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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 20/10/21 14:34, Jonathan Fine wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">Thu 21 October: 6:30 to 7:30pm:
What is an accessible TeX rendering
pipeline?<br>
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<p>That's a good question and an important topic. I have a
relatively simple solution at the moment: a makefile that converts
my LaTeX source to PDF and HTML.</p>
<p>At present, I am using the Lwarp package to generate the HTML
output, and Lualatex for the PDF. However, it would be
straightforward to use TEX4HT or LaTeXML instead.</p>
<p>The main problems, from my limited perspective, are as follows.</p>
<p>1. Not knowing which LaTeX packages are compatible with producing
high-quality HTML output, and addressing incompatibilities that do
occur. If the HTML conversion were standardized and supported
directly within the packages themselves (e.g., with code that
specifies structural tags/elements), I think this would be easier
from a user's point of view. I hope the development of support for
tagged PDF will have the side effect of improving HTML processing.
I care about quality HTML output, but not so much about PDF
tagging.<br>
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<p>2. The fact that there is no standard HTML production pipeline
for LaTeX, but rather a multiplicity of tools with similar
functionality (but differences of detail in what is supported and
what output is produced).</p>
<p>3. There is support for providing a text alternative to graphical
content in LaTeX now, equivalent to the HTML ALT attribute.
However, there doesn't appear to be a standard mechanism for
providing extended descriptions (e.g., containing tables,
paragraphs or other structural elements).</p>
<p>It should also be noted that mathematical notation doesn't have a
significant role in my current work, so I am effectively avoiding
mathematics accessibility issues by not needing this aspect of
LaTeX much. When I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in LaTeX, there were
occasional logic symbols and variables in the technical chapters,
and in that context, the ability to include the notation correctly
(and to edit it in a completely accessible manner) was important.</p>
<p>I have also used Pandoc Markdown and AsciiDoc, but I keep coming
back to LaTeX for all of my substantial writing due to the wealth
of packages available in TeX Live and the excellent facilities for
use in scholarly manuscripts. Anyone with a complete TeX Live
installation could work with my documents, whereas, if I wrote
them in Markdown, for instance, anyone else who wished to build
them would have to install extensions and use specific command
line options or makefiles - and I would have to rely on various
extensions that may or may not be maintained.</p>
<p>I think LaTeX currently has a more mature software environment
than the "light-weight" markup languages provide, at least in
relation to my needs.<br>
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<p>I also appreciate having the typographical details decided by
specialists in that domain (namely, the autors of LaTeX and its
packages).</p>
<p>The ability to use word diffs in Git to compare revisions of a
document (a feature that has an option to respect LaTeX syntax)
also proves useful at times.</p>
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