Re: Accessibility questions that are less technical

Am Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:35:37 -0500 schrieb Jim Hefferon:

> Hello.  I have a number of questions that are perhaps less technical
> than most posts here.  I apologize; they seem too soft SE or latex3's
> GitHub list, the tug.org accessibility list does not have substantive
> traffic, and the blind-mathematicians mailing list did not accept my
> email. I hope folks here don't mind.
> 
> I intend to re-make a book of mine to be accessible and I'm struggling
> with some things that arose out of some preliminary, practice, work
> that I did.
> 
> 1) At the bottom is an MWE document (I have today's TeX Live and I'm
> using LuaLaTeX).  I do not currently have access to Windows so the
> NVDA screen reader is not an option.  On Linux, Okular does not read
> the math correctly and does not read the alt text or "Black bird." at
> all.  Are there better screen reader options?   I'd sure like to do the
> highest PDF standard.  At the moment I am developing my docs without
> being able to know what is the outcome and it is awkward.  

Okular is imho a pdf reader, not a dedicated screen reader. To my
knowledge the main screen reader on linux is called Orca. 

The best is probably to use it together with a very current firefox
as PDF reader as firefox just added support for tagged PDF and
forwards it as if it were a webpage. Which means that if something
works in html it should also work in PDF.
 
And then complain if something doesn't work ... 

Try to get access to windows and nvda: It helps a lot to be able to
compare the output.

 
> 2) Can alt text contain math?  If not, I must write "x times y" and
> "the sine function"?

alt is a "text string". You can use all unicode characters, but not
draw some diagramm or add limits. (Mixing mathml in it could work,
but that's untested).  So I would avoid complex math in the alt
text. Put it e.g. inside a caption{The graph of the integral $\int
x^2 dx$}, this then can be tagged with mathml and the alt text
"only" need to describe non-mathematical stuff. 


 > 3) Is there any way to influence screen readers outside of textual?
> To give a concrete example, I would like to get a pause after
> execution of ltx-talk's \frametitle{..} command.  

In math we can add pauses (it is done inside align), it should also
be possible outside of math, but I wouldn't worry too much about
that. Blind people hear in a quite different speed than we would
use.


> 4) Is there some best practices document that folks could recommend?
> For example, googling for guidelines on writing alt text gives many
> results but even the most high-profile ones seem to me to be both
> vague and contradictory. 

Welcome in the world of accessibility ;-). If you ask three peoples
you will get four different opinions. But for this type of questions
you should really try to get in contact with the blindmath mailing
list. 

> 
> 5) There is sometimes a tradeoff between what is useful for
> visually-impaired users and others.  To again name a concrete example
> from ltx-talk, I sometimes show a sequence of graphics as slides
> inside of a frame to illustrate changes (say, developing the arc
> length as a limit by showing line segments become shorter).  Only the
> graphic changes, not the surrounding text.  I understand screen
> readers to re-read the entire slide; certainly Okular does.  That's
> pretty tedious after five slides.  Does anyone have advice about
> working through that?

If you use overlays than ltx-talk should tag the first slides as
artifacts and only the last one is read. 

Ulrike