[accessibility] An accessible PDF CC By-NC-SA Calculus book?

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

I've discovered what might be an accessible PDF for a Calculus book. Please
would someone who has the right tools investigate this for us. (I'm on
Linux and don't have Acrobat.) The details are below. And if the PDF is not
accessible, perhaps we could help the producers improve the accessibility.

Disclaimer. The PDF wasn't produced using TeX. However, the source document
is open source, and it's good to learn from others. I've copied Bruce
Lawson, who's mentioned below. He's interested in accessibility. (Hello
Bruce from Jonathan.)

The starting point is this: The message below on the BlindMath list said:

http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/blindmath_nfbnet.org/2021-July/009909.html
> As for education and training, Openstax is a very good resource
with accessible high-school as well as some university level math. All
topics I read were well and comprehensively explained, providing also
some exercises for training.

I hadn't heard of Openstax before, so I took a look.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStax
> OpenStax (formerly OpenStax College) is a nonprofit educational
technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has
created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in
free digital formats and for a low cost in print

> OpenStax's original goal was to publish openly licensed textbooks for the
25 highest-enrolled undergraduate college courses, and they exceeded that
goal in 2016. In September 2020 they announced plans to double the number
of textbooks they offer. All books are available for free in web view and
PDF on openstax.org.

I found a textbook homepage and downloaded the PDF. I think it looks OK.

https://openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1
https://assets.openstax.org/oscms-prodcms/media/documents/Calculus_Volume_1_-_WEB_68M1Z5W.pdf

Looking at the properties of the PDF I see
Producer: Prince 11 (www.princexml.com)
Creator: DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1
Format: PDF-1.6

According to wikipedia Prince (formerly Prince XML) can create PDF/UA, and
I've found an article by Bruce Lawson on how to do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(software)
> Prince can generate accessible PDFs conforming to the PDF/UA profile (ISO
14289, the International Standard for accessible PDF technology) that can
be used by people with assistive technologies

https://medium.com/@bruce_39084/making-accessible-tagged-pdfs-with-prince-ad7fd7a48711
https://brucelawson.co.uk/

If you've got to the end of the message, I hope it is of interest and
helpful.

with many thanks

Jonathan
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