WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Math, LaTex, and accessibility

for

From: Jasper Cole
Date: Oct 6, 2014 12:08PM

WebAIM accessibility gurus,

I've been working with LaTex files for online math courses. I'd like to make the documents more accessible, but I'm very uncertain about the best approach.

For starters, it'd be great to generate tagged PDF documents. These may not be perfect, but at least they would be more accessible than the documents are currently. Does anyone know of any method to automatically generate these tags at the time of PDF creation? I've considered remediating the documents after they've already been created, but they're frequently modified and some of our instructors are less willing/able to add the tags themselves.

I also read this previous conversation : http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=4042/ . It says that "teX, LaTeX and MathML are good for mathematics. PDF is completely inaccessible for STEM publications." Does that still hold true, even with modern tagged PDFs? If so, what alternative would you recommend? Should files be generated as HTML pages?

Finally, I also read this conversation : http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id=11637 . It says that "LaTex is presentation oriented which means semantics must be deduced from presentation," whereas "Content MathML does not have this problem." Would you agree with that statement? If so, is MathML the necessary step to provide accessibility? If that's the case, what is the procedure for conversion? From what I've seen, it would have to be a mostly manual process, but perhaps there's another way? We have over 500 documents (many of which are quite long) and getting them all accurately translated will be very challenging.

I've never worked with this type of material before, so any knowledge of LaTex, MathML or Math PDFs is extremely helpful. I will definitely appreciate any feedback.

Thanks so much!
---
Jasper Cole