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by hprotagonist 2106 days ago
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

2 comments

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.
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!

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)