You hit the nail on the had with your question – this is the most problematic part of it.
Most illustrations are a bit simpler to handle than code and the way is pretty much paved by HTML img alt texts (the well written ones, that actually can substitute for the illustration by conveying the same information). Ideally we should receive the ALT texts from article authors, but effectively (for now) it would be up to the person reading to come up with a solid substitution text.
Code is a different can of worms. My favorite idea so far is to basically explain what the code does as close as possible, without actually reading it, and then having a separate audio track with the code being read (likely just by a text-to-speech algorithm, though possibly augmented a bit to include things like "next line" or "this line has a 2-level indent" for Python code).
I don't have an example yet, but let me get back to you on that next week, since I was thinking of doing recordings for my two articles in this issue.
Most illustrations are a bit simpler to handle than code and the way is pretty much paved by HTML img alt texts (the well written ones, that actually can substitute for the illustration by conveying the same information). Ideally we should receive the ALT texts from article authors, but effectively (for now) it would be up to the person reading to come up with a solid substitution text.
Code is a different can of worms. My favorite idea so far is to basically explain what the code does as close as possible, without actually reading it, and then having a separate audio track with the code being read (likely just by a text-to-speech algorithm, though possibly augmented a bit to include things like "next line" or "this line has a 2-level indent" for Python code).
I don't have an example yet, but let me get back to you on that next week, since I was thinking of doing recordings for my two articles in this issue.