[texhax] Visually Impaired

[William Adams]

On Nov 20, 2014, at 10:47 AM, Clifford Weil wrote:

> I’m working with people at Michigan State University to promote the use of LaTeX throughout the campus. They would like to know if there is a facility to make the output of a LaTeX file understandable by the visually impaired? The text part doesn’t seem to be a problem; it’s the graphics and similar structures that present difficulty. Is there anything available?

Actually, the text part can be improved by using CMAP and other nifty things to ensure that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 comes out as something more intelligible than a two plus b two equals c two. See ``tagged pdf'', e.g., : http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/579/how-to-create-tagged-pdf

For graphics, there are similar options: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/75102/need-alt-text-for-images-in-pdf-for-screen-readers

This answer also suggests pdfcomment: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/19279/latex-accessibility and this may also help: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/32609/latex-to-braille

Looking back through the archives there's been some discussion of voice recognition, &c. in the past, e.g., Karl Berry's response:

On Jun 15, 2006, at 5:56 PM, Karl Berry wrote:

> 1) TV Raman did a couple TUGboat articles on blind accessibility some
> years ago.  If you search for "raman" at http://tug.org/TUGboat/ you may
> be interested in some of that.  I believe Dr. Raman still uses LaTeX.
> 
> 2) Eitan Gurari and colleagues did a paper on creating spatial math
>   exercises in Braille and print.  Linked from here:
> http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents26-2.html
>   (If you're not a TUG member, Eitan or I can send you the paper I suppose.)
> 
> 3) TeXShop for MacOSX has magnification and speaking options integrated
>   with (I believe) the system facilities.
> http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.