- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 11:50:35 +0000 (GMT)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> One of our accessibility-course delegates has come up with something = > that has me stumped at this stage: they want to represent greek letters = For heavy maths, I think I would suggest the current best approach would be to author in TeX or eqn/troff formats and provide both source and PDF versions. These are mark up languages that are designed for maths, if reasonably laid out, will degrade to plain text in the same way that HTML does (HTML seems to have been influenced by them in some ways). (I suspect that they are actually less noisy than Math-ML when treated as plain text.) If HTML is mandated, for heavy maths, I would suggest capturing an image of the relevant part of the PDF page and including the TeX or eqn source as alt text, although one might consider using the Greek entities, rather than the original names for those characters. I suspect that, even if Math-ML gets widespread support in visual browsers, it will not be supported in assistive technology except as raw XML. While it may make machine processing and scaleable visual presentation easier, it may not have much impact on accessiblity. Of course, if browsers implemented HTML 4, you could start with a MATH-ML <object>, fallback to a TeX <object>, fallback to a GIF <object>, and finally fall back to "plain" text.
Received on Saturday, 9 February 2002 10:40:28 UTC