Hi

Summary: Obstacles to accessible TeX this Thursday 12 Aug, 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time.
Links to 8 accessibility talks at recent TeX conference. Topics for TeX Hour, to the end of August.

At the TeX Conference last weekend there were 8 talks that focussed on accessibility. I think that's a record. The subject of the TeX Hour this Thursday is "Obstacles to Accessible TeX". This includes technical, social and human problems. Sharing experience and a fair partnership between blind and sighted are crucial for avoiding and removing obstacles.

One of the talks is a 30 minute conversation between Jonathan Godfrey and Jana Schroeder,  both of whom are blind. I had the honor of facilitating this conversation.  Even if you don't go to the TeX Hour, I think it's well worth listening to. It's available at

Here are the TeX Hour details:

Date and time: Thursday 12 August, 6.30 to 7.30pm UK time.
UK time now: https://time.is/UK.
Zoom URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09
Meeting ID: 785 5125 5396
Passcode: knuth

The URLs of all 8 talks are below, in the Appendix. I particularly recommend the talk on tactile mathematics by Kolesnikov, Maneki, Cantino, Beezer, and Volker Sorge

TeX Hours are always Thursday 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time. Future TeX Hours are 
Thursday 19 Aug: XML to TeX to PDF - when PDF is one of many rendering of XML
Thursday 26 Aug: Portable TeX Documents - reducing and resolving dependencies of TeX source

with best regards

Jonathan

Appendix: Links to the 8 accessibility talks at 2021 TeX Conference

Andreas Papasalouros & Antonis Tsolomitis
latex2nemeth: A direct LaTeX-to-Braille Transcribing Tool

Ulrike Fischer
On the road to tagged PDF: about StructElem, Marked Content, PDF/A and squeezed Bärs

Frank Mittelbach
Taming the beast — Advances in paragraph tagging with pdfTeX and XeTeX

Jana Schroeder and Jonathan Godfrey ( host Jonathan Fine)
Code and math in the dark

Keiran Harcombe & Boris Veytsman 
Creating TeXLive VPAT statement

Alexei Kolesnikov, Al Maneki, Michael Cantino, Rob Beezer, Volker Sorge
Tactile mathematics: Enabling Sighted and Blind People to Share Mathematical Experience

Michael Nolan, Dr. Todd Pagano, Suhas Chikkanaravangala Vijayakumar, Rahul Jaiswal
Publishing for all: Using LaTeX to help improve the accessibility of an open-access journal
[This talk is split over 2 URLs.]

Ross Moore & Tom Price
Accessible research reports; case study, including acronyms and glossaries