[texhax] blind users and TeX?

[William Adams]

On Jun 2, 2006, at 5:23 AM, Martin Schröder wrote:

> 2006/6/2, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:
>> papers years ago?  Any current packages?  Can pdftex output be heard?
>
> PDF would require supprt for tagging, which pdfTeX lacks. It's a known
> missing feature
> http://sarovar.org/tracker/index.php? 
> func=detail&aid=429&group_id=106&atid=496

Not just tagging (which is nice 'cause it allows the reading order to  
be set and heads &c. to be suppressed), but also a sane encoding for  
all characters.

My first question would be if \usepackage{mathptmx} improves things.  
This should only leave the extensible math elements (braces &c.) in  
the TeX math encodings.

Second, have any concrete plans been made for (La)TeX support of the  
STIX fonts? It's still listed as a ``next task'' at the STIX page on  
the AMS site.

Third, perhaps this would be a good time to snag a copy of  
Microsoft's new ``Cambria'' math font (incl. in the Office 2007 beta)  
and see if it works well? Have the person see if this works any better:

http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf

I suspect the best authoring setup would be to use something like  
William Hammond's Gellmu and have two conversion paths, one to LaTeX,  
another to some sort of XML optimized for a screen reader. Or just  
defer reading a .pdf and always use the TeX source?

I made a quick test .pdf and while all the text was read okay, it  
wasn't made understandable:

a two plus b two = c two

is _not_ equivalent to:

$a^2 + b^2 = c^2$

William


-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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