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by xworld21 35 days ago
I suppose somebody has to ask (and most likely complain) about this: what does RaTeX do for accessibility? I gather that it produces images. I checked the demo, and there's not even an alternative text or an ARIA label, so this seems completely invisible to anybody relying on a screen reader. This is quite a step backwards compared to modern LaTeX, which can now tag equations with MathML within the PDF, or using MathJax, or any other serious tool targeting HTML, like pandoc or LaTeXML.

Is accessibility anywhere on the roadmap for RaTeX?
1 comments
nkmnz 35 days ago
AFAIK, KaTex has accessibility via MathML included, but it doesn't provide an export as image - it rather renders as html. So why would you want the utility that you use to render an additional image to take care of something that KaTeX already does?
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xworld21 35 days ago
True, my knee jerk reaction came from seeing this run in the browser... but that does not change the question. RaTeX advertises itself as a renderer for native apps, but how are those apps supposed to implement accessible controls? Does RaTeX offer anything towards that?
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nkmnz 35 days ago
Honestly, I have no idea how native apps for desktop or mobile handle accessibility. There is katex-rs[0] that outputs html and mathML. I'd assume the two could work together and the mathML would be fed to whatever the screen reader receives instead of the image?

On a related note: is mathML more accessible than an AI generated text of how a human would read the mathematical or chemical formula?

[0] https://crates.io/crates/katex-rs

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xworld21 35 days ago
> On a related note: is mathML more accessible than an AI generated text of how a human would read the mathematical or chemical formula?

Yes, screen readers would typically allow you to navigate the formulas in ways that are more sophisticated than text (not to mention the issues with translating to Braille, which I don't claim to understand, at all). In fact alternative text is a poor substitute for structured information about the formula, which is what you get with MathML.

Plus, the MathML + screen reader combo is deterministic and debuggable, as opposed to OCR'ing an image.

> There is katex-rs[0] that outputs html and mathML. I'd assume the two could work together and the mathML would be fed to whatever the screen reader receives instead of the image?

Maybe! You are parsing the input twice, but it could be a pragmatic solution. I don't know myself how native apps are supposed to expose MathML to screen readers (or if it is even possible without an embedded browser!).

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techwizrd 35 days ago
I'm working on a Neovim plugin to render LaTeX in Markdown, and I'm struggling with this. Why is it so hard to simply render an image from KaTeX?
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xymostech 34 days ago
What are you struggling with? If you want an image output, there a reason you want to use KaTeX for this, and can't just use actual LaTeX?

KaTeX depends on the browser engine to do most of the layout, so generating an image would require a tool which converts the HTML nodes back into an image. There are some tools that can do that (like html2canvas), but using LaTeX to generate a PDF and then converting that to an image is probably going to be easier.

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