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I want to be careful that this is not perceived as "calling out", but this is an important issue that is easy to gloss over, and it matters. Please don't think about this as minimal effort to generate minimal compliance. https://twitter.com/JHB_econ/status/1346861452376870914
My intellectually curious 14 year old lost the last of his functional vision last year. This past summer he went through the difficult process of transitioning to braille/screen readers/audio as his only way to access the world.
Together we learned just how unfriendly much of the digital world is to screen readers. Pop-ups, nested menus, bad PDFs, much of Google Docs, all present an essentially insurmountable hurdle all over the web.
He was unable to compete in a national math competition because there was no screen readable option. He cannot watch many things with Audio Description because ad displays don't like screen readers.
There are costs to making things screen reader compatible. But there are also costs to not doing so. Think of all the efficiency gains in economics in the last decade as more and more public data sets became machine readable instead of having to be transcribed.
There is a solution here: fix LaTex so that it automatically generates screen reader friendly (not just compatible!) PDFs.
Any of my friends out there who use LaTex, you can do good in the world by working toward this goal.
Any of my friends out there who use LaTex, you can do good in the world by working toward this goal.
A final note on why being screen reader friendly, not just compatible is so important: visually impaired people do not know what they are not seeing. We already regularly encounter issues where N gets something wrong because weird formatting means he stopped "reading" too soon.
