All, Lately, I've had a number of discussions with the director of disabled student services at our school regarding document preparation for the visually impaired. As a result of these discussions, I am a bit lost as how to proceed with the preparation of mathematics for the web and documents for my course content. I've paid a little attention to the develoment of MathML, but I've always said "Who wants to code like that?" whenever I look at examples. However, today I found: http://www.dessci.com/en/company/press/releases/040722.htm I now realize that software that reads web pages aloud it pretty important. But how do I, in my limited time, prepare documents for multiple purposes? Can I use Context to support all of our students at our school? Just how do I proceed? At a loss.
I am afraid your question is to vague to be answerable. Hence here are two pieces of information that might or might not be useful: i) Mathematica 5.1 can convert TeX to MathML, at least to some extent. So it should at least in principle be possible to convert carefully crafted TeX files to MathML + XML. I don't know whether one can make ConTeXt do that, too. If yes, I am sure it is better than what Mathematica can offer. ii) Proofread your web pages with lynx (text-only). If you need formulas, use jpegs/pngs that have as a textual description a text that will be read as you would read the formula (eg: sum of 1 over n square for n from 1 to infinity equals pi squared over 6) But, again, I am completely at loss when thinking about your request, which only shows how little we know and do. Let me know if you find some useful solutions. Matthias On Dec 14, 2004, at 1:51 PM, David Arnold wrote:
All,
Lately, I've had a number of discussions with the director of disabled student services at our school regarding document preparation for the visually impaired. As a result of these discussions, I am a bit lost as how to proceed with the preparation of mathematics for the web and documents for my course content.
I've paid a little attention to the develoment of MathML, but I've always said "Who wants to code like that?" whenever I look at examples. However, today I found:
http://www.dessci.com/en/company/press/releases/040722.htm
I now realize that software that reads web pages aloud it pretty important. But how do I, in my limited time, prepare documents for multiple purposes? Can I use Context to support all of our students at our school? Just how do I proceed?
At a loss. _______________________________________________ ntg-context mailing list ntg-context@ntg.nl http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
Matthias Weber wrote:
I am afraid your question is to vague to be answerable.
Hence here are two pieces of information that might or might not be useful:
i) Mathematica 5.1 can convert TeX to MathML, at least to some extent. So it should at least in principle be possible to convert carefully crafted TeX files to MathML + XML. I don't know whether one can make ConTeXt do that, too. If yes, I am sure it is better than what Mathematica can offer.
ii) Proofread your web pages with lynx (text-only). If you need formulas, use jpegs/pngs that have as a textual description a text that will be read as you would read the formula (eg: sum of 1 over n square for n from 1 to infinity equals pi squared over 6)
it all depends on where one starts: tex or xml; starting with pure tex, tex4ht may be a solution; on the other hand, when one starts with xml, one can use context to produce the pdf's and xst to make html documents. Once you get accurstomed to it, editing in xml is not that bad and for math, there are math(ml) editors to make the complex formulas. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
Hans et al, OK, some questions. You say "starting with pure tex," does this mean that if you start with Context, then tex4ht is not an option? Secondly, since I teach mathematics, anything I write is going to contain a *lot* of mathematics and a lot of figures (graphs, etc). Is XML and MATHML going to be painful in this case? How can I get started with a small project or example, so I can determine how to proceed? I think I can look at the latex followed by tex4ht direction myself, but I could use some help with the second method, xml to pdf via context and xml to html via xst. I really have no idea how to proceed with this direction. I could use some pointers, or even a small example, with math code and a metapost graph or two.
Matthias Weber wrote:
I am afraid your question is to vague to be answerable.
Hence here are two pieces of information that might or might not be useful:
i) Mathematica 5.1 can convert TeX to MathML, at least to some extent. So it should at least in principle be possible to convert carefully crafted TeX files to MathML + XML. I don't know whether one can make ConTeXt do that, too. If yes, I am sure it is better than what Mathematica can offer.
ii) Proofread your web pages with lynx (text-only). If you need formulas, use jpegs/pngs that have as a textual description a text that will be read as you would read the formula (eg: sum of 1 over n square for n from 1 to infinity equals pi squared over 6)
it all depends on where one starts: tex or xml; starting with pure tex, tex4ht may be a solution; on the other hand, when one starts with xml, one can use context to produce the pdf's and xst to make html documents.
Once you get accurstomed to it, editing in xml is not that bad and for math, there are math(ml) editors to make the complex formulas.
Hans
----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
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participants (4)
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darnold＠northcoast.com -
David Arnold
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Hans Hagen -
Matthias Weber