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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

> thank you, thank you

You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-)

(I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org.)

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Oh, that's very good to hear! I'll definitely get in contact. I won't be able to, for the next two months or so, but after that I should have some free time when I can test/contribute with code/whatever else is required. (Hopefully, if this gets done, publishers that use LaTeX for typesetting might automatically offer accessible PDFs as well.)

Sometimes being a resource for developers, as someone who could be asked, can be valuable. Anyway, good luck with your studies!

Just wanted to say my thanks as well, while I have not worked with one of your books, I have a lot of respect for people that choose to release the source of textbooks they created.

You are welcome. Have a look at https://hefferon.net for the other books.

Could you elaborate on this? Like a link to a concrete project/discussion? I am visually impaired too and I did my own research on this topic a while ago. It appears that in the past decade or two there have been a few attempts to improve accessibility of Latex generated PDFs, but none of them seems to have accomplished the goal and pretty much all of them are dead projects now. I would be happy if there's an ongoing project.

I second this and would also like to add a request to clarify what it is that would even be possible in this space, because I have no idea beyond “have hidden MathSpeak text behind the mathematics notation”, which is probably both too vague and too specific to be useful.

Even more damningly, I actually have no idea what it is the accessibility users do, because I’m sure I wouldn’t understand half of the maths notation I’ve read or typeset if someone just spelt it out for me. I simply can’t manipulate things that long without writing them out, and when comparing two equations nothing beats placing them one above the other. Surely computers must be capable of something more helpful than forcing everything into one-dimensional form?

Just having raw Tex code for the formula would be already immensely helpful. Right now we're in the situation that the information about formulas is lost for screenreader users. Once there's raw Tex formula, then screenreader developers, myself included, can come up with many different ways to present formulas in more convenient form. But again, so far, the raw tex code of the formulas is lost, and apparently it seems to be either incredibly hard to embed it into PDFs or something - judging by so little progress in this direction over the last decade.

There is a working group. See https://www.tug.org/twg/accessibility/. One of the reasons to have a TeX Users Group is to allow there to be a way to organize, and provide some money for, such things.

(I should say that my personal involvment goes no further attending presentations at the annual conference.)

> interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction

Can you elaborate on what / where those projects are? It's not clear from the tug.org website.

I love LaTeX and if I had a relevant skill set I'd be willing to help out.

Thank you.

See https://www.tug.org/twg/accessibility/; I'm afraid I can't say more than that.

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