[pdftex] making pdf document accessible using LaTeX

[Thierry Bouche]

Hi,

Le lundi 12 novembre 2007, vers 01:18:05, Victor Ivrii écrivit :

V> This is an example posted by someone more knowledgeable than me. You
V> can put the text to speak in
V>  /ActualText (sum with i from to n .....  )

this is very interesting. How much of this is automatizable?
Better: how much of this could be done for every piece of math which
lacks a natural pure Unicode description (I suppose that it is easy to
have some toUnicode mechanism in pdftex so that $X$ puts the plane 1
unicode number as text string in the PDF), using some external filter
that would provide some more standardized version of the maths (I think of
two formats, which I both produce with tralics and currently exploit at
CEDRAM website: MathML and sanitized latex).

By the way, I have been pointed to a developing NISO standard for
accessible maths, that would be similar to this with MathML, if I
understood well. A variation of Design Science's MathPlayer would have
been able to read aloud such a PDF, including the maths read not as ASCII
source, but as real maths.

Is anyone here aware of some work with pdftex (or luatex!) in this
direction?

While on this topic, I read here a while ago about the possibility to
have some kind of tooltip window with typeset material in it showing
while passing the pointer over an activated zone. This is typically a
feature that would change mere links into a useful thing for latex cross
references (show the bibitem when pointing a bibcte, e.g., or the
equation content for an eqref, or theorem statement, section title,
etc.)

Same question here: has someone developed something so that I can simply
plug a package and have all my crossrefs (at the possible price of some
more markup required) turned into a tooltip preview of the target?

That would make PDF (and pdflatex) quite a user friendly system for the
scientist!


 Thierry