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Re: Is it True: No PDFs generated from LaTeX are Accessibly Tagged?

for

From: Jonathan Cohn
Date: Apr 22, 2018 5:05PM

Google seems to indicate there is a Latex revision that was worked on a year ago to include accessibility meta data in the PDF.. I don't know a lot about LaTeX
So
take a look at:
https://github.com/NREL/latex_editing/blame/master/article/accessibilityMeta.sty
And I would be interested in knowing if this is the answer and if a this is just a file that can be dropped in an appropriate place or if a full build of LaTeX tools would be required.

Best wishes,

Jonathan Cohn



> On Apr 22, 2018, at 6:12 AM, Brandon Keith Biggs < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I think I just stumbled over one of the most egregious causes of
> inaccessible PDFs on the web and I hope I'm missing something:
>
> Pdflatex does not generate accessible PDFs.
>
> This means that every PDF generated using the LaTeX compilers is not
> properly tagged. It also means that by default, all the PDFs from pandoc
> are not properly tagged. This has staggering implications in the academic
> community where most PDFs are created with LaTeX.
>
> I really hope I am wrong, but I have been using both pandoc and pdflatex
> directly for the last day, trying to get one heading to show. It seems to
> be impossible.
>
> Before I go and make issues on the different LaTeX distribution sites, is
> there anyone who knows more about this? If it is true that there is no way
> to create accessibly tagged PDFs from pdflatex, I would love either a guide
> that describes the code required for proper tagging of pDFs or someone
> knowledgeable to comment on the issues that I open.
>
> Here are a few sources that make me fear this problem has not been
> addressed yet:
>
> https://umij.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/the-sad-state-of-pdf-accessibility-of-latex-documents/
>
>
>
> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/261537/a-guide-on-how-to-produce-accessible-pdf-files
>
> http://tug.org/pipermail/accessibility/2016q4/000005.html
>
> https://chi2014.acm.org/authors/generate-a-tagged-pdf#LaTeX
>
>
>
> A source that shows the staggering problem this has on the academic
> community:
>
> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pubs/pdfs/2015/accessibleconferences.pdf
>
>
>
> Just to speak to the implications this has had on my life:
>
> Over the last 4 months I have been doing a literature review. I have saved
> 64 articles in PDF. 21 were completely unreadable, so I had to OCR them
> with Kurzweil 1000 (a $1000 piece of technology, and I still couldn't read
> any tables or math). Out of the others, only 4 were properly tagged.
>
> None of the PDFs were scanned, they all had the text there,
> itjustlookedlikethis.
>
> This means that if any blind person ever wishes to read academic papers,
> they are required to have an OCR program on their computer, just to read
> PDFs that were probably generated with pdflatex.
>
> The worst part is, people just don't realize how terrible this PDF problem
> is. Even my research group and wife, who know better, don't quite
> understand that even if their LaTeX is perfect, or their Markdown is
> perfect, their only conversion tool is broken. How can it be broken?
> Everyone uses it!
>
> If this single tool gets fixed, the percentage of inaccessible to
> accessible PDFs being produced will switch over night.
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Brandon Keith Biggs <http://brandonkeithbiggs.com/>;
> > > >