For decades, scientists creating papers that feature mathematical formulas have generally used LaTeX, a language designed to produce printed pages in static form, such as PDFs. A tool developed at NIST can turn these papers into web pages, which can be viewed more easily on different devices and satisfy long-standing requests from readers with visual accessibility needs. The preprint server arXiv has begun using the tool to offer its millions of papers in both PDF and webpage formats.
Credit: N. Hanacek/NIST
The complex formulas in physics, math and engineering papers might be intimidatingly difficult reading matter for some, but there are many people who have trouble merely seeing them in the first place. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created a tool that makes these papers easier on the eyes for those with visual disabilities, and it’s about to be adopted in a major way.
The tool, which converts one commonly used format for displaying math formulas into another, could help make the latest and greatest research papers accessible to all. Most new research papers are distributed as PDF files, which many people in the research community have difficulty reading.
According to the World Health Organization, more than a quarter of the world’s population has a diagnosed vision impairment, and Yale’s Center for Dyslexia and Creativity reports that in the United States 20% of people have dyslexia. In a recent study of scientific papers distributed as PDFs, researchers found that only 2.4% of the documents they sampled satisfied their accessibility criteria.
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