Math-heavy research papers will be easier to view online thanks to the NIST tool
LaTeX, a language intended to produce printed pages in static form, such as PDFs, has been used by scientists for decades to create papers that include mathematical formulas. A tool created at NIST can convert these papers into web pages that can be viewed more easily on various devices and fulfill persistent requests from readers who require visual accessibility. The tool has been used by the preprint server arXiv to make its millions of papers available in both PDF and HTML formats.
N. Hanacek/NIST for credit
Some people may find the complex formulas in physics, math, and engineering papers intimidatingly challenging to read, but many people find it difficult to even begin to understand them. The National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ) has developed a tool that will soon be widely used to make these papers more palatable to people with visual impairments.
The tool could make the most recent and outstanding research papers available to everyone by converting one widely used format for displaying math formulas into another. The majority of new research papers are distributed as PDF files, which many researchers find challenging to read.
More than 25 % of people worldwide have vision impairments that have been diagnosed, and 20 % of Americans have dyslexia, according to the World Health Organization and Yale’s Center for Dyslemia and Creativity. Only 2.4 % of the documents they sampled in a recent study of scientific papers distributed as PDFs met their accessibility requirements, according to the researchers.  ,
Bruce Miller, a trained physicist who specializes in math software, said,” If you’re not someone who has struggled to publish math papers all your life, you might wonder why this is an issue.” ” PDFs appear fantastic on the printed page.” However, the discrepancy can be painful if you want math formulas to read aloud or be legible on a screen that is n’t the same size as your tablet or phone. PDFs are difficult to convert to other media.
Typically, how are PDFs created? A scientist will typically render the formulas in the language LaTeX ( pronounced “lay-tech” ) or one of its closely related languages when creating a paper manuscript that uses many of them. Although LaTeX is made to produce printed pages in static form, it has been in use since the 1980s and is well known for its high-quality typesetting.
HTML has been used by website designers since the 1990s, allowing them to modify the displayed text’s appearance, behavior, and layout based on the context. Readers with vision impairments want this feature, so if you’ve ever dragged a webpage to another size and watched the text smoothly reposition itself to fit within the new rectangle’s boundaries.
Modern HTML includes extensions that allow for the “re-flow” type as well as the machine reading of math formulas for those who are unable to read the text themselves. Because of these qualities, HTML is perfect for producing text that is understandable, but there has n’t been a practical way to convert LaTeX to HTML in years. Miller struggled with this because he needed to find a way to digitize the more than 1,000 pages of the venerable Handbook of Mathematical Functions from NIST.  ,
LaTeX was allegedly converted to webpages at the time, but none of them functioned properly, he claimed. Let’s try to make our own, I reasoned.
LaTeXML was the resulting NIST tool, which reads a source file of LaTex and creates an HTML representation of the document. The online Digital Library of Mathematical Functions was made possible by LaTeXML, and several years later, the managers of a significant online resource realized it could also be of assistance.  ,
This tool is arXiv ( pronounced “archive” ), a collection of academic articles that have n’t yet been released in scholarly journals. More than 2 million articles are currently available for free viewing and downloading as PDFs on arXiv, which is run by Cornell University. The server has evolved into a well-known way station where researchers can publish their findings and discuss them with their peers before making them public.
Only 30 % of users who rely on assistive technology can access all the research they require on their own, according to a survey conducted in 2022. According to Shamsi Brinn, lead researcher on arXiv’s accessibility report and manager of the HTML papers project, the same survey found that PDF formatting is the biggest barrier.  ,
With arXiv’s use of the LaTeXML converter, that will change, according to Brinn. The server will produce HTML versions of documents and add them to the PDF download link.
The first paper will be converted on a rolling basis by the arXiv repository in December 2023. According to Joe Zesski, assistant director of the Northeast ADA Center, the action is part of a larger trend to demand accessible web and electronic information. The modification will make information available to young scientists who have grown up using electronic resources as well as assisting the scientific community in adhering to the White House’s updated policy on making federally funded research freely available.
According to Zesski, there is a growing demand for equal access by and for young people with disabilities as well as an increasing reliance on the internet and electronic information in education. It’s crucial to take action to make the information that students will need to access accessible and useful to them.
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