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Re: which campuses offer on-line courses that are accessible to blind or deaf?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 4, 2003 11:37AM

On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Wayne Dick wrote:

> I am really interested in the state of the art in preparing accessible
> mathematics, science and technology. I'm not talking about high school
> stuff.

The bad news is that presenting mathematical expressions on the Web
suffers from serious difficulties, even if we think about common browsing
situation and "normal" users only, as I have done in my treatise
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/
Many of the techiques and tricks that I discuss there imply some
inaccessibilities. Even simple superscripting means problems to speech
browsers.

> What we
> really need is a system that makes it easier to produce accessible say
> MathML than it would be to produce PDF or text with imbedded graphical
> renderings of formulas.

As far as I can, MathML is not a practical option for several reasons.
Using TeX might be of some help - I have even heard of visually impaired
users who would prefer access to raw TeX notations, which are, after all,
accessible to people who can learn the notations.

I think TeX would be the practical option. For the majority, formulas
would be presented as images generated by TeX. Using the TeX source as the
alt text is perhaps the best you can do for accessibility at present, in
the general case.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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