[texhax] blind users and TeX?

[Juergen Fenn]

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:

> I've gotten a few queries over the years from blind users wanting to use
> TeX.  The latest is struggling with pdf output under MacOSX.
>
> Has anything happened with an audible TeX since TV Raman's exceptional
> papers years ago?  Any current packages?  Can pdftex output be
> heard?

No idea about the situation on the Mac, depends on what the user is
struggling with and what features in LaTeX are required.

I once helped "remotely" to convert a book typeset in LaTeX for a
blind user. The assistant to the blind person finally managed to
convert the LaTeX sources with tex4ht to HTML which could be converted
into Braille for output on a reader. We also discussed conversion of
the dvi via dvi2tty or something similar. I learned then that most
blind users seem to use Windows because the screen readers usually
build on the Internet Explorer.

Regards,
Jürgen.