Helping instructors make their LMS materials accessible

[Oscar Levin]

I got an email from a colleague in Epidemiology asking for advice on making course materials accessible, when they contain equations.  This led me to two thoughts.

1. We should collect the best resources and guides for doing this sort of thing and keep them in one place that we can easily reference and share.  I thought I could do a blog post on mathtech.org, but I would love to get suggestions of good resources.  So please share here if you can.

2. PreTeXt is obviously the correct choice for authoring course materials that will be accessible.  But for folks who don't want to commit to making an entire course website (even if hosted on gh pages), it would be nice to output something they can use on Canvas.  Would getting a standalone html file that you can upload be useful (Canvas does support this and display the file, which you could link to)?  What do other LMSs do with html files?  

An alternative to the stand along html: what if PreTeXt output plain text but with math inside appropriate `\(...\)`, which if you past into a Canvas page, produces mathjax?  Do other LMSs do something similar? 

Love to hear your all thoughts.

[Mark Fitch]

On 1/23/2025 8:00 AM, Oscar Levin wrote:
> An alternative to the stand along html: what if PreTeXt output plain
> text but with math inside appropriate `\(...\)`, which if you past
> into a Canvas page, produces mathjax?  Do other LMSs do something
> similar?

Blackboard does display LaTeX code, though I have never checked how it
does it. Generally I limit reliance on this feature (better to link out).