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Comment by njkleiner | Hacker News Reader

Both are on the roadmap, apparently.

https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-14933...

Both have been “on the roadmap” from day 1, with little progress.

Many open source projects put “we should make our system accessible to disabled vision issues” on the roadmap, depressingly few projects then actually do it.

Even latex, which in academic circles is famous for not having html output, nowadays produces more accessible output than typist.

You are right that it's been on the roadmap for a while, however, it's definitely very high on their priority list. The recent update (v0.12) contained a lot of necessary internal refactorings of the layout engine, and they've mentioned on the Discord that after v0.12, they will start work on HTML output.

I really hope so, and I will start recommending typst when there is good accessible output.

However, it’s also been a “top priority” since basically the first release.

The issue is a bit more than a year old.

Feel free to step up and close it. Complaining about it isn't going to add velocity to a new project.

Adding accessibility to every open source project which neglected it would take a team of thousands.

I work on accessibility on the open source programs I already contribute to.

PDFs can be translated to EPUB using existing programs. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Typst emits "good" PDF (I worked on a PDF program for years and I know it when I see it) so that conversion should be fairly high fidelity.

Clearly this is not as good as offering a second backend, but the latter is also a huge amount of work. I'm sure if you showed Typst cases where their PDF output doesn't translate to EPUB cleanly using available converters, they would at least investigate and see if they can improve that.

But without demonstrating that translation isn't working, I'm not going to accept the claim that there's an accessibility problem here.

I downloaded the first typist pdf I could find:

https://github.com/Leedehai/typst-physics/blob/master/physic...

And fed it through the top pdf2epub on google:

https://cloudconvert.com/pdf-to-epub

Plain text is fine, but all maths is mangled, and tables and matrices are completely destroyed.

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