Tex code in TUG page

[Kaveh]

I think we are all agreed that we want maximum accessibility for everyone
including the blind. There is a blind man, Ross, living near me and I
befriended him a while ago. We had coffee last weekend and it was
fascinating to find out more. Some memorable points that I did not know:

   - The harness on his guide dog (as opposed to the flexible lead) is a
   two-way communication channel. One example is that when the dog mounts a
   kerb, he gets a measure of the height difference from the movement of the
   harness.
   - There are no blind schools any more as integration is seen as the way
   forward. Downside is the teachers are not as specialised
   - Braille is no longer mandatory for blind kids as there is text to
   speech. We both agreed this did not seem right. It is akin to sighted
   readers always using audiobooks
   - Mobile phones, e.g. iPhone, are very accessible. He shops for
   everything online with no trouble.
   - Ross got O-level in math. For geometry he would use a wooden board
   with pins and a rubber band to draw a triangle etc!

Coming back to the original point, I think pure text would have been better
for sighted and for blind users. The code is messy and unhelpful. TeX was
not designed to be read by end users. Some examples that unnecessarily
complicate simple text:

   - \begin{itemize} \item each cell
   -  \cs{begin}\tubbraced{uktug} to \cs{end}\tubbraced{uktug}
   - \texttt{{luatruthtable}package. The \texttt{xkeyval}

Note non-matching braces in last case.

On Sat, 23 Jul 2022 at 21:47, Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you reinhard for your most helpful reply. Sent from my phone.
>
> Jonathan
>
> On Sat, 23 Jul 2022, 21:13 Reinhard Kotucha, <reinhard.kotucha at gmx.de>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2022-07-22 at 18:45:05 +0100, Jonathan Fine wrote:
>>
>>  > Just to let you know that I intend to use this thread as a
>>  > one-slide case study for my talk Access and Accessibility at the
>>  > TUG Conference. This talk will be at 16:45 pm UK time on Sunday. I
>>  > won't mention names, but I might mention roles.
>>
>> Hi Jonathan,
>> like Kaveh I have no problem if my name is mentioned.
>>
>> Maybe I should provide some background information regarding my
>> statement.
>>
>> About 20 years ago a teacher and a blind schoolboy attended our local
>> monthly TeX meeting at the university.  The teacher was employed by
>> "Landesbildungszentrum für Blinde Niedersachsen (LBZB)", an
>> organization which supports blind people's education in Lower Saxony.
>>
>> In the past blind pupils attended special schools.  The LBZB launched
>> a pilot project where blind pupils attend regular schools, supported
>> by a teacher of the LBZB.
>>
>> Blind pupils usually used Microsoft Word if only text is involved.
>> For mathematics the situation is more difficult because formulas are
>> two-dimensional and couldn't be displayed on a Braille line.  The
>> solution was that the blind typed math formulas in LaTeX syntax.
>> Since LaTeX (source code) formulas are one-dimesional they could
>> easily be read on a Braille display.
>>
>> The LBZB-teacher helped whenever problems occurred with the
>> translation from LaTeX to PDF.  Class exams were judged by the
>> teachers of the regular schools, who had no idea about LaTeX at this
>> time.
>>
>> Nowadays I assume that more teachers are familiar with LaTeX because
>> they used it already during their own education.
>>
>> I must admit that I don't know very much about the requirements of
>> visually impaired people and the tools that are available now.  I've
>> heard about Nemeth but I actually don't know anything about it.
>>
>> After all, I've been told recently that the blind schoolboy I met
>> about 20 years ago now has a doctoral degree in economics.
>>
>> Regards,
>>   Reinhard
>>
>> --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
>> Marschnerstr. 25
>> D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha at gmx.de
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>

-- 
Kaveh Bazargan PhD
Director
River Valley Technologies <http://rivervalley.io> ● Twitter
<https://twitter.com/rivervalley1000> ● LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/bazargankaveh/> ● ORCID
<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1414-9098>
*Accelerating the Communication of Research*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20220724/c0039dcd/attachment.html>