· on the web
This started out last fall and is mostly a quick observation on screenreader behaviors and turned into some meandering thoughts about "linearizable" SVGs. The other day (month/season/year), I found myself thinking about a text role in ARIA. Not exactly original but at least I was thinking about it in the context of SVG. So technically I was thinking about a role for the (woefully unmaintained)…
Links with complex content are a long standing accessibility challenge, essentially ever since HTML opened up the a tag to contain virtually anything else. Equation layout is not accessible and there is no single ARIA pattern that will help you make it so. So you need to adjust your approach as the situation requires - and, above all, as your users require. One of my old sturdy helpers (to make…
For the past, uhm, decade? (wut?) I've been helping the AMS to build its tooling for TeX to HTML conversion. The first two parts were made open-source in 2022 (texml) and 2023 (texml-to-html). And yet, I've never written about them once. Let's change that. There are plenty of tool for TeX-to-HTML conversion, so why another? The reason is fairly trivial: it already existed. The AMS had done some of…
After sharing the first interesting problem I had run into , Sam and I spent a few more days working on this experiment. I had hoped to finish this write up before attending JMM 2024 but life was more important. In any case, time for an update. If you want to skip to the end, here's a link to the (now public) repository . You can just browse through the git history if you prefer - I stopped at…
So here on the blog (and more relevantly at work) I've been rolling out MathJax v4 after it hit its third beta in July. MathJax v4 is chock full of fixes, features and even a tiny bit of finally-getting-rid-of-stuff. To close off the year, I thought I'd sum up my personal highlights. Here's my (obviously totally personal and biased) short list. STIX Two (and fonts in general) I've been using the…
So a while back - checks notes - ahem , 6 years ago Sam gifted me with some of his precious time to do a fun little experiment around writing mathematical long form using the web. With "using the web", I don't mean writing markdown or LaTeX (or whatever) and converting that to HTML. Instead, I had this weird idea that we could actually use the web platform - HTML, CSS, JS - to write content.…
I started volunteering at an elementary school this year, helping kids learning to read. I'm not an elementary school teacher (and no amount of university teaching would save me) but luckily anyone who can read can help; it's all about patience and the simple reality of being present for a child. One of the textbooks typesets syllables in different colors to help the inexperienced readers. This…
This will possibly be another piece that will get updates in the future. Actually, I hope not but we'll see. This, above all, is for me. For me to gather my thoughts one (hopefully) last time. For me to deal with stupid garbage which has accumulated over the years. As for you, dear reader, I don't know if this is for you. I didn't write it for the handful of experts in this area; maybe for someone…
July 2022. I started this piece well over three years ago (some time before June 2019 in any case). As it came along grew out of proportion, I had tried turning it into three pieces but never got far enough to start publishing it. Then I tried to recombine them (some time in 2020?) in the hopes of finally pushing them out but didn't finish the last few pieces. Then 2021 was worse than 2020 and now…
This is the first time I skipped writing for over a year, I think. Well, good riddance, 2021. You took too much. I meant to write about this back in February, right after the conference, traveling south for a couple calm days with friends. But then a fucking war started, a few hundred kilometers away and it all seemed absurd. It still seems absurd. It is terrifying and horrible. War is the most…