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We have only had a few accessibility requests on scanned materials but, in each of those cases, the students wanted the equations in LaTeX. In one case, it was a scanned major paper from 2017, not exactly a long time ago, but a lot of remediation was still required. There is a cloud service called MathPix [1] which has recognition technology for equations, and usually the LaTeX rendering doesn't need a lot of correction. Pushing the scans through a cloud service was the method used here and I'd be curious how other organizations are handling accessibility with equation-heavy materials, particularly from scanning. The recent arXiv Accessibility Forum [2] has a great keynote from Dr. Jonathan Godfrey where he talks about how "all material presented by another party must be able to be read by a blind person using whatsoever hardware and software tools provide an equitable outcome as that attained by their sighted peers". LaTeX seems to be a key technology in making that happen. art --- 1. https://mathpix.com/pricing 2. https://accessibility2023.arxiv.org/ -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Hammer, Erich F Sent: Friday, July 21, 2023 8:55 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] [External] Re: [CODE4LIB] What manner of creature is LaTeX? LaTeX can do way, way more than math and text layout. My favorite example: https://mathvault.ca/wp-content/uploads/fancy-latex-output.png That isn't a photoshopped collage of different LaTeX creations. The diagrams, the overlays and the fading is all created with LaTeX into that single image. Erich On Thursday, July 20, 2023 at 18:24, Sam Hansen eloquently inscribed: > I agree with Steve on this. LaTeX is just a markup language for > mathematical content. for most written things it is overkill, and > there are definitely projects like the more XML based PreTeXt that > offer huge improvements over vanilla LaTeX implementations. But LaTeX > does what it does, hyper specific typeset and math, it does very well. > It also is capable of some interesting accessibility things such as a nemeth braille output that it has over WYSISYG editors. > > Sam > >> On Jul 20, 2023, at 17:19, McDonald, Stephen >> <[log in to unmask]> >> wrote: >> >> I'm not sure I agree with that description of LaTeX. LaTeX is more > concerned with formatting than style. LaTeX says, "this is the > title", "this is a footnote", "this is a quotation block", "this is a > chapter", "this is a sidebar note". The actual style that is used for > a title, a footnote, or a quotation block is defined separately, and > layout on a page is done in end-processing. I don't see any way you > could separate those format blocks from the text to be blocked out. Am I misunderstanding you? >> >> Steve McDonald >> [log in to unmask] >> >> Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Stuart wrote on eates: >>> LaTeX is a little like PostScript and Excel with autorun scripts: >>> formats conceived and developed prior to the software development >>> insight that separation of content and code need to be separate. >>> >>> Nowadays it is accepted that content should be split into text and >>> style, but way back when, there wasn't even a consensus for the >>> split between content and code. >>> >>> cheers >>> stuart >>