[texhax] description of text in {\tt }

[Dr Nicola L C Talbot]

P. R. Stanley wrote:
> My favourite LaTeX documentation would contain more words describing 
> the physical effect of the commands in specific packages. I 
> appreciate that LaTeX is mainly concerned with the logical layout of 
> the document, hence its appeal to a lot of blind people, however, for 
> those of us who want to do more than typesetting articles it would be 
> amply useful to have a visual perspective of the end result in PDF or 
> DVI, the rationale being that we can then decide when and where to 
> introduce that \tt, mbox or ... command.
> This is a much more pressing problem with other more visual subsets 
> of LaTeX such as the XY package. Currently, there is no accessible 
> tool for producing mathematical drawings except XY. The only obstacle 
> to it becoming the de facto typsetting tool for blind people is the 
> lack of comprehensible tutorials with text that is independent of the 
> visual illustrations.
> I hope that gives you a clearer idea of the situation.
> Please let me know if I can contribute towards the creation of more 
> blind accessible documentation.
> Cheers
> Paul 

The HTML version of my "LaTeX for Complete Novices" tutorial uses 
bitmaps to show the example output but where the alt tag isn't 
sufficient to describe the output, the bitmap is linked to a page with a 
more in depth description (e.g. both bitmaps in 
http://theoval.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~nlct/latex/novices/itemize.html). Is this 
the kind of thing that you're thinking about? Any comments to help 
improve the accessibility would be very welcome.

Regards
Nicola Talbot
-- 
http://theoval.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~nlct/