HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers

https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html

39•el3ctron•1h ago

Comments

el3ctron•1h ago

Accessibility barriers in research are not new, but they are urgent. The message we have heard from our community is that arXiv can have the most impact in the shortest time by offering HTML papers alongside the existing PDF.

lalithaar•34m ago

Hello, I was going through html versions of my preprints on Arxiv, thank you for all that you guys do Please do let me know if the community could contribute through any means for the same

lalithaar•35m ago

I was reading through this article too, glad to have found it on here

ForceBru•33m ago

Is this new or somehow updated? HTML versions of papers have been available for several years now.

EDIT: indeed, it was introduced in 2023: https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv...

Tagbert•30m ago

From the paper...

Why "experimental" HTML?

Did you know that 90% of submissions to arXiv are in TeX format, mostly LaTeX? That poses a unique accessibility challenge: to accurately convert from TeX—a very extensible language used in myriad unique ways by authors—to HTML, a language that is much more accessible to screen readers and text-to-speech software, screen magnifiers, and mobile devices. In addition to the technical challenges, the conversion must be both rapid and automated in order to maintain arXiv’s core service of free and fast dissemination.

ForceBru•16m ago

No I mean _arXiv_ has had experimental support for generating HTML versions of papers for years now. If you visit arXiv, you'll see a lot of papers have generated HTML alongside the usual PDF, so I'm trying to understand whether the article discussed any new developments. It seems like it's not new at all

ashleyn•30m ago

Can't help but wonder if this was motivated in part by people feeding papers into LLMs for summary, search, or review. PDF is awful for LLMs. You're effectively pigeonholed into using (PAYING for) Adobe's proprietary app and models which barely hold a candle to Gemini or Claude. There are PDF-to-text converters, but they often munge up the formatting.

jrk•15m ago

Not sure when you last tried, but Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT have all supported pretty effective PDF input for quite a while.

Barbing•27m ago

>Did you know that 90% of submissions to arXiv are in TeX format, mostly LaTeX? That poses a unique accessibility challenge: to accurately convert from TeX—a very extensible language used in myriad unique ways by authors—to HTML, a language that is much more accessible to screen readers and text-to-speech software, screen magnifiers, and mobile devices.

Challenging. Good work!

sega_sai•24m ago

Unfortunately I didn't see the recommendation there on what can be done for old papers. I checked, and only my papers after 2022 have an HTML version. I wish they'd make some kind of 'try html' button for those.

rootnod3•23m ago

Maybe unpopular, but papers should be in n markdown flavor to be determined. Just to have them more machine readable.

nateroling•18m ago

Seeing the Gemini 3 capabilities, I can imagine a near future where file formats are effectively irrelevant.

DANmode•3m ago

Files.

Truth in general, if we aren't careful.

jas39•11m ago

Pandoc can convert to svg. It can then be inlined in html. Looks just like latex, though copy/paste isn't very useful

sundarurfriend•1m ago

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