8 ms·

The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

79 points by rmbeard 6y ago

hprotagonist 6y ago
An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors. This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.
- konjin 6y ago
  Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only. If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    It's more than that. I read more than one or two IT papers which donated variable types by using a different font between A and A and that difference was essential for reasonable understanding the papers. Then the notation is overloaded. Brackets are not even necessary enclosing something or are not necessary well balanced. "Bar" based brackets and bars used for non bracket purpose are not necessary differentiate by noon visual clues. Etc. It's already often confusing for people which can read the formula so I'm not surprised that really annoying for people which can't normally read the formula. A super simple example is that [a;b[ is that "German"/(EU?) still to write an range with inclusive start and exclusive end. In the US [a;b) is used instead. But let's be honest something like rangeIE(a, b) or similar (Latex range_{ie}) is much better for a screen reader I thing and that's a trivial example not one of the really bad ones. I think all formula should be written in a way which represents semantics not visuals and then be compiler to a classical visual representation (maybe using some additional non-semantic style annotation block).
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    There's a bunch of counter-argument here from working practising blind mathematicians who read and write raw TeX every day, so there's at least a non-zero audience. https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0 https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0
    - konjin 6y ago
      There were a bunch of mathematicians who used roman numerals for arithmetic between 0 AD and 1200AD. That they existed is not a counter-argument to the fact roman numerals are terrible to do arithmetic in. That is an argument that people can get used to anything, and become proficient enough at it that changing to a new - and better - system will set them back enough for it to be not worth while doing - for them. The same is true for modern maths notation.
      - hprotagonist 6y ago
        I am not blind. Neither am I a mathematician. I'm a sighted biomedical engineer. I have heard blind mathematician colleagues very loudly espouse using LaTeX for everything they do. I'm inclined to believe them!
    - ivan_ah 6y ago
      Speaking of accessibility for math equations, there is some really good work done in MathJax 3: http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/a11y-extensions.html#speech-braille-support http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/a11y-extensions.html... slides from presentation: https://mathjax.github.io/papers/CSUN19/csun2019_talk.pdf https://mathjax.github.io/papers/CSUN19/csun2019_talk.pdf You can try on any of the demos on this page: https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-demos-web/ https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-demos-web/ (right click on an equation to enable the accessibility options)
- afiori 6y ago
  A friend of mine works with a professor that defines: \be -> \begin{equation}, \ee -> \end{equation}, \ga -> \gamma, \gm -> \gamma, \s -> \section, and so on Personally I think that latex should produce pdf documents with better mappings so that copy-paste and latex-paragraphs are preserved, even if obviously it will still get messed up in complex layouts
konjin 6y ago
>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there? Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate programs. >My point being that if we wouldn’t rely on TeX itself and use ANT (or whatever alternative) which is written in the quite elegant OCaml, than hacking it would be at least possible for mere mortals. Although I have to admit, despite being in love with OCaml since my PhD days, it’s also a quite niche language. But imagine if the whole thing was written in Python, or at least C. Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. >I wish someone would design a new space shuttle because while it's a neat project I only understand MKS units and it's too much effort to use a calculator for converting between them and Imperial units.
- dewey 6y ago
  > Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    You don't. Maybe to edit such a complex program that you're using to convert your equations to some other pretty format you should.
  - konjin 6y ago
    1 + 1 = 2 Aren't formulas easy to insert in plain text? The problem with maths notation is that it was invented by sighted people for sighted people as a short hand for very complex ideas, which at the time weren't fully understood. If you want to type equations use s-expressions, the clarity you get from saying what you mean is astonishing. (define integral (lambda (function) ;; Implementation of Risch algorithm left ;; as an exercise to the motivated reader. )) (define definite-integral (lambda (lower-bound upper-bound function) (let ((anti-derivative (integral function))) (- (anti-derivative upper-bound) (anti-derivative lower-bound))))) Hey look, you don't need the dummy variable explicitly any more. It's almost like it's a relic from a time before people understood what function application actually was. If you want the implicit mess (and incredible power) of higher maths, be prepared to deal with the the mess of typography. Which is why you need TeX, or worse.
ffk 6y ago
One pattern I like to use is to write my documents using markdown which can be compiled into pdf via latex with a template of my choosing. It is also capable of compiling to other formats which may be more accessible such as plain text, html and docx. https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/ [edit to add link to pandoc]
svnpenn 6y ago
I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I have seen some pretty wild stuff in CSS, so surely its possible: https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css
- boarnoah 6y ago
  I get that things like proper kerning are probably doable with CSS. LaTeX still does a better job out of the box, which goes a long way for my understanding of its typical use cases (resumes or long form reports).
- dfdz 6y ago
  > I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore Am I correct in assuming that you are not working in academia/on research? In that case, I would argue that from your point of view latex was never needed. On the other hand, if you are working on math/cs/physics research latex is indispensable...
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Not even considering the math formatting, Html is still lacking good footnotes, bibliographies, glossary generation, index generation, and table of context generation. Browsers also render things atrociously compared to a latex pdf.
  - vehemenz 6y ago
    There are third-party tools that do all of this. A LaTeX-generated PDF does not render correctly at all for a blind user.
    - 6y ago
rbobby 6y ago
Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago. Revisit this comment in 5 years.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  It wasn’t because mathematicians were reluctant to change that math in HTML didn't take off. Rather, it was because browser developers were loathe to implement and maintain the enormous and complex pile of code that is MathML, and they said "Why should we, if you mathematicians already have LaTeX?" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support
  - jfk13 6y ago
    Firefox has had MathML support for a long time. Complain to Apple and Google (and vote with your browsing activity, by using the browser that is less driven by commercial considerations).
    - realityking 6y ago
      Safari has supported MathML since 2011. Though apparently the implementation is somewhat buggy. The real issue is the lack of MathML support by Chrome (and until recently, Edge)
      - extra88 6y ago
        Yes, Chrome had some MathML support but removed it (I think as part of their forking of Blink from WebKit).
- vehemenz 6y ago
  Believe it or not, HTML, CSS, and MathML are still going pretty strong in the educational publishing industry. MathType supports TeX input. MathJax accepts TeX input. The technology is already there, there's just very little mindshare because no one cares about accessibility.
hugh-avherald 6y ago
Why must the PDF encapsulate all requirements? My understanding of accessibility requirements it that you must have a version that is amenable to automatic speech, not that all versions must be.
- ldjb 6y ago
  It doesn't have to. But ideally you only want to have to produce and distribute a single file. Also, a lot of people don't consider accessibility when generating PDFs. If LaTeX produced accessible PDFs, the PDFs would be tagged automatically without the author even thinking about it. Of course, it might still not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than the status quo.
vehemenz 6y ago
If you want accessibility, it would be better to convert your content to XML and run the LaTeX through MathJax first, using accessibility extensions (https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/ https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/). Then use a third-party converter such as PrinceXML to generate the PDF from the XML.
aklemm 6y ago
I can't believe MathML just died and it's like not even part of the conversation about the history of math markup.
- lol768 6y ago
  MathML isn't dead! Igalia have been doing some pretty great work on getting it upstreamed into Chromium, where there has been no MathML implementation (in contrast to Firefox) for some time.
bokumo 6y ago
Ross Moore did a presentation about accessibility and PDF at the 2020 TUG online conference. https://youtu.be/VF9Ubax_HIY https://youtu.be/VF9Ubax_HIY
mci 6y ago
1. Needs (2016) in the title. 2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX. 3. The author bizzarely links to "the mess" of the literate source of TeX the program as a WEB file rather than as a typeset document. 4. AIUI, the source code of the TeX engine has nothing/very little to do with adding tags to PDFs, which it is the job for LaTeX packages. Admittedly, understanding and writing their source code is a rarer skill than reading the literate source of TeX.
- ketzu 6y ago
  > 2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX. Is that true? My experience was that pdftex is by far the most used one, but while thinking about it, I noticed I have zero data to back that up.
  - jimhefferon 6y ago
    The overwhelming majority of people writing today use pdflatex. But at this point lualatex is pretty fast, and is starting to accumlate packages that leverage it to do good things. It is starting to build momentum.
- amai 6y ago
  https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-a-1b-with-lualatex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-...
scoresmoke 6y ago
Even though LaTeX is still not very close to producing perfectly accessible PDF documents, there is some recent work towards this goal. - https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf - https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility I am using the former for some personal documents and found that it improves text selection and copying on Apple devices. (This could be related to how PDFKit handles text.) Edit: formatting.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  accessibility, which its own author says not to use any more (or at least not until foundational problems are fixed), is mentioned in the article.
minikites 6y ago
The "accessibility" LaTeX package maintainer is looking for help in this area: https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42 https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42
bfirsh 6y ago
Converting LaTeX to HTML may be a route to making it accessible. I'm working on this project: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo It's 80% of the way there, but with 80% more work it could be a pretty complete implementation. It powers this: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/
choeger 6y ago
The thing is: LaTeX might try hard to look like a declarative language for structured documents, but it is not. It is a set of TeX macros. And TeX is a type setting system. There is no good reason to put the accessibility into the type setting. Instead, use a declarative (e.g., any markup) language, translate that a) to (LaTeX) and b) to accessibility annotations and then combine the two results. Problem solved. Unfortunately you will either lose a lot of expressiveness along the way or you have to find a very sophisticated markup language.
- romwell 6y ago
  Why not simply augment LaTex with PDF tags which would be inserted manually, in the process of typesetting? Something like: \pdftag{blah} Common packages could then generate these tags, and very few modifications of TeX source would be needed.
  - choeger 6y ago
    Yeah, one could do that. But then again, one could do that with any other scripting language. A true declarative document would mean a single source of truth and freedom from those technical matters.
amai 6y ago
The author writes: "Did I mention that both Word and LibreOffice generate tagged PDFs?" But then the simple solution is this: Convert your LaTeX to Word or LibreOffice. Then generate the PDF. Absurdly the easiest way to convert LaTeX to Word/LibreOffice is by creating a PDF first (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111886/how-to-convert-a-scientific-manuscript-from-latex-to-word-using-pandoc https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111886/how-to-conver...), import that into Word/LibreOffice and then create your PDF/A from that.
amai 6y ago
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-a-1b-with-lualatex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-...

79 points by rmbeard 6y ago

An answer, particularly in the sciences, is to also distribute the source *.tex files, which being plain text with markup, can be handled just fine by things like emacspeak, or accessibility tooling for other sensible editors. This comes up a bit around the blind accessibility issue for mathematics, which is why I suspect it's bubbling up this week on HN.

konjin 6y ago
Standard maths notation is sight first and sight only. If you want maths for the blind you need to convert to something like s-expressions, which emacspeak and read perfectly.
- dathinab 6y ago
  It's more than that. I read more than one or two IT papers which donated variable types by using a different font between A and A and that difference was essential for reasonable understanding the papers. Then the notation is overloaded. Brackets are not even necessary enclosing something or are not necessary well balanced. "Bar" based brackets and bars used for non bracket purpose are not necessary differentiate by noon visual clues. Etc. It's already often confusing for people which can read the formula so I'm not surprised that really annoying for people which can't normally read the formula. A super simple example is that [a;b[ is that "German"/(EU?) still to write an range with inclusive start and exclusive end. In the US [a;b) is used instead. But let's be honest something like rangeIE(a, b) or similar (Latex range_{ie}) is much better for a screen reader I thing and that's a trivial example not one of the really bad ones. I think all formula should be written in a way which represents semantics not visuals and then be compiler to a classical visual representation (maybe using some additional non-semantic style annotation block).
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  There's a bunch of counter-argument here from working practising blind mathematicians who read and write raw TeX every day, so there's at least a non-zero audience. https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0 https://www.nfb.org/latex-what-it-and-why-do-we-need-it-0
  - konjin 6y ago
    There were a bunch of mathematicians who used roman numerals for arithmetic between 0 AD and 1200AD. That they existed is not a counter-argument to the fact roman numerals are terrible to do arithmetic in. That is an argument that people can get used to anything, and become proficient enough at it that changing to a new - and better - system will set them back enough for it to be not worth while doing - for them. The same is true for modern maths notation.
    - hprotagonist 6y ago
      I am not blind. Neither am I a mathematician. I'm a sighted biomedical engineer. I have heard blind mathematician colleagues very loudly espouse using LaTeX for everything they do. I'm inclined to believe them!
  - ivan_ah 6y ago
    Speaking of accessibility for math equations, there is some really good work done in MathJax 3: http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/a11y-extensions.html#speech-braille-support http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/basic/a11y-extensions.html... slides from presentation: https://mathjax.github.io/papers/CSUN19/csun2019_talk.pdf https://mathjax.github.io/papers/CSUN19/csun2019_talk.pdf You can try on any of the demos on this page: https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-demos-web/ https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-demos-web/ (right click on an equation to enable the accessibility options)
afiori 6y ago
A friend of mine works with a professor that defines: \be -> \begin{equation}, \ee -> \end{equation}, \ga -> \gamma, \gm -> \gamma, \s -> \section, and so on Personally I think that latex should produce pdf documents with better mappings so that copy-paste and latex-paragraphs are preserved, even if obviously it will still get messed up in complex layouts

konjin 6y ago

>Take your average computer science graduate from the last ten years. Do you think anyone would be remotely able to understand what is going on there? Yes, you literally read the literate program of TeX and understand what's going on: http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf http://brokestream.com/tex.pdf I had never learned Pascal but I've managed to edit and compile TeX successfully, and it was easier than trying to understand any of my own non-literate programs. >My point being that if we wouldn’t rely on TeX itself and use ANT (or whatever alternative) which is written in the quite elegant OCaml, than hacking it would be at least possible for mere mortals. Although I have to admit, despite being in love with OCaml since my PhD days, it’s also a quite niche language. But imagine if the whole thing was written in Python, or at least C. Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. >I wish someone would design a new space shuttle because while it's a neat project I only understand MKS units and it's too much effort to use a calculator for converting between them and Imperial units.

dewey 6y ago
> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  You don't. Maybe to edit such a complex program that you're using to convert your equations to some other pretty format you should.
- konjin 6y ago
  1 + 1 = 2 Aren't formulas easy to insert in plain text? The problem with maths notation is that it was invented by sighted people for sighted people as a short hand for very complex ideas, which at the time weren't fully understood. If you want to type equations use s-expressions, the clarity you get from saying what you mean is astonishing. (define integral (lambda (function) ;; Implementation of Risch algorithm left ;; as an exercise to the motivated reader. )) (define definite-integral (lambda (lower-bound upper-bound function) (let ((anti-derivative (integral function))) (- (anti-derivative upper-bound) (anti-derivative lower-bound))))) Hey look, you don't need the dummy variable explicitly any more. It's almost like it's a relic from a time before people understood what function application actually was. If you want the implicit mess (and incredible power) of higher maths, be prepared to deal with the the mess of typography. Which is why you need TeX, or worse.

ffk 6y ago

One pattern I like to use is to write my documents using markdown which can be compiled into pdf via latex with a template of my choosing. It is also capable of compiling to other formats which may be more accessible such as plain text, html and docx. https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/ [edit to add link to pandoc]

svnpenn 6y ago

I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I have seen some pretty wild stuff in CSS, so surely its possible: https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css

boarnoah 6y ago
I get that things like proper kerning are probably doable with CSS. LaTeX still does a better job out of the box, which goes a long way for my understanding of its typical use cases (resumes or long form reports).
dfdz 6y ago
> I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore Am I correct in assuming that you are not working in academia/on research? In that case, I would argue that from your point of view latex was never needed. On the other hand, if you are working on math/cs/physics research latex is indispensable...
jimktrains2 6y ago
Not even considering the math formatting, Html is still lacking good footnotes, bibliographies, glossary generation, index generation, and table of context generation. Browsers also render things atrociously compared to a latex pdf.
- vehemenz 6y ago
  There are third-party tools that do all of this. A LaTeX-generated PDF does not render correctly at all for a blind user.
  - 6y ago

rbobby 6y ago

Imagine how much further ahead HTML/CSS would have been if the academic crowd abandoned latex 20 years ago. Revisit this comment in 5 years.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
It wasn’t because mathematicians were reluctant to change that math in HTML didn't take off. Rather, it was because browser developers were loathe to implement and maintain the enormous and complex pile of code that is MathML, and they said "Why should we, if you mathematicians already have LaTeX?" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support
- jfk13 6y ago
  Firefox has had MathML support for a long time. Complain to Apple and Google (and vote with your browsing activity, by using the browser that is less driven by commercial considerations).
  - realityking 6y ago
    Safari has supported MathML since 2011. Though apparently the implementation is somewhat buggy. The real issue is the lack of MathML support by Chrome (and until recently, Edge)
    - extra88 6y ago
      Yes, Chrome had some MathML support but removed it (I think as part of their forking of Blink from WebKit).
vehemenz 6y ago
Believe it or not, HTML, CSS, and MathML are still going pretty strong in the educational publishing industry. MathType supports TeX input. MathJax accepts TeX input. The technology is already there, there's just very little mindshare because no one cares about accessibility.

hugh-avherald 6y ago

Why must the PDF encapsulate all requirements? My understanding of accessibility requirements it that you must have a version that is amenable to automatic speech, not that all versions must be.

ldjb 6y ago
It doesn't have to. But ideally you only want to have to produce and distribute a single file. Also, a lot of people don't consider accessibility when generating PDFs. If LaTeX produced accessible PDFs, the PDFs would be tagged automatically without the author even thinking about it. Of course, it might still not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than the status quo.

vehemenz 6y ago

If you want accessibility, it would be better to convert your content to XML and run the LaTeX through MathJax first, using accessibility extensions (https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/ https://mathjax.github.io/MathJax-a11y/docs/). Then use a third-party converter such as PrinceXML to generate the PDF from the XML.

aklemm 6y ago

I can't believe MathML just died and it's like not even part of the conversation about the history of math markup.

lol768 6y ago
MathML isn't dead! Igalia have been doing some pretty great work on getting it upstreamed into Chromium, where there has been no MathML implementation (in contrast to Firefox) for some time.

bokumo 6y ago

Ross Moore did a presentation about accessibility and PDF at the 2020 TUG online conference. https://youtu.be/VF9Ubax_HIY https://youtu.be/VF9Ubax_HIY

mci 6y ago

1. Needs (2016) in the title. 2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX. 3. The author bizzarely links to "the mess" of the literate source of TeX the program as a WEB file rather than as a typeset document. 4. AIUI, the source code of the TeX engine has nothing/very little to do with adding tags to PDFs, which it is the job for LaTeX packages. Admittedly, understanding and writing their source code is a rarer skill than reading the literate source of TeX.

ketzu 6y ago
> 2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX. Is that true? My experience was that pdftex is by far the most used one, but while thinking about it, I noticed I have zero data to back that up.
- jimhefferon 6y ago
  The overwhelming majority of people writing today use pdflatex. But at this point lualatex is pretty fast, and is starting to accumlate packages that leverage it to do good things. It is starting to build momentum.
amai 6y ago
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-a-1b-with-lualatex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-...

scoresmoke 6y ago

Even though LaTeX is still not very close to producing perfectly accessible PDF documents, there is some recent work towards this goal. - https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf - https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility I am using the former for some personal documents and found that it improves text selection and copying on Apple devices. (This could be related to how PDFKit handles text.) Edit: formatting.

JadeNB 6y ago
accessibility, which its own author says not to use any more (or at least not until foundational problems are fixed), is mentioned in the article.

minikites 6y ago

The "accessibility" LaTeX package maintainer is looking for help in this area: https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42 https://github.com/AndyClifton/accessibility/issues/42

bfirsh 6y ago

Converting LaTeX to HTML may be a route to making it accessible. I'm working on this project: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo It's 80% of the way there, but with 80% more work it could be a pretty complete implementation. It powers this: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/

choeger 6y ago

The thing is: LaTeX might try hard to look like a declarative language for structured documents, but it is not. It is a set of TeX macros. And TeX is a type setting system. There is no good reason to put the accessibility into the type setting. Instead, use a declarative (e.g., any markup) language, translate that a) to (LaTeX) and b) to accessibility annotations and then combine the two results. Problem solved. Unfortunately you will either lose a lot of expressiveness along the way or you have to find a very sophisticated markup language.

romwell 6y ago
Why not simply augment LaTex with PDF tags which would be inserted manually, in the process of typesetting? Something like: \pdftag{blah} Common packages could then generate these tags, and very few modifications of TeX source would be needed.
- choeger 6y ago
  Yeah, one could do that. But then again, one could do that with any other scripting language. A true declarative document would mean a single source of truth and freedom from those technical matters.

amai 6y ago

The author writes: "Did I mention that both Word and LibreOffice generate tagged PDFs?" But then the simple solution is this: Convert your LaTeX to Word or LibreOffice. Then generate the PDF. Absurdly the easiest way to convert LaTeX to Word/LibreOffice is by creating a PDF first (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111886/how-to-convert-a-scientific-manuscript-from-latex-to-word-using-pandoc https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/111886/how-to-conver...), import that into Word/LibreOffice and then create your PDF/A from that.

amai 6y ago

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-a-1b-with-lualatex https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/498987/generate-pdf-...