STEM access: From author to reader (discussion)

• Date: 19 January 2023
• Time: 6:30 to 8:30pm (UK Time)

The video for the discussion is above. For the talks follow this link.

The meeting

On Thursday 19 January, 6:30 to 8:30pm UK (ie GMT) there was a special two hour meeting on accessibility in the STEM document toolchain, from author to reader.

The speakers were Jason White, Jonathan Godfrey and Patrick Smyth. Some recommended URLs and chat messages for the discussion are below.

Recommended URLs

Jonathan Fine (host)

• Agile Manifesto.
• 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics.

Jason White (speaker)

• Using Markup Languages for Accessible Scientific, Technical, and Scholarly Document Creation.
• Ableism, Technoableism, and Future AI (IEEE ($)).

Jonathan Godfrey (speaker)

• Slides for his presentation.
• Gold standard for accessibility.

Patrick Smyth (speaker)

• Social model of disabity (wikipedia).
• Webb Space Telescope Accessibility (github).

Questions from chat

1. I believe R Markdown and LaTeX use similar (or same?) notation for math. Is it universal? Question specifically for Jonathan Godfrey is wether your students or colleagues have to relearn how they write math when they switch to using R?

2. Another question for J. Godfrey and perhaps the other blind users: have you tried VS Code’s accessibility features: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/accessibility

3. An interesting idea that has been shared with us, and that I would love to hear your reactions to: crowd-sourced image and chart descriptions. This is in context of arXiv making research papers available as HTML on the website. Crowdsourced descriptive text could be an additional layer, not presented as part of the original authored source.

4. For Jonathan Godfrey: If you are working exclusively in HTML via R markdown, does that mean you are writing math expressions in MathML? If so, are you aware of the MathML Core development (https://www.w3.org/TR/mathml-core/)?

5. I think Jonathan Godfrey mentioned the benefit of source in PDF. What source would be best?

6. Markdown has fewer semantic tags than HTML. Do you think this presents an issue for using markdown as the original format? I am thinking of html tags like strong vs bold, abbreviation, keyboard, sample(output), code, etc

7. I heard that access to HTML or the source LaTeX for published documents is critical. Do you have any other recommendations or requests for publishers of technical documents to improve accessibility?

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