Thanks Hans, I agree and I am merely weighing my options. I don’t want anyone to waste their time on something useless just to satisfy some compliance mandate.
Any document I want to make available to my students needs to be “compliant” by April 2026. Nobody knows what that exactly means or how this will be tested. I strongly support providing accessibility in addition to what I want my students to use. The best way(while waiting) seems to be to provide two documents, where the accessible version replaces all images with text that I write, and all formulas with the text that Mikael’s example produces. So my question is just this: how do I make that automatic: have all formulas replaced by a text that reads like a spoken formula? Matthias > On Apr 11, 2025, at 11:52, Hans Hagen via ntg-context <ntg-context@ntg.nl> > wrote: > > On 4/10/2025 9:02 PM, Matthias Weber wrote: >> Thank you Mikael, >> What I would like to to is to have what \placenotes[mathnote] produces added >> to the pdf as a tag so that a screen reader would be able to read the math. >> Right now, >> with your example, it reads the typeset math in an extremely garbled way >> (but the mathnotes at leats make sense). >> So the question is how to get the content of the mathnotes into the PDF tags… > > Last time we looked into this (over a year ago) we tested several variants > with some viewers (Mikael and I use Sumatra (mupdf) and Okular) and did some > tests with speech. We don't have acrobat installed and can't assume users > have anyway, esp not on linux. > > We checked what is done with Alt and ActualText and such and decided that it > made no sense to keep trial and erroring. Okular can show the embedded xml > blob fine. > > So at that time we settled on adding the serialized formula as ActualText > because that at least gave no errors in validators. We explicitly decided not > to flag /math as Formula because that gave validating issues with complex > formulas that have non-math inside. (We expect that by llm will be able to > interpret a '/math' tag some day, why not.) > > So, from our perspective, we try to make sure something validates, add as > much structure as possible / reasonable, then wait till the viewers that we > use catch up (maybe they do when all that tagging dust has settled and > standards are stable) and then pick up the thread when we know how to adapt. > > In the meantime users can finetune mapping as they like, but we don't want to > be held responsbile for a mess. After all users know what they coded and want > out of it. As said before, tagging is not that complex to support. The only > condition it that we don't want to cripple context structure support by > adapting to suboptimal situations. > > So patience is your friend. > > Hans > > ps. For decades we now use as test a math content base that covers a lot of > dutch education and we had to go from content mathml (nice) to openmath > (mess) to presentational mathml (dropped from browsers) to asciimath > (insufficient) to again a mix of presentational mathml (back in browsers) and > asciimath to ... so we know a bit what we're dealing with here: multiple > output from the same source (web as well as properly made up teacher driven > math). Everything web related keeps changing, often in an oscillating way. > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE > Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands > tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > ___________________________________________________________________________________ > If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the > Wiki! > > maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / > https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl > webpage : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror) > archive : https://github.com/contextgarden/context > wiki : https://wiki.contextgarden.net > ___________________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl webpage : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror) archive : https://github.com/contextgarden/context wiki : https://wiki.contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
