There’s an interesting paper on the arXiv that came out before Christmas, but which I’ve only just seen, about attempts to make arXiv content more accessible. Here is the abstract:
The research content hosted by arXiv is not fully accessible to everyone due to disabilities and other barriers. This matters because a significant proportion of people have reading and visual disabilities, it is important to our community that arXiv is as open as possible, and if science is to advance, we need wide and diverse participation. In addition, we have mandates to become accessible, and accessible content benefits everyone. In this paper, we will describe the accessibility problems with research, review current mitigations (and explain why they aren’t sufficient), and share the results of our user research with scientists and accessibility experts. Finally, we will present arXiv’s proposed next step towards more open science: offering HTML alongside existing PDF and TeX formats. An accessible HTML version of this paper is also available at https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessibility_research_report.html
I think this is well worth reading.
This reminds me a bit of the experiences I’ve had teaching theoretical physics to blind and partially-sighted students. Years ago this used to involve making braille copies of notes, but there are now various bits of software to help such people manage LaTeX both for creating and reading documents. In particular there are programs that can read Latex documents (including formulae and equations) which means that if a lecturer can supply LaTeX source version of their notes the student can hear them spoken out loud as well as make their own annotations/corrections. While HTML might be better for some fields, I wonder if physicists and other people in disciplines that make heavy use of mathematics might prefer to use the LaTeX source code which is already downloadable from arXiv?
I’d be interested in views on this through the comments!
In the Dark 