs justified themes, could be workable in the long run. I hope that we get to see some browser extensions modding the pages before too long. The reason for the current justified text is that it is the default aesthetic for a LaTeX-based article, and a lot of authors expect it.