Accessibility Services (ZAB)

LaTeX is a software package used primarily in the natural sciences. It is the go-to typesetting system for technical and academic publishing. Normally, PDF files created from LaTeX documents are not tagged and therefore not accessible. The corresponding functionality is missing in the LaTeX kernel and has yet to be added. For this reason, the LaTeX team launched the LaTeX Tagged PDF project in 2020. This team is expected to have implemented this missing functionality in LaTeX by 2025. Because of this, the LaTeX team also joined the PDF Association as a Liaison Member in 2021. As part of this collaboration, a Liaison Working Group was set up to support the LaTeX team with this project.

There are several packages that implement functionalities for accessible PDFs from LaTeX. However, these packages are all at an early stage of development and describe themselves as still experimental. In the Accessibility section of CTAN there is a list of packages that extend LaTeX with corresponding functions. The package that is being actively developed by the TaggedPDF project and has the widest range of functions is the tagpdf package.

As the direct accessible export as a PDF file is currently still experimental, an export to HTML can be an accessible alternative. The University of Nevada has published instructions on how to create accessible HTML5 pages from LaTeX using pandoc and MathJax. Another possibility for creating HTML pages from LaTeX with TeX4ht and MathML has been published by the California State University in a tutorial.