Post ATgjRQPdVfvbBQRmTI by jbigham@hci.social
(DIR) More posts by jbigham@hci.social
(DIR) Post #ATgjRQPdVfvbBQRmTI by jbigham@hci.social
2023-03-16T19:01:39Z
2 likes, 1 repeats
we have chosen to put most of our research into documents in PDF format.PDFs are a huge pain to make accessible.most scientists write their papers in Latex, overleaf, etc., which cannot produce accessible PDFs.to make such PDFs accessible, one uses Adobe Acrobat, which is expensive and proprietary.increasingly, we post our PDFs to arXiv, which ~forbids accessible PDFs b/c they can't be compiled from source.~none of our science is accessible.artifacts (and file formats) have politics.
(DIR) Post #ATgjRRKM6nIY1Kz4sa by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-03-16T23:20:43Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham hmm, in which way is LaTeX PDF output non-accessible? At least it doesn't produce rasters like, well, Photoshop & other things, so that must be some other problem…Do you mean text blocks ordering or some other stuff?
(DIR) Post #ATgjWRQn9Mdvn4Nawy by jbigham@hci.social
2023-03-16T23:21:37Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@mmu_man https://lmgtfy.app/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwebaim.org%2Ftechniques%2Facrobat%2F ;)
(DIR) Post #ATgjZlxXHdEkKHHeaW by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-03-16T23:22:15Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham I know how to use Google, thanks.
(DIR) Post #ATgjed9fRen2T4H5mq by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-03-16T23:23:07Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham (and it's not meant to search for URLs by URL, that's what the URL bar is.)
(DIR) Post #ATgk7jUcxXSeWTxIum by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-03-16T23:28:23Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham https://lmgtfy.app/?q=latex+pdf+tagsDon't know how extensive they are but there are ways to do it it seems. Sure they need more exposure, and push for arXiv to consider making it mandatory.
(DIR) Post #ATgkKJ1AhjMUB0AnIG by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-03-16T23:30:39Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham just like surely not everyone using Acrobat know or will use the accessibility tags properly anyway.People still want to fake radio buttons in HTML, so there's a long road ahead…
(DIR) Post #ATgoklIYa3sTETAwnw by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-03-17T00:20:15Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham makes me wonder how well LibreOffice handles that in PDF it generates, as I've been using it for years thinking it was just fine.Same for pandoc I use to generate user manual through LaTeX from markdown… 🤔
(DIR) Post #ATh82WAnS7ZufEj50K by chris@abraham.su
2023-03-17T03:56:20Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@jbighamAll of that is true. @AlgoCompSynth
(DIR) Post #AThBYOSvwaIrtB6Iee by AlgoCompSynth@ravenation.club
2023-03-17T04:35:42Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@chris @jbigham How come Adobe Acrobat can make accessible PDFs when the open source toolchains cannot? That doesn't make sense; PDF is a format
(DIR) Post #ATjExzvqTEAFVURc24 by simulo@hci.social
2023-03-16T19:18:27Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@jbigham I always wondered why science on the web is all pdf when the web is said to have been invented to ease sharing of information for and by scientists.
(DIR) Post #ATjFmx74i7AZX6zgcC by tenet@defcon.social
2023-03-16T19:43:58Z
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@simulo @jbigham Because few people took the anti-PDF camp seriously 25 years ago. There was a big push even back then to avoid PDFs primarily because of the dearth of 3rd party readers. Even after the PDF spec was published and a few became available it was clear there are serious issues with the format.If only we had some kind of markup language that would allow a basic web browser to read data and display it in a specified format. That would allow all sorts of accessibility tools to work on it. Oh well, too bad such a thing doesn't exist and there's no way research documents could be uploaded using that alongside a PDF.
(DIR) Post #ATjFmxhaWMNPMM4qWm by sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange
2023-03-16T20:29:00Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@tenet @simulo @jbigham I would argue that typesetting formulas in HTML is unfortunately pretty much impossible. MathML is a nice idea, but not really usable in the same way as latex compiled to PDF, with mathematicians really liking coming up with obscure symbols and that in order to make them accessible, the formulas would need to be in content MathML, which afaik has next to no tooling support.