NIST Developed Software to Make Scientific and Technical Documents Easier to Read
The growing reliance on the Internet for education information makes it important to give equal access to young people with impairments. While many find it intimidatingly difficult to read math and physics formulas in engineering papers, others have trouble viewing them as reading materials in the first place.
The good news is that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a tool to make these types of papers easier to read for people with visual disabilities.
The tool, which NIST calls LaTeXML, can read a LaTeX source file. It can also build an alternate document that it can convert into HTML. Actually, it has already been adopted in a major way, as NIST’s LaTeXML was the tool used in building the online version of the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions.
How NIST’s LaTeXML Works
Generally, new research papers are distributed as Portable Document Format (PDF) files, which many find difficult to read. Yet Bruce Miller, a physicist at NIST who specializes in math software, asserts that using PDF as media is a mismatch for formula presentation. According to Miller PDF cannot be easily repurposed for use in another form of media to make the formulas legible in other screens like smartphones or tablets.
Since the 1990s, HTML was used to convert a typical format to make the content of a webpage more accessible and usable to all, particularly those who have reading disabilities. HTML can adjust the layout, look and behavior of the text displayed by research papers, but it depends on the context.
Modern HTML now includes extensions, that permit webpages to “re-flow” and take form in another size. In doing so, text automatically adjusts and repositions itself in order to fit the new boundaries of a device screen. Modern HTML also makes it possible for a machine to read math formulas aloud. Such a capability gives access even to those who cannot read the text themselves.
In light of certain limitations, Miller encountered problems in creating digital versions of more than a thousand pages of NIST’s highly revered Handbook of Mathematical Functions as the documents were prepared by way of LaTex.
LaTex, by the way, is a document preparation process using high-quality typesetting. LaTex as it is, uses a system ideal for preparing medium-to-large scientific or technical documents.
Nevertheless, as a solution to the problem of converting NIST’s massive Handbook of Mathematical Functions, Miller developed the software called LaTeXML. The software permitted the conversion of LaTex-prepared source documents into HTML files.