We have put it in front of the compliance folks as one tool to consider and I told them I knew y’all if they had big vendor level type questions at some stage. The LaTeX style editing tool could be huge. I saw @tienchihmath.bsky.social’s video but haven’t tried it myself since I’m in survival mode.

I would expect to see an angle of saying “Uh, you get federal student financial aid money, so you need to comply as well” before too long.

visually impaired students right now, but we definitely have dyslexic students. Thus, improving digital accessibility isn’t helping hypothetical future students, it’s helping our actual students we have today.

I kept having to point out that these were just getting the Adobe checker to ✅ things but weren’t making things accessible and thus were doing more harm than good in the long run.

Also, I find it really helpful to remind folks that dyslexic folks benefit from screen readers. We have few blind/

I think if we do this well, the end result will be a higher quality of digital accessibility. The panic was just going to lead to box-checking accessibility. Our IT manager was getting demoralized that she didn’t have any recommendations for people, so she was coming up with things, and

anything online.

satisfy automated checkers but without providing materials that are actually digitally accessible.

Will some people kick the can down the road? Sure. But this gives us more time to figure out workable solutions that will avoid what @clontz.org suggested people are talking about: not putting

for content that uses a lot of mathematical notation. I have been trying to tell them this for YEARS.

I fully expect that UW is going to expect continued good faith efforts to improve digital accessibility over the coming year, but now we can do it right, rather than just concocting ways to

I have recently sat in meetings with the top compliance folks on campus who were finally, less than a month before the deadline, wrapping their heads around the fact that they have no idea how to determine if the tools they are preparing to contract for provide genuine digital accessibility

need to lead on giving guidance on what will and won’t be compliant that we still have lots of things that we don’t have guidance on. For a lot of our faculty, until we know what the rules are going to be, they won’t change their ways.

Speaking from an R1 perspective, the last year has seen campus leadership needing to deal with a budget crisis induced by attacks on federal grant-making agencies and reacting to other aspects of the regime that took office in January 2025. It redirected so much effort from the folks who

As much as I’d like to, I know I’m not going to get all our faculty to join #PreTeXtGang. And the graduate school has declared dissertations need to be digitally accessible AND still has esoteric formatting requirements, so we need quality auto tagged LaTeX PDFs.

Those of us who are having to help are sure feeling better, because I got my classes ready so now I actually can help others. Especially because UW still hasn’t selected tech to help properly remediate STEM documents and the LaTeX tagging project isn’t quite there yet.

Well, well, well... the deadline for compliance with the new Title II accessibility guidelines has been extended by a year (or two, depending on the size of your organization)

View overlooking Budapest at blue hour. Buda Castle is prominently lit in the left. The Chain Bridge stands in the foreground, crossing the Danube. Parliament and Margaret Bridge sit deeper into the scene.

Blue Hour View from the Citadella

In honor of Hungary 🇭🇺 voting to stand for freedom and democracy yesterday, here’s a shot from my recent trip.

Pentax K-3 iii
smc Pentax-DA 18–270mm at 88mm stitched to a panorama in Lightroom Classic

Türkiye?

I am so happy for Hungary today! Orban did a lot of damage in 16 years. It will take time to restore a free press and to tear down the corruption he entrenched. But today Hungarians cast their ballots to turn things around! I wish them well, and hope we can start undoing our own damage in November.

View of the Hungarian parliament building at night, from the Buda side of the Danube. Photo taken from my hotel window, actually 😁

Spent five nights in Budapest during Spring Break, leaving on April 2nd. Hungary is a wonderful country, and as a mathematician, I have had more opportunities than most Americans to get to know Hungarians. (My academic brother is Hungarian and my office neighbor at UW is as well.)

And note that the LaTeX you get back is probably not something you want to manage by hand afterward for a complex document. I do use it for my exams, which I set up as very simple worksheets in PreTeXt but prefer to finalize print format using LaTeX still.

You mean next year, when can move it to 6-1 by replacing the retiring Justice Ziegler with another left-leaning justice!

I always forget that I share a birthday with Sam Alito until social media reminds me. @maddow.bsky.social is also in the April Fool’s Day baby club, too, which I appreciate more.

had a dream where i was taking a math final. on page 2 was a problem i immediately recognized as an "x choose y" problem @mitchkeller.phd

I taught you well!

That last sentence! (Read the whole piece, please.)

I don’t see anything in there about all patients on ventilators in a hospital dying, which was the claim that was questioned.

Someone needs to install a bunch of smart switches/bulbs and millimeter wave presence detectors!

I wonder if the clock and controllers were tied to some integral part of the building so putting functional clocks back up was just a rounding error in the project. Or, if it was a contractor who cut the line, maybe there was insurance that paid.

We still have centrally controlled clocks in some buildings at UW. They recently accidentally cut the line to our building and then decided to install separate controllers for four buildings rather than us all sharing a controller. This also required replacing all the clocks.

Agree 100% on the number part and *most* named theorems. “Euler’s theorem” is maybe not the best example because there are so many things one could call that and I’d allow something like “Euler’s theorem on polyhedra” but prefer “Euler’s Polyhedra Theorem”.

This is undoubtedly the home of the Math Department at Bee State University.