5 Costs, risks and remaining barriers

It is strongly recommended that the reader does not attempt to read this section if they have not at least skimmed the guidance on document production and transform methods from the main site. It is questionable how much sense the section will make without some insight as to the restrictions and requirements of the methods.

We recommend that separate Linux and Windows 7 machines be used (the Linux software requires only command line interface). We used a dual boot machine and spent quite a lot of time rebooting...

The following is a list of necessary software on the two operating systems. Please see appendix A for links to further information about the software.

Linux:

None of the above software has a direct cost however, the installation and maintenance of the system will require staff time.

Windows:

Time for an expert user to gain a basic understanding of the key restrictions is approximately 1 hour but from experience they will need to produce and transform several practice documents to reach a full understanding. Once this has occurred the only remaining time overhead in the creation of the master documents is the extra work required to incorporate EPS diagrams into documents.

Transformation of the documents cannot be truly automated as a single transform may rely on two operating systems and on the use of software with a GUI interface. The transformations are completed without change to the master document. With careful use of make files, scripts, macros and storage of files many steps can be completed with limited user intervention. Some steps appear to scale badly with the number of equations in a document but we have not quantified this.

We recommend that support staff focused on the task produce masters, transform from masters to other formats as required and advise staff updating master documents. Specialist staff time is likely to be the most substantial cost. Assuming such staff are already employed to produce accessible formats this cost will diminish over time provided that master documents are updated.

Use of open source, free software

All transforms from LaTeX  rely on open source, free software. There remains the risk that this software is not updated in the future and ceases to be viable on a modern computer. This is a wider question for the mathematical community which uses these tools. To attempt to quantify this risk we provide factual information about some of the tools, as of 31st May 2012, which may allow a reader to investigate further.

Of course, some of the above appear to have substantial funding and community support. It is possible that their future is more secure than some of the commercial products we have used.

Specific risks and barriers

We attempt to capture some of the more specific remaining risks and barriers noted throughout the project. We have undoubtedly missed something and will probably update this section in the future.

Some methods are currently reliant on our own proof of concept work rounds. This is a major risk. Our proof of concept work rounds may not be reliable, may not be updated and ultimately may not be the correct approaches. They were created to overcome known bugs, issues or missing functionality in software.

Other risks and barriers include:

From a staff point of view the methods require a change in mindset away from typesetting or “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) approaches to document production. This in itself may be a barrier.

Finally, a remaining barrier is that students and their support staff may not know how to use the software or resources effectively. For instance, using text-to-speech software with XHTML+MathML requires installation of MathPlayer and knowledge of how to request the text-to-speech software to read the resource. Guidance and possibly training for students and staff may be required.