[NTG-context] Re: Tagging Math

Thanks Hans, I agree and I am merely weighing my options. I don’t want anyone to waste their time on something useless just to satisfy some compliance mandate. Any document I want to make available to my students needs to be “compliant” by April 2026. Nobody knows what that exactly means or how this will be tested. I strongly support providing accessibility in addition to what I want my students to use. The best way(while waiting) seems to be to provide two documents, where the accessible version replaces all images with text that I write, and all formulas with the text that Mikael’s example produces. So my question is just this: how do I make that automatic: have all formulas replaced by a text that reads like a spoken formula? Matthias

On Apr 11, 2025, at 11:52, Hans Hagen via ntg-context wrote:

On 4/10/2025 9:02 PM, Matthias Weber wrote:

...

Thank you Mikael, What I would like to to is to have what \placenotes[mathnote] produces added to the pdf as a tag so that a screen reader would be able to read the math. Right now, with your example, it reads the typeset math in an extremely garbled way (but the mathnotes at leats make sense). So the question is how to get the content of the mathnotes into the PDF tags…

Last time we looked into this (over a year ago) we tested several variants with some viewers (Mikael and I use Sumatra (mupdf) and Okular) and did some tests with speech. We don't have acrobat installed and can't assume users have anyway, esp not on linux.

We checked what is done with Alt and ActualText and such and decided that it made no sense to keep trial and erroring. Okular can show the embedded xml blob fine.

So at that time we settled on adding the serialized formula as ActualText because that at least gave no errors in validators. We explicitly decided not to flag /math as Formula because that gave validating issues with complex formulas that have non-math inside. (We expect that by llm will be able to interpret a '/math' tag some day, why not.)

So, from our perspective, we try to make sure something validates, add as much structure as possible / reasonable, then wait till the viewers that we use catch up (maybe they do when all that tagging dust has settled and standards are stable) and then pick up the thread when we know how to adapt.

In the meantime users can finetune mapping as they like, but we don't want to be held responsbile for a mess. After all users know what they coded and want out of it. As said before, tagging is not that complex to support. The only condition it that we don't want to cripple context structure support by adapting to suboptimal situations.

So patience is your friend.

Hans

ps. For decades we now use as test a math content base that covers a lot of dutch education and we had to go from content mathml (nice) to openmath (mess) to presentational mathml (dropped from browsers) to asciimath (insufficient) to again a mix of presentational mathml (back in browsers) and asciimath to ... so we know a bit what we're dealing with here: multiple output from the same source (web as well as properly made up teacher driven math). Everything web related keeps changing, often in an oscillating way.

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