How to read and write math like a pro?

This was a scary question for me during Highschool. I was using a bit of braill and used to just work equations in my head but both did not feel like long term solutions especially when it comes to collaborating with sighted people. There were no blind people around who had studied a math related subject in the university and special education teachers had no idea what to recommend. I was very lucky when I met a blind chess player during an international chess tournament for the blind who told me about LaTeX , something like a special language for writing math in the computer. It sounded very complicated even the words involved were weird to me what the fuck is a compiler and what does it mean to run and debug. I was interested for sure but how do you even get started with something like this when you do not understand anything about it? Today you could ask an large language model I guess but at that point this was not an option. Let me share some things I would have liked someone to tell me at that time and hopefully you can get started much faster than I did.

LaTeX is a markup language, something like a programming language, but much easier,b and its goal is to produce professional documents mainly in PDF format not actual programs. I am by no means an expert on LaTeX, but as I used it for many years, I would like to share the basics about it to give you just a first idea about it.LaTeX is used widely in the scientific community and by publishers. One of its big advantages for blind users is that it is fully text-based. There are no weird graphical menus, unlabeled buttons, or navigation obstacles. You just write text.

To write a fraction in LaTeX, for example, you type something like: \frac{numerator}{denominator} and there are similar commands for every mathematical expression: integrals, derivatives, Greek letters, matrices, you name it.

The amazing thing is that there is no mathematical symbol, function, or expression that you cannot write in LaTeX. It was not designed for accessibility, but it happens to be very accessible, because everything is written in clear text.

Another big advantage is that after a blind person writes a document and asks LaTeX to create the PDF, the result is immediately readable by every sighted person who understands math. No intermediate translation, no special requirements. Just a normal scientific document.

Nowadays, with large language models like ChatGPT, you can even ask math questions and get the answer directly in LaTeX, so you can read it yourself, learn from it, or copy it directly into your school work, research, or reports.

Something that is particularly useful For university students is that many professors already write their notes in LaTeX. Sometimes they can even share the source files with you so that you can study directly from them in an accessible way.

A nice bonus for people who are using word is that for easy mathematical expressions you can use LaTeX to write math in word too. I am not using this So I cannot say how well it works in practice but it should be good if you are writing a document and you have only a few mathematical expressions. I know that there were many efforts to make other solutions for reading and writing math which are based on LaTeX, but I have never used them. If someone has successfully used one such solution, I would be super interested to learn about it. So please send me an email. I believe that if a blind person wants to study a STEM subject today there is no real alternative at the moment than using LaTeX one way or another this is why I will publish a LaTeX learning tutorial in the near future along with recommendations for how to write and read it in different operating systems. be sure to subscribe to not miss this and any other posts!