[accessibility] Current packages and methods of generating tagged PDF from LaTeX

[Jason White]

Thank you, Ulrike. I've started reading the documentation of your package.
What would be the best installation process to obtain your package and all
of its dependencies?

I have TeX Live under Linux and Mac OS, and MikTeX under Microsoft Windows.
I can install on any of those.

I can also test the output with screen readers and PDF reading tools on each
of those operating systems. Adobe Reader under Windows and Mac OS supports
tagged PDF; work was done to support it in Evince under Linux/GNOME, but I
don't know how far that has progressed; Preview under Mac OS is said to have
support as well. (Unfortunately, most of the PDF files I receive aren't
tagged, so I have performed very little testing across operating systems.)

I can certainly run lualatex. A small sample document would be a useful
starting point.

For this to become widely used, it seems to me that there will need to be
well documented and easily used macros that LaTeX package writers can
include in their packages to declare structural elements and delimit page
regions. I also wonder whether this could become a more robust pathway to
generating HTML as a byproduct.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ulrike Fischer <fischer at troubleshooting-tex.de> 
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2019 11:51 AM
To: Jason White via accessibility <accessibility at tug.org>; Jason White
<jason at jasonjgw.net>
Subject: Re: [accessibility] Current packages and methods of generating
tagged PDF from LaTeX



> I am a user of braille and speech-based assistive technologies. I work 
> in accessibility professionally. I often write documents in LaTeX, and 
> they need to be as accessible as possible. It is usually feasible, of 
> course, to generate HTML versions alongside the PDF, as is my preferred
option.

>  

> However, some venues only accept PDF files. I've found various links 
> to LaTeX packages and conference presentations on work that has been 
> done to create tagged PDF from LaTeX.

>  

> What's currently the best approach? I can also offer to test new tools 
> as they become available. My documents don't contain mathematical 
> notation, so proper tagging of the document structures would suffice.


Well I naturally would suggest that you try out my package tagpdf.

I'm quite interested in feedback, and I'm quite willing to help to use it in
concrete documents (and to repair problems that appear).

The main thing that currently is not working well (beside math (which you
don't need)) are links. There exist experimental code, but while
investigating the structure needed here we (the latex team) realized that
the latex core needs tools for pdf resource management and we are currently
working on it.

Be aware that tagpdf works best with lualatex. 

Ulrike Fischer