[texhax] TeX for the blind

Glenn Ledder gledder1 at math.unl.edu
Fri Dec 8 17:03:55 CET 2006


Philip,

Good point.  There is no way that a screen reader could make these
distinctions from inspection of the printed output.  It would have to work
directly with the source file.

Regards,
Glenn



-----Original Message-----
From: Philip TAYLOR [mailto:P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk] 
Sent: Friday, December 08, 2006 9:20 AM
To: William Adams
Cc: Glenn Ledder; texhax at tug.org
Subject: Re: [texhax] TeX for the blind



William Adams wrote:

[snip]

> As a test on that, try a .pdf of $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$ --- someone needs 
> to teach these screen reader folks that the Pythagorean theorem is 
> _not_ ``a2 plus b2 equals c2''.

I genuinely cannot see how a screen-reader, given only a formatted page
image with no semantic markup, can possibly know that the "2"
in x^2 + y+2 = z^2 should be pronounced "squared" whilst the "3" in this
footnote^3 should be pronounced "see footnote 3" and the "-1" in this
trigonometry (sin^-1) should be moved to the front of the "sin"(e) and
pronounced "arc" !

Philip Taylor

[1] ...
[2] ...
[3] This is Footnote 3



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