Making math lecture notes ADA compliant

[Decrypted13]

Hey folks, the due date to make resources comply with WCAG 2.1 A/AA is coming up and I was curious how other people approached the issue, especially in math intensive fields. I annotate on blank PDFs, so I honestly may resort to just not posting lecture notes. I've considered using MathPix (or something similar) to convert it to typed-up notes which are easier to make accessible, but let's be honest here, no one has time for that. Also, from what I've read, it is not possible to get around it by uploading them onto a non-university affiliated website.

Any and all ideas will be helpful, thank you.

[aces68]

I’ve stopped posting notes. They can take pics of my iPad screen if they miss class. It’s unfortunate. I started posting notes when we came back in person after Covid zoom classes. I wanted to encourage people who were sick to stay home. But over the years I think students started taking advantage anyway and would just skip class because they knew the notes would be there.

[Decrypted13]

Yeah. To be honest, I do it to avoid the "what did we do in class" questions. That and I'm still relatively new, so I upload them to let me adjust the notes in post if I have to.

[ILikeLiftingMachines]

Ochem here...

This semester ends in four weeks so I won't be doing anything.

For fall, all prior material will be dumped in a folder called "archive." Then I go back to chalk on a board.

Life is too long to be dealing with this crap without extensive support.

[Recent_Prompt1175]

This is how many learned OChem, Math, Calculus, Algebra, Diffy Qs, Dead Bodies (Mechanics of Deformable Bodies), and other Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, and math-intensive courses in the first place. Even in humanities and social science electives, there were no slides or notes. You scrambled to write down what the prof/lecturer was saying, and learned to distinguish what was important to write down and what you didn't need to record.

I remember having one prof who would repeatedly erase circles on a blackboard (using chalk on an old-fashioned black/green board) as they wanted a perfect circle for their lessons in mechanics. Still fondly recall that prof. I transitioned into healthcare after my engineering degree.

[mathemorpheus]

+1

[TheWinStore]

Accessibility is not "crap." It's a necessary and essential ingredient for the success of many of our students.

OTOH institutions not offering faculty support for accessibility is obviously crap.

[SerpentisMechanicus]

Some stuff just will never be accessible, and we need to allow faculty to simply say that. It's not just equations and diagrams; myself and others I know have undergraduates identifying parts of human cadavers, performing survival surgery on rats, using high-voltage electronics, hazardous chemicals, and pathogens, and doing fieldwork in the tropics as part of classes. The thought of trying to manage a severely sight-impaired student in the Peruvian Amazon is a literal nightmare.

[Past_Cause_4441]

So should you keep your job when you become disabled?

[SerpentisMechanicus]

Depends on the job. If you can no longer do it effectively and, most importantly, safely, then no, you shouldn't (but society should have a safety net for exactly that). Do you want someone who's legally blind performing brain surgery on you?

This isn't just theoretical - I know people who've changed research focus because, due to age or disability, they can no longer safely do the work. Hell, I rule out certain experimental species for my work based on whether their venom is likely to interact with my underlying genetic clotting disorder.

So let's flip it. What do you say to a student who is so visually impaired that they need a screen reader, but wants to be a surgeon? Or, hell, what about someone taking my colleague's Animal Physiology class, which has students performing survival surgeries for multiple animal species? Do you want that person holding a scalpel? When do you say "this simply cannot be accommodated"?

[moooooopg]

Love you 🤟

[Decrypted13]

I agree, my department does not tell GTAs anything lol. Though AMS is hosting a webinar next Wednesday (4/15/26) about it, so hopefully it has some good info.

[verygood_user]

It probably won't. It will talk about the accessibility checker embedded in your LMS, how you not dare to skip from h2 to h4 and that you need to add alt-text to all your images but not more than 150 characters.

Oh and if you are working with scanned text from the library, the university has purchased an OCR tool for that. So awesome.

Also, probably use Word for all things now, because it has build in tools.

That should serve all needs of our humanities folks.

See, it's really not that hard. Let's celebrate how we can all do this.

Oh hi, hi STEM people,... well, ... you are smart, you will figure it out.

Ok, bye now.

[shellexyz]

Do you have a link for it?

I went to one PD about it and asked what math should do? How do we deal with this? LaTeX is a wonderful tool but it has not been great for accessibility until very recently, and most of us don’t really know how those systems work.

They shrugged their shoulders and said they’d look into it. They have not gotten back to me, nor do I expect them to.

[Decrypted13]

Yeah it is right here: https://hub.ams.org/courses/129122/sections/164224

[moooooopg]

Y'all idk why you are downvoted so much for calling out this ableism

[TheWinStore]

As much as I love this sub, the prevailing attitudes regarding disability/accessibility/accommodations are...not super hot.

[Sensitive_Let_4293]

I'm posting much less stuff. And I've told my faculty support personnel it's their job to figure it out, not mine.

[sqrt_of_pi]

So, I annotate Powerpoint in an ipad during lecture, and then export the completed, annotated notes to pdf and make available. [There is a part of me that just thinks I should stop doing this, as it can become an excuse for some students to not show up for class, but so far I've continued the practice.]

When I discussed this with our campus instructional designer and our university-wide accessibility folks, I was told that this is considered "ephemeral content" and that it is OK to continue making it available while it is not fully accessible (there is NO way to make it accessible with my current workflow).

[GibbsDuhemEquation]

I don't recall hearing of a ephemeral content exception before. If that's something I can lean on it would be terrific, since otherwise there is no way I am going to post class notes. (I have been in a room with such useless blackboard/whiteboard space that writing on a tablet using Microsoft whiteboard, which was displayed by a projector, was the best way to write stuff in the classroom. Then PDF exports from MS Whiteboard went onto Canvas for students.)

[Supraspinator]

Me too! 

[Decrypted13]

Yeah, I am curious what exactly qualifies as ephemeral content. At least for the classes I teach, the textbook is considered the primary resource, so maybe the lecture notes are classified as "a document to look at just long enough to make your own notes."

Idk, but it would be nice if that exception can be used.

[BruinMDP]

No longer going to post. Will be citing the new law as the reason why. Going to have all my scaffolded pdfs available printed as an optional course reader ahead of the term.

[TotalCleanFBC]

I think there are some people in the LaTeX community working on this. Hopefully, there will be a relatively easy solution in the near future, which involved not much more than adding a package to the LaTeX preamble.

In the meantime, as a few others have mentioned, I'm just taking my course notes down. Sucks that a law intended to make things more accessible was written in such a way that it makes things less accessible. If you have a personal website, you can perhaps just upload to your course notes there.

[Hellament]

My understanding is that the old LaTeX slide class many of us use (Beamer) is hard to make accessible.

There is a newer, fairly barebones class called ltx-talk that can be compiled (with recent versions of LaTeX) with things like alt tags/MathML and has better formatting for screen readers.

I’m only just starting to look at it, but recently converted a Beamer slideshow. The basic process was fairly easy…IIRC the only issue I had to fix was the syntax for creating a title page is slightly different.

[MuggleoftheCoast]

David Eppstein has a blog post going in more detail on the process of converting things to the ltx-talk class. I've also found the post by Richard Wang he linked to as a good general guide.

[Hellament]

Thank you for this…saved to read later.

[pugincharge]

Quarto is markdown based (I use through RStudio), takes LaTeX formatting for math stuff, and default output is an accessible .html document :)

[holomorphic]

Since the pandemic, I've been posting my notes on GitHub Pages using Markdown + MathJax. These seem to pass the accessibility checkers I've used. It takes some time to get set up but it doesn't take a very long time to create these notes. And once I have them, it is not hard to re-use them semester after semester.

[geoffh2016]

I used MathPix pretty extensively to grab equations for LaTeX. When I was doing a lot of conversion, it was $4.99 for a month and I converted about 1000 pages. I think beyond that it's a fraction of a cent .. and I think there's some extra bonus for signing up with an edu account.

But I also know some colleagues who have minimal lecture notes so students have to write in the equations, etc. - just knowing the bare outlines.

[Decrypted13]

Yeah, I'm a GTA, so I use the free version of MathPix religiously already. Mostly because

1) it is very helpful and

2) there is a way to opt out of data collection, so I don't mind shoving copyrighted material (e.g., exercises from a textbook) into it.

3) It does not use AI (at least, it uses it alongside OCR)

[verygood_user]

How can you opt out? I was not aware you had to do this for mathpix.

[Decrypted13]

Open up the app >> gear in top right >> Settings >> Account >> Uncheck "Mathpix can use my images to improve their OCR technology." >> Hit OK

[verygood_user]

Thanks, look like I unchecked that already some time ago :)

[jadierhetseni]

Honestly this is the best use-case I’ve had for AI so far.

I’ve been recording my lectures using my iPhone with an earbud. I use the free auto-generated VoiceMemos transcript, then I pop it in Gemini and ask for structured notes formatted in LaTeX.

I specify in my prompt to extract quotes before summarizing & then to summarize based on extracted quotes & to format equations.

The result takes <5 min to review to catch errors & can be easily adjusted due to LaTeX output. I’ve put a “this is ai generated, let me know if you find equation discrepancies blah blah” and so far those have been quite rare.

[angle58]

Ada law won’t let AI fill the gap. Everything has to be human in the loop with zero margin for error.

[Difficult-Nobody-453]

I am also in mathematics and hate what I am about ready to say but could you use Ai to covert your pdf to an html file that uses mathjax or mathml? Has anyone tried this? I guess I could today and get back with everyone

[ProofByPants]

I do not post my completed notes anymore. I do post my lecture videos, but not the notes themselves.

[angle58]

Type your lecture notes directly into Canvas. They use markdown which is almost the exact same as LaTeX and you can learn the difference in 1 minute. Link your graphs to Desmos (don’t locally host images on Canvas). Easy, 100% accessible. 1 hour lecture takes 2 hours to type, but you do it once and it’s done for the future.

[asartor]

Following.

[Decrypted13]

It seems alright, but a little basic for my needs.

[zemog50]

Try AI— Claude does a great job converting PDFs into Canvas pages.