Re: Org mode export accessibility

["T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>]

Thanks for looping me in.
I'm not subscribed to emacs-orgmode --- so feel free to forward if you
find the thoughts below materially useful.

As  a long-term org-mode user --- and an even  longer  term TeX
user: here are some thoughts:

1. Accessibility as word used in isolation has now become mostly
   meaningless, to be concrete one has to ask "Accessibility to whom"? 

2. So in the following, everything I say is with respect to users with
   visual impairments.

3. It's incorrect to define "Accessibility" in terms of a specific
   user access tool or technology -- that usage is marketing jargon
   for a specific Access Solution like a screenreader --- so I refrain in general from
   defining this in terms of Screenreaders.

With those meta-thoughts out of the way:

A: Org-generated documents are mostly well-structured documents, and
not in general a user-interface e.g. (WebApp); so  with regard to export --
either HTML or LaTeX/PDF ---  ARIA is mostly irrelevant.

B: The LaTeX->PDF pipeline *can* produce tagged PDF with respect to
document structure eg. Sectioning, but only if you use pdflatex or
pdftex i.e. LaTeX/Tex->dvi->[ps]->pdf is lossy with respect to
structure present in the markup; this is a short-coming of DVI which
predates  the thought of document structure making it through to the
output.

C: pdftex and pdflatex were built in the late 90's by a student in
Prague (Hanu Than? from memory) --- only reason I know this is that I
got Adobe to fund that project when at Adobe in the 90's. It's a very
good piece of work that essentially uses PDF directly as the "Device
Independent" format rather than the original dvi. DVI as designed in
the 70's was device-independent for the time, ie it did not hardwire
printer controls and could be mapped to various print mechanisms. For
the 90s, by which time Document Structure meant a lot more than being
some version of inkjet printer driver independent, the afore mentioned
project used PDF as the Device-Independent format --- and
leveraged the Tagged PDF bits from PDF 1.4 to achieve the result.

D: All that said, it is likely still easier to go from org->HTML
directly and produce content that is easier to machine-process  ---
rather than go through one more level of indirection via LaTeX and
PDF; however there may well be additional constraints in a publication
workflow, e.g. publisher wants to only publish final-form -- and yes,
in this case, HTML and PDF are both final-form.

E: Finally, note that in (D) I said "machine processable" not
"Accessible"; machine-processable is a pre-requisite to "repurpose "
what you publish, and making  that result usable by different user
communities is a direct consequence of suche machine-processability.


Hope this helps.

-- 
--Raman 
Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
♉ Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  🦮

--

Thanks,

--Raman(I Search, I Find, I Misplace, I Research)
♉ Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  🦮