That’ll Teach Me
A while back, I wrote a post about the accessibility (or lack thereof) of mathematical text in PDF documents.
There is, apparently, a Working Group, trying to develop a standard for accessible PDF documents. Joe Clark decided that they needed some input from yours truly, and arranged for me to join one of their conference calls this week, and give some further input on their Wiki.
Someday, an accessible PDF document will be one which is properly tagged, and which, for each equation, contains an embedded MathML equivalent (in the same way that LaTeXit.app produces PDF files with embedded TeX source code). The MathML could then be used by assistive technology to produce either mathematical braille or voice.
Today, alas, pdftex doesn’t do tags (much less output embedded MathML), and the arXivs don’t use pdftex. So, like MathML itself, this is all a bit pie-in-the-sky.
Oh, wait …
Posted by distler at May 5, 2006 2:45 PM