Making LaTeX produce tagged and accessible PDF
Excerpt: The LaTeX Project recently became a Liaison Member of the PDF Association to help accelerate the development of tagged and accessible PDF produced from LaTeX.
About the author: The staff of the PDF Association are dedicated to delivering the information, services and value members have come to expect.
Maintained by the LaTeX Project, LaTeX is the de facto typesetting system for technical and scientific content and publishing. It’s also free and open source.
Historically, typesetting systems such as LaTeX have oriented on accurate visual representation of the author’s intent. However, accessibility to users who must use assistive technologies (AT) in order to read requires not only accurate visual representation, but the content’s semantic structure must be machine-readable to enable correct representation by respective AT.
Tagged PDF (ISO 32000-2, 14.8) defines the mechanisms in PDF technology that establish the semantics of PDF content in a machine-readable manner. As the organizing model for all reuse of PDF content, tagged PDF works with other PDF features such as embedded and associated files, XMP metadata, annotations, forms and JavaScript to bring a rich variety of presentational options to scientific and technical authors with full accessibility.
As part of its drive towards integrating accessibility features the LaTeX Project recently announced a project to automatically generate tagged PDF with LaTeX. To help contextualize and accelerate this development the LaTeX Project recently became a Liaison Member of the PDF Association, allowing the organization to access PDF industry expertise and resources.
For its part the PDF Association, recognizing the significance of LaTeX, has formed a new Liaison Working Group to provide PDF industry support to LaTeX Project developers.
Chaired by PDF Association Board member Boris Doubrov, the LaTeX Project LWG’s work will be coordinated with other communities of the PDF Association to ensure broad awareness of this effort.
PDF Association members can join the LaTeX Project LWG today via the Member Area!