11:25 AM
If accessibility weren't an issue then I would advocate for using MathJax a lot in places where it's needed at all. E.g., if you have a formula with numbers and variables in it that needs MathJax-ing, then in purely aesthetic terms you should also MathJax individual instances of the variables and relevant numbers in the rest of your text.
Obviously (1) none of that applies if you don't have mathematics that requires MathJax in the first place -- if all you're doing is saying "if 4x+3y=7 and 2x+3y=5 then what are x and y?" you can write that OK without MathJax and probably should. (Though the equations will look better with MathJax, and then the argument above would say that aesthetically you should MathJax the isolated x and y too.)
And (2) accessibility is generally more important than aesthetics for obvious reasons.
But here's a question. Suppose you are writing something that does contain some mathematics complicated enough that you need MathJax for it. Someone who's using a screen reader that can't cope with MathJax is then going to be missing something essential. So maaaybe -- it depends on what they can and do do about that situation -- maybe once you've got any nontrivial MathJax there's not much accessibility argument against adding more.
If the situation is that someone with a non-MathJax-savvy screen reader who encounters a lump of MathJax can then launch some other bit of software that can interpret it for them, but that doing so for three bits of MathJax is 3x as much work as doing it for one, then accessibility means not only avoiding MathJax when you can but also minimizing how often you use it.
Likewise if the situation is that their screen reader will say what the MathJax says but in some form that's unpleasant or difficult to make sense of: you're paying a price every time it happens.
On the other hand, if the screen reader just gives up entirely and there's no realistic alternative, then something to which something that needs MathJax is essential is just inaccessible and won't be made any more or less so by MathJaxing individual variables and the like.
Or if what happens is that the screen-reader user calls someone else over and says "hey, could you read this out for me?". Once they're doing it at all, there's probably little extra cost to having them do it for the whole thing. (Depends on the details of the thing, of course.)
(There are other costs to using MathJax that don't have much to do with accessibility, or at least with accessibility-for-people-with-impairments. For instance, if your network connection is slow then MathJax will cause a bit of pain.)
Anyway, @bobble your PSA is pretty good. I have a few suggestions. 1. Show both the input and the output for at least some of the cases where you're comparing MathJax with non-MathJax, so people can see how to do it. 2. In many cases the non-MathJax way is "just use the special characters that are part of the Unicode repertoire" and it might be worth giving, or linking to, some advice on how to enter those characters. 3. Have you verified that all those things come out OK [... continues]
... in common screen readers? I'd be a little concerned about whether subscripts and superscripts come out right, and slightly concerned about whether some less-common characters might turn into something like "Unicode character 20F3". (I have not checked what Unicode character 20F3 actually is.)
4. As you can see above, I'm not very sure how strong a case there is for minimizing MathJax in a post that has to use it anyway, as opposed to avoiding MathJax completely if you can, but it may be worth saying a few words about that issue.
5. It feels a bit odd to go from "... a wonky extension which doesn't work with more complicated math" straight to "so don't use $1$ where 1 will do", since that's pretty much the least complicated thing you can do in MathJax. It feels to me like almost all the advice in the PSA doesn't help in the case where someone has a screen reader with a wonky extension that's OK with simple things but falls over with more complicated ones -- because the more complicated cases are [... continues]
... exactly the cases where there isn't really any alternative to MathJax in the first place. So the advice "when you can write something adequately without MathJax, do so" isn't going to make anyone turn complicated formulae into plain text, because plain text isn't an adequate representation for complicated formulae, which is why we have mathematical notation in the first place.
I guess pretty much any formula can be turned into prose if you really have to, but the result is going to be super-unpleasant to read for everyone.
Less of a question than just...
I'm disappointed.
You state:
We understand that this is a change some may be disappointed by and that it may seem to indicate that we don't believe that younger members of our communities can be great moderators - over the years we have known many mods who started...
Affix riddles are really versatile; they come in all forms.
I have an issue with the tag wiki of the affix-riddle tag. Here is the current description:
An affix riddle is a specific type of riddle that uses wordplay, specifically describing multiple affixes (usually prefix-infix-suffix), to clue...
Sweden
Ashton Kutcher
salmon
dogs
Emma stone
Germany
elk
Chicago
Miami
Margot Robbie
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countryside
