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
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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
>>