Session 6: Accessibility and Inclusive Design

@oct19-cohort, hope you’ve all had a good break (at least one from our sessions if nothing else)! We’re back tomorrow at 1pm ET to talk about Accessibility and Inclusive Design.

As per usual, the slides and handouts below will be referenced during the session and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License:

  1. Handout: Accessibility and Inclusive Design
  2. Slides: Accessibility and Inclusive Design

I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow. :smiley:

Hi - I am presenting a workshop at a conference tomorrow at the same time as our meeting so I will not be able to join in.

D

No worries, thanks for letting us know. Good luck with the workshop! :slight_smile: Hope things are moving smoothly on your project and that the CFPs have been well-received.

Thanks very much, all for the conversation today about accessibility – and especially Amanda @wentworth (hoping that I’ve tagged the right person!), your contributions about math. I thought that we had exhausted the options internally regarding accessibility and math. It turns out that we have not.

So, I’ll be looking into MathML for accessibility to see if it is a viable option for our next project in place of what we’ve been doing (as well as looking to see if we’ve already looked into it!)

And, while its more work, I’d rather do this right. Thanks for the additional info!
Anita

Hi Anita,

I really hope that you’ll have good luck with MathML in solving this issue! I have a pretty limited understanding of it, as I’ve only interacted with it in terms of converting Lumen math courses into Pressbooks. I think that, in general, math has a long way to go to be fully accessible in PDFs, so there truly might not be an ideal solution at this point. Fingers crossed that some passionate mathy/techy minds will come together to solve this soon! Keep us updated!

Thanks Anita and Amanda, and everyone else who was there today!

@alazear — sorry you had to leave part way, but I did see your message and look forward to hearing whether you have any questions or comments about this topic.

Anita, I’m glad you’ve found a potential solution with the math book. I wanted to point to the section on Math in Pressbooks (in the Pressbooks User Guide) as this contains some specific information about Accessibility of the different equation authoring tools. Hope this helps until, as Amanda says, a more ideal solution can be found. Let us know how you go!

I’m listing out the resources shared in the chat or mentioned during the session:

As usual, the chat transcript is available for anyone who wanted to reference it.

Lastly, I wanted to remind those on the call and ask those who weren’t to please fill out our Rebus Community survey (open this month). Since this has been our sixth session, and marks the halfway point, I’d also love to hear some of your feedback. If you could share one thing each that you would like to Keep, Start, and Stop, that will help me revise the remaining six sessions and facilitate the conversation so we’re all getting value out of these interactions! All comments are welcome, so please respond below with your thoughts. :smiley:

Thank you both @apurva and @wentworth ! While my question is not related to the current book, I am under no illusions (at a Polytechnic nonetheless) that I can escape from learning about math and accessibility.

I reached out to my colleague in Accessible Technology. She said she’s been doing more training on LaTeX (one author’s primary choice for writing) and accessibility. She said that “the current recommendation is to use a LaTeX library that has the ability to export the equations as Math ML” and that the "two [LaTeX] libraries we should consider using for this type of work are:

  1. accessibility.sty, https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accessibility (proper PDF tagging)
  2. axessibility.sty, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3241029 (proper math tagging)"
    I’ll let you know how it goes!
    Anita

No escape from learning generally, as far as I see it. :smiley:

Thanks for the links to the two libraries! I look forward to hearing how you get on.

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Hi all - I just posted more details on the new features I promo’ed for you last week. Enjoy!

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