[hprotagonist]

An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors.

This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.

[konjin]

Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only.

If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.

[hprotagonist]

There's a bunch of counter-argument here from working practising blind mathematicians who read and write raw TeX every day, so there's at least a non-zero audience.

https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0

[konjin]

There were a bunch of mathematicians who used roman numerals for arithmetic between 0 AD and 1200AD. That they existed is not a counter-argument to the fact roman numerals are terrible to do arithmetic in. That is an argument that people can get used to anything, and become proficient enough at it that changing to a new - and better - system will set them back enough for it to be not worth while doing - for them. The same is true for modern maths notation.

[hprotagonist]

I am not blind. Neither am I a mathematician. I'm a sighted biomedical engineer.

I have heard blind mathematician colleagues very loudly espouse using LaTeX for everything they do. I'm inclined to believe them!

[ivansavz]

Speaking of accessibility for math equations, there is some really good work done in MathJax 3: http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/a11y-extensions.html... slides from presentation: https://mathjax.github.io/papers/CSUN19/csun2019_talk.pdf

You can try on any of the demos on this page: https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-demos-web/ (right click on an equation to enable the accessibility options)

[dathinab]

It's more than that.

I read more than one or two IT papers which donated variable types by using a different font between A and A and that difference was essential for reasonable understanding the papers.

Then the notation is overloaded.

Brackets are not even necessary enclosing something or are not necessary well balanced.

"Bar" based brackets and bars used for non bracket purpose are not necessary differentiate by noon visual clues. Etc.

It's already often confusing for people which can read the formula so I'm not surprised that really annoying for people which can't normally read the formula.

A super simple example is that [a;b[ is that "German"/(EU?) still to write an range with inclusive start and exclusive end. In the US [a;b) is used instead. But let's be honest something like rangeIE(a, b) or similar (Latex range_{ie}) is much better for a screen reader I thing and that's a trivial example not one of the really bad ones.

I think all formula should be written in a way which represents semantics not visuals and then be compiler to a classical visual representation (maybe using some additional non-semantic style annotation block).

[afiori]

A friend of mine works with a professor that defines: \be -> \begin{equation}, \ee -> \end{equation}, \ga -> \gamma, \gm -> \gamma, \s -> \section, and so on

Personally I think that latex should produce pdf documents with better mappings so that copy-paste and latex-paragraphs are preserved, even if obviously it will still get messed up in complex layouts