Thu 19 Jan: TeX Hour: STEM access: From author to reader

[William F Hammond]

Dear Friends,

Some of you will now that I am the developer of GELLMU
(Generalized Extensible Latex-Like MarkUp).  It was
conceived as (and remains) a didactic project.  Its main
period of development was 1998-2007.  That said, I have been
using it for almost all of my "TeXing" since 1998.  While
the last fully tested CTAN version is from 2007, there is a
less well tested version from 2014 at my University website,
https://www.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu .

I became aware of accessibility concerns in the early 1990s,
and room was made in the GELLMU Project for accessibility
provisions.  I said that room was made.  Not everything that
emerges can be regarded as accessible.  For example, there
has been no effort to "tag" the PDF output.  While the HTML
with MathML output has never been enriched with
incorporation of LaTeX source, someone inclined to have that
could fairly easily modify the code to make it happen.
I think the authors of the article at arXiv referenced by
Jonathan would agree that such enriched HTML with MathML is
likely to work better for the forseeable future than tagged
PDF.

However, in relation to GELLMU, I think a still better
approach to accessibility is to focus on the XML that
mirrors the generalized LaTeX source.  In my talk at TUG
2014 (Portland, Oregon, USA) I spoke about experiemental
visual rendering in a web browser of such XML using static
CSS.  Accessibility was not part of that presentation, but
it was and is lurking in the background because such an XML
file being rendered in a web browser is as close as one is
ever likely to come to the direct rendering of LaTeX source
in a web browser.  The names of the XML elements are the
names of the generalized LaTeX source commands, and,
moreover, as opposed to classical LaTeX, the full tree
structure of every mathematical expression is fully explicit
as part of the XML tree.

For example, look at the "source view" of the XML file
https://www.albany.edu/~hammond/presentations/tug2014/gamma-lm.xml .
The source view will not please one's eyes, but it's very
amenable to processing by a properly "trained" audio widget.

Cheers,

      -- Bill



Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi 
>
> This Thursday 19 January, 6:30 to 8:30pm GMT, there'll be a
>  . . .
> In case you haven't already heard, last month the arXiv
> preprint service published its framework for improved
> accessibility to the research papers it hosts. This is very
> important for STEM access.
> HTML:
> https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessibility_research_report.html
> PDF: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07286
>
> Earlier this month the American Mathematical Society (AMS)
> published an article (in PDF)
> Making Accessible Documents Using LaTeX by Eric Larson and
> Isabel Vogt
> https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202301/rnoti-p68.pdf
>  . . .