Accessibility Tools

This is a quick tour of some accessibility tools and other resources.

This blog post here is one of three posts made today, all on accessible maths. The other posts are Blind Math News and Accessibility Evaluation: Open University and RNIB. For more on the TeX Hour see contact.

Teaching and Learning Mathematics Online (TALM0)

TALMO wrote:

As a result of Covid-19 it is increasingly likely that for UK Higher Education the start of the 2020/21 academic year will commence with online delivery. Many institutions are making preparations accordingly, and whilst all disciplines face issues delivering online content, mathematical sciences teaching poses particular pedagogical and technological challenges.

To assist with these preparations and avoid wasteful duplication of effort, we ran a two-day workshop. There were twelve talks and over the two days there were 700 participants.

These talks are focussed, quite rightly, on the learning and teaching process. One of them, by Emma Cliffe is Accessible math e-resources - where do you start.

Here's direct links to Emma Cliffe's video (You Tube) and slides.

PreTeXt

This describes itself as

An uncomplicated XML vocabulary for authors of research articles, textbooks, and monographs. The best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML.

Its core technologies are XML and XSLT. It produces PDF (via LaTeX), HTML, EPUB, Jupyter Notebooks and other formats. Before 2017 it was know as MathBook XML.

It has a Gallery of examples and a Catalog of projects using PreTeXt.

The accessibility package

This is a LaTeX package for producing tagged PDF. It originate from earlier unpublished work focussed on documents produced using KOMA-Script. There are problems with using it as is.

It's available on CTAN here, and the source is on Github here.

The axessibility package

This is a LaTeX package for producing tagged PDF. Its documentation (PDF) states

Our package automatically produces an ActualText corresponding to the LaTeX commands that generate the formulae. This ActualText is hidden in the PDF document, but the screen reader reads it without reading any incorrect sequence before

It's available on CTAN here, and the source is on GitHub here.

University of Bath accessible math guide (2012)

This guide is for staff in Higher Education that need to create flexible learning resources efficiently and robustly. Emma Cliffe (head of maths support at Bath) was the main author of this guide.

The guide contains several parts:

• An overview document (in multiple formats)
• Guidelines for writing documents (in LaTeX and in Word)
• Guidelines for software setup, transformation and outputs

Here's a link to the HTML + MathJax version of the guide.

Misc

The ACM published an article Making the Field of Computing More Inclusive (2017). This is a general article, which makes a special mention of LaTeX and accessible PDF.