Math Societies' Author Guidelines for Preparing Accessible Mathematics Content

[Mitch Keller]

A colleague pointed me to this document entitled "Author Guidelines for Preparing Accessible Mathematics Content” put together by the American, European, and London Mathematical Societies as well as the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. 

It makes some useful comments about image descriptions and the use of color in images, but it also makes me a bit sad to see how it appears (reading between the lines) that they have opted to put journal staff time into doing awful things like manually tagging PDFs with “alt text” for equations rather than avoiding PDF as a primary format for the digital versions of their journal articles.

-- 
Mitch Keller
mi...@rellek.net

http://www.rellek.net/

[David W. Farmer]

The AMS recently (in December) created an accessibility advisory
group. I am one of the 5 mathematician in the group, and there also
are some AMS staff. The group has not yet had its official
first meeting, but those who were at JMM met for an hour. (Well,
more than an hour, which made me miss Matt B's presentation.)

When I was asked to joint the group, I observed that it was just
AMS and not a group of several organizations, and that concerned me.
Especially since producing accessible learning resources is one
of the looming issues, and the AMS is not the most education
focused organization. So at JMM I had some informal discussions
with people from a couple of other organizations. As I am not
the chair of the AMS committee, I viewed this as just information
gathering for myself and not an official activity of the committee.

The SIAM document Mitch shared was the result of a group of
math societies and publishers. I think the AMS was one of them.
I gather that some of the participants are absolutely wedded to the
idea that PDF is what they will keep producing, so PDF had to be the
focus of that document.

So that may be an example of: bringing everyone together and sharing
their knowledge and perspective, not necessarily having the optimal
outcome.

The AMS committee has a goal of producing a document which provides
useful/actionable guidance for instructors.

Some things have already become clear:

1) there are people who view teaching as a distraction from their
research mathematics, and they just want to be told how to quickly
do just enough to get their department head/dean off their back.

2) even for people enthusiastic about teaching, it is not viable to
only say "switch to PreTeXt".

3) there is a lot of legacy LaTeX which is tightly integrated with
various courses, particular ones with larger enrollment.

I will try to keep you informed on where the AMS group is going.
Please do not hesitate to share your thoughts, either directly to me
or on pretext-a11y.

Obviously I have to work with the committee to produce something of
use to a broad community, but equally obviously, the AMS is fully
aware of my involvement and advocacy for PreTeXt.

Regards,

David

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[Rob Beezer]

On 1/8/26 08:15, Mitch Keller wrote:
> It makes some useful comments about image descriptions and the use of color in
> images, but it also makes me a bit sad to see how it appears (reading between
> the lines) that they have opted to put journal staff time into doing awful
> things like manually tagging PDFs with “alt text” for equations rather than
> avoiding PDF as a primary format for the digital versions of their journal articles.

The AMS has released the code for the first of the three steps in their pipeline
for producing (accessible?) HTML and EPUB versions. As we might have guessed,
LaTeX gets converted into a dialect of XML. Maybe it would be better if they
just began with some other dialect of XML rather than LaTeX? ;-)

https://github.com/AmerMathSoc/texml

Rob

[Rob Beezer]

On 1/8/26 09:10, David W. Farmer wrote:
> 3) there is a lot of legacy LaTeX which is tightly integrated with
> various courses, particular ones with larger enrollment.

We've had some very solid efforts to automate the conversion of legacy LaTeX to
PreTeXt, from Oscar and David F, primarily. These have been deterministic.

I am very eager to explore other, seemingly non-determinisic, avenues that might
do as well or better. That'll be good for every student, but it will also
potentially increase the availability of accessible classroom materials (and more).

Rob