Making accessible research materials in STEM fields

Motivation

Where are we now?

General lack of alt-text
Limitations of LaTeX itself
“Culture of PDF”
Little awareness of the problem

I'll argue that the current state of publishing in STEM has unintentionally overlooked the struggles of people who need assistive technology to consume visual content. What do I mean by that? [CLICK] Well, I've never submitted a paper to a journal and been asked to provide any sort of alt-text or image description for my figures; I don't know of any major journals with requirements for that, and some authors think it's unfair to ask them to include them (but, in my humble opinion, it's not unfair in the slightest). [CLICK] Next, beyond journal requirements, there are challenges and limitations baked into LaTeX, the markup most of us use to submit journal articles. PDF does have some support for accessibility features, but LaTeX can't yet take full advantage of them. (Stay tuned, though, as there is a project in the works to develop a LaTeX-to-HTML compiler.) [CLICK] Speaking of PDF, it's a format built around the idea of printing onto physical paper, but really when was the last time you printed an article on actual paper to read it? Journals consider PDF to be the official version of an article, with any HTML version at a distinctly lower quality; and yet, based on the way people actually consume digital articles today, this seems backwards. [CLICK] Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this just isn't an issue many people are aware of, because blind and low-vision STEM majors can get pushed out of their fields early on as it becomes harder and harder to find accessible content. What might that look like?

What's the harm?

If my screen reader doesn't understand LaTeX, I can't read back my own equations as I write them.
I want to be a peer reviewer, but I can't review figures without asking a sighted colleague to describe them to me.
Having written materials processed by disability services takes so long that I can't read the latest papers in my field.
I spent so long scanning textbooks that I finally changed majors.

Where do we go?

Normalize adding alt-text, even to images that “don't matter” (figures in homework assignments, etc.)
Advocate for journals to require alt-text and have authors sign off on HTML versions of articles
Consider transitioning from LaTeX to HTML/EPUB

I hope I've convinced you that this is a worthwhile issue to be addressing; plus, you attended this talk, so I'm assuming you already thought that to some degree. So let's move on to what steps can be taken now to improve things for future STEM students, researchers, and academics. [CLICK] First of all, and a suggestion I really liked that was made at the forum, we need to normalize putting alt-text on everything so that it becomes as second-nature as labeling your plot axes. Writing good alt-text is a skill, but it's one worth learning; even sighted people can benefit from more verbose or descriptive captions on figures in papers. [CLICK] Second, I'd argue that part of making HTML versions of articles better is having authors sign off on them first. I've noticed in particular that math in HTML articles tends to be poor-quality, but there's just no good reason for that, as we'll see in a few minutes. [CLICK] Finally, we need to consider if LaTeX and PDF need to continue to be the main vehicle for disseminating academic research. As you've probably guessed from my title, that's what I'm going to focus on today.

Benefits of HTML

Form vs. function


<p>The HTML "p" tag indicates that this text is a paragraph. It says nothing about what that paragraph should look like, just that the intent is to present a paragraph.</p>


\noindent We can all think of times we add ``tweaks'' to our \LaTeX\ source inline to make it look a certain way. \thisisabadidea{because the content now contains styling}, which can make equations difficult to parse --- think about manual spacing tweaks: \; \! \,

Form vs. function


<p class="no-indent">HTML encourages separating purely stylistic elements into external stylesheets. Rendering HTML without styling affects presentation, not substance.</p>

LaTeX vs. MathML

Screen readers were not designed to interpret LaTeX math on-the-fly.
MathML is an XML-conforming markup that is more descriptive of math content, at the price of being much more verbose.


<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="block"><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo>−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>c</mi></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></math>

LaTeX vs. MathML


<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="block"><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo>−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>c</mi></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></math>

x = \frac{- b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4 a c}}{2 a}

MathML can be just as aesthetically pleasing as LaTeX math, and much more accessible!

Hands-on with NVDA: LaTeX

What did you notice?

Greek letters replaced by Latin?
Superscripts missing entirely?
Long subscripts merged to variable name?

Hands-on with NVDA: MathML

What went better?

Greek letters read correctly
Superscripts, superscripts, and punctuation made clear
Inline equations read correctly

Available tools

Making accessible colormaps

Converting LaTeX math to MathML

Converting LaTeX articles to HTML

Call to action

What can you do today?

Stop tweaking your LaTeX math; this only makes it harder to parse!
Provide static Jupyter notebooks; the dynamic ones are virtually unusable with a screen reader
Use automated accessibility checkers to find solutions to common problems in your content
- Microsoft Office accessibility checker for Word, etc.
- Firefox and Chrome accessibility checker for webpages
- IBM accessibility checker for web apps

What's left to do?

Standardizing best practices for figure descriptions, including those for interactive, dynamic, and video figures
Developing more advanced tooling for authors to migrate existing content
Better awareness of blind and low-vision colleagues' struggles and recommendations for improving
Talk to people!