“We don’t want to convert people to use LaTeX but we are going to basically require it, when at least 40% of the community doesn’t use it, because we have an impractical mandatory format and no other template. Please rely upon the free labor of others to meet our requirement.” 😬
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Like, at least call this what it is? The ACM imposes formatting requirements that assume a homogenous community of computer scientists who heavily evangelize for an inaccessible typesetting language.
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This is a diversity and accessibility issue. I’m so frustrated about this move from CHI and ACM.
And it’s bringing back memories of all the times that (*always* white male) CS folk have told me that “real” computer scientists use LaTeX and I was inferior for preferring Word.
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It’s gatekeeping behavior, and it’s gross, and I’m sick of it.
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i'm curious, what's the argument that LaTeX is inaccessible or anti-diversity? before stuff like overleaf i could see it in terms of requiring command line tool knowledge, but now i'm not sure.
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i'm someone who tends to find WYSIWYG tools a lot harder to use because the relationship between interface actions and outcome is not transparent to me. but i'm a cs person... maybe the HCI community has done studies on something like this?
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in terms of accessibility, i would tend to assume that text input is more friendly to e.g. voice control than a GUI is. but again i'm genuinely not in the know and interested in learning more here.
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writing latex is probably accessible, but is a dumpster fire. the PDFs resulting from latex will not be at all accessible, and need to be processed by Adobe Acrobat, in a very non-intuitive way. this is basically a disaster.
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So LaTeX doesn't output properly tagged PDF? That's a shame. 🙄