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This must be a joke. LaTeX cannot even produce accessible PDF today. Believe me, I tried. I write my lecture notes in LaTeX and some of my students have disabil

This must be a joke. LaTeX cannot even produce accessible PDF today. Believe me, I tried. I write my lecture notes in LaTeX and some of my students have disabilities. I tried to follow these guides https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/261537/a-guide-on-how-to-produce-accessible-pdf-files https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/261537/a-guide-on-ho... (note the Feb 2024 update). No matter how technically "correct" the LaTeX people want it to be, even a PDF produced by MS Word was more accessible for my students.

JohnKemeny 2y ago
Since you are familiar with the TeX StackExchange, perhaps you can ask there? As you might be aware, the author of the message is David Carlisle, a very active member at TeX (766k rep) and is also a maintainer of many popular packages. Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  > Since you are familiar with the TeX StackExchange, perhaps you can ask there? I have. I don't want to link my HN identity to my SE identity (which is tied to my real world identity through mathoverflow) so I won't link here. > Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed. As I said, it was updated in February 2024. I was written by Ulrike Fischer who's also very involved in latex3. It's basically the current state of the art in accessible PDFs. And it's still not good enough. I wish it were otherwise, but latex is the pinnacle of design-by-committee and tech debt. Given how latex3 turned out, I'm very pessimistic. The only thing latex has going for it is inertia.
xworld21 2y ago
The tagging work is still highly experimental. A major missing element is equation tagging: for now, you need to produce an 'associated MathML' file externally, for instance using LaTeXML. Even then, PDF readers do not support the MathML tags yet! If anything, I am sure that the LaTeX3 team would appreciate you posting minimal examples of mistagged PDFs. If you want to produce accessible documents from LaTeX, you should convert to HTML. ATs such as screen readers just work miles better than with PDFs, and given the resources put in developing browsers compared to PDF readers, I don't think this will change any time soon. Luckily conversion from LaTeX to HTML is very feasible today, as proved by arXiv. (Shameless plug: I maintain BookML specifically to help lecturers with the LaTeX to HTML work)
- generationP 2y ago
  A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length. And I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section).
  - xworld21 2y ago
    > A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length. Very true! Although they are now comparable, if you rely on the browser native MathML instead of MathJax/LaTeX. (You can test this on long arXiv HTML papers, e.g. https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1710.07304 https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1710.07304 is more than 60 pages as PDF. Mind you, the ar5iv default CSS is not great. I would use Latin Modern for formulas, at the very least.) > I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section). I believe all of them can do it out of the box now. I know for sure that LaTeXML, tex4ht and lwarp can split by chapter or section.
braiamp 2y ago
If you can, please report those issues to https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project . It is expected that devs can't account for all cases.

JohnKemeny 2y ago

Since you are familiar with the TeX StackExchange, perhaps you can ask there? As you might be aware, the author of the message is David Carlisle, a very active member at TeX (766k rep) and is also a maintainer of many popular packages. Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed.

g15jv2dp 2y ago
> Since you are familiar with the TeX StackExchange, perhaps you can ask there? I have. I don't want to link my HN identity to my SE identity (which is tied to my real world identity through mathoverflow) so I won't link here. > Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed. As I said, it was updated in February 2024. I was written by Ulrike Fischer who's also very involved in latex3. It's basically the current state of the art in accessible PDFs. And it's still not good enough. I wish it were otherwise, but latex is the pinnacle of design-by-committee and tech debt. Given how latex3 turned out, I'm very pessimistic. The only thing latex has going for it is inertia.

xworld21 2y ago

The tagging work is still highly experimental. A major missing element is equation tagging: for now, you need to produce an 'associated MathML' file externally, for instance using LaTeXML. Even then, PDF readers do not support the MathML tags yet! If anything, I am sure that the LaTeX3 team would appreciate you posting minimal examples of mistagged PDFs. If you want to produce accessible documents from LaTeX, you should convert to HTML. ATs such as screen readers just work miles better than with PDFs, and given the resources put in developing browsers compared to PDF readers, I don't think this will change any time soon. Luckily conversion from LaTeX to HTML is very feasible today, as proved by arXiv. (Shameless plug: I maintain BookML specifically to help lecturers with the LaTeX to HTML work)

generationP 2y ago
A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length. And I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section).
- xworld21 2y ago
  > A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length. Very true! Although they are now comparable, if you rely on the browser native MathML instead of MathJax/LaTeX. (You can test this on long arXiv HTML papers, e.g. https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1710.07304 https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1710.07304 is more than 60 pages as PDF. Mind you, the ar5iv default CSS is not great. I would use Latin Modern for formulas, at the very least.) > I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section). I believe all of them can do it out of the box now. I know for sure that LaTeXML, tex4ht and lwarp can split by chapter or section.

braiamp 2y ago

If you can, please report those issues to https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project . It is expected that devs can't account for all cases.