
Andrew and co, I have a big fat apology to make. It was actually the wikipedia page on Lambda Calculus where there are many occurrences of special symbols. The Wikibook, as far as I've explored, is fully accessible. Nonetheless, I'd still be more than happy to make my contributions in any way I can. I am a beginner to functional programming and so I could play a useful role in ensuring the text takes nothing for granted with regard to the fundamental principles and beyond. As a tip for anyone involved in writing and publishing scientific materials on the web, unless the maths is either written without any funny symbols or, better still, typeset in latex, it is not accessible to a screen-reader. One small point about the Haskell source code is that the column indentations do not always appear in the screen reader browse buffer. Of course, there are ways of getting around the issue and if the author of the Wikibook is interested we could discuss the details off list. Cheers, Paul At 16:22 22/02/2007, you wrote:
Can you guys point out an example of this in the wiki book? I've never heard of this accessibility issue. I may even be willing to go back through and modify the wikibook to make it more accessible of you can explain what you're referring to. Accessibility is important to me.
On 2/21/07, P. R. Stanley
wrote: and can I please ask anyone thinking of using special symbols to resist the temptation. Symbols such as the &160 used liberally in the Haskell wikibook are totally invisible to screen readers. I would be happy to proof read any document before it goes to the wikibook to ensure it's fully accessible to screen readers.
Regards, Paul
At 03:17 22/02/2007, you wrote:
I made a preliminary page, and fleshed out some of the headers/sub-headers on the wiki page for a good Haskell Cookbook (aka NOT a PLEAC clone). Please contribute and/or fix the examples and explanations so we can make a really nice Cookbook for newbies. :)
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cookbook
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Call me a technophile, but it saddens me that ASCII has already held us back for too many decades, and looks like it will still hold us back for another.

On Fri, 2007-23-02 at 02:24 -0500, Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
Call me a technophile, but it saddens me that ASCII has already held us back for too many decades, and looks like it will still hold us back for another.
OK. You're a technophile. But I agree with you. ASCII needs to die a
slow, brutal death. Quickly. (And yes, I'm aware of the
contradiction. ;))
--
Michael T. Richter

On 23/02/07, P. R. Stanley
As a tip for anyone involved in writing and publishing scientific materials on the web, unless the maths is either written without any funny symbols or, better still, typeset in latex, it is not accessible to a screen-reader.
I was under the impression that modern screen readers could pronounce Unicode characters by looking up their name. I.e., your would get read as 'Non-breaking space' (perhaps a bad example, this one wouldn't want to be read out due to its abuse as a layout tool, which would make reading old pages very awkward). I don't see how images are going to be much better? I suppose <math> images do, on MediaWiki, have an alt text which is their LaTeX, but I'd hate to have to have that read to me. If you're interested in talking to the authors of the wikibook, subscribe to the wikibook@haskell.org mailing list. -- -David House, dmhouse@gmail.com
participants (4)
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Albert Y. C. Lai
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David House
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Michael T. Richter
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P. R. Stanley