[UK-TUG] Please, more talk between blind math users and LaTeX developers

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

This is about improving communication between blind math students and
support staff on the one side and the LaTeX developers on the other.

I'll be brief. Kellee Sanchez's request for help started a discussion which
I found to be very good. It covers many interlinked topics. It will take me
some time to digest and understand. I'm learning so much from this
discussion.
http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/blindmath_nfbnet.org/2021-March/009702.html

I'm a long-time TeX user. I'd like the developers there, particularly those
focussed on accessible PDF and on TeX-to-HTML (or XML), to similarly learn
from this discussion. To make this discussion more accessible to them and
others, I'll summarize it in posts on my blog.
https://jfine2358.github.io/

I think there's a real social problem. TeX users care about typography.
Blind people can't see typography. TeX users love PDF. Blind people, it
seems to me, love accessible HTML. Blind students need accessible material
during the course. TeX developers think long term.

This need not be a problem. We all care about communication and usability.
We have shared interests and values. The social problem I see is that there
are too few connections between these two communities.

Let's have more sharing between the people on the Blind Math mailing list
and the developers on the LaTeX project. This conversation can help both
sides.

The LaTeX developers hope to produce tagged PDF no sooner than 4 years from
now, with math support to follow later. For math support they need to
extract and store the TeX source for the equations.  Achieving this LaTeX
developer goal will I'm sure help blind math users.
https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2020-tagged-pdf-feasibility.pdf

Let's make progress by talking more with each other. And working together
when we can.

with best wishes

Jonathan

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