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The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

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Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#31

Post by ldjb »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #11

Why must the PDF encapsulate all requirements? My understanding of accessibility requirements it that you must have a version that is amenable to automatic speech, not that all versions must be.

It doesn't have to. But ideally you only want to have to produce and distribute a single file.

Also, a lot of people don't consider accessibility when generating PDFs. If LaTeX produced accessible PDFs, the PDFs would be tagged automatically without the author even thinking about it. Of course, it might still not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than the status quo.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#32

Post by vehemenz »

dathinab wrote: post #26
svnpenn wrote: post #7

I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I…

I wrote my bachelor thesis in markdown with inline mathtex(?) and compiler it from there with pandoc. I also tried from/to HTML and the result is just bad. HTML isn't suited at all to write scientific documents with proper formatting. Also I still need to do some things directly in latex and include them with inline latex in markdown. So no HTML+CSS isn't suited for this at all. At least for now where scientific pape…

You can definitely generate good scientific PDFs from HTML and CSS, combined with tools to generate SVGs from your LaTeX/MathML. I've converted a fair number of textbooks from print to high quality digital and print hybrid PDFs.

The learning curve is pretty high though. If you're not a web developer already, there are better options out there.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#33

Post by vehemenz »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #14
svnpenn wrote: post #7

I had a realization a while back, that in my opinion LaTeX isnt really needed anymore. Pretty much anything you can do with LaTeX, you can do with HTML. Want a PDF? Most browsers will print to PDF now, or you can use a library like this: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf Need a page break? Here you go: https://developer.mozilla.org/Web/CSS/break-after Im not sure what you would do about TikZ and stuff like this, but I…

Not even considering the math formatting, Html is still lacking good footnotes, bibliographies, glossary generation, index generation, and table of context generation. Browsers also render things atrociously compared to a latex pdf.

There are third-party tools that do all of this.

A LaTeX-generated PDF does not render correctly at all for a blind user.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#35

Post by mci »

1. Needs (2016) in the title.

2. Even by 2016, pdfTeX had been largely superseded by LuaTeX.

3. The author bizzarely links to "the mess" of the literate source of TeX the program as a WEB file rather than as a typeset document.

4. AIUI, the source code of the TeX engine has nothing/very little to do with adding tags to PDFs, which it is the job for LaTeX packages. Admittedly, understanding and writing their source code is a rarer skill than reading the literate source of TeX.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#36

Post by jimktrains2 »

vehemenz wrote: post #33
jimktrains2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even considering the math formatting, Html is still lacking good footnotes, bibliographies, glossary generation, index generation, and table of context generation. Browsers also render things atrociously compared to a latex pdf.

There are third-party tools that do all of this. A LaTeX-generated PDF does not render correctly at all for a blind user.

I'm not saying latex is exemplary in all forms. (I would also like to know if the big browsers render all web pages as accessible PDFs, though).

I simply meant that a plain html document + the browser leaves much to be desired for even non-technical documents.

Tbh, I would like to see a more advanced and open html-based ecosystem for documents. Latex has many watts, but also a lot of features.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#37

Post by scoresmoke »

Even though LaTeX is still not very close to producing perfectly accessible PDF documents, there is some recent work towards this goal.

- https://ctan.org/pkg/tagpdf

- https://ctan.org/pkg/accessibility

I am using the former for some personal documents and found that it improves text selection and copying on Apple devices. (This could be related to how PDFKit handles text.)

Edit: formatting.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#39

Post by SilasX »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #22
dewey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?

Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup. We called them typesetters. It was a qualified job, you don't expect the task to be something Joe Random could to with 6 weeks of training.

At risk of gatekeeping, it doesn’t sound like typesetters merit the title of engineer.

Re: The sad state of PDF-Accessibility of LaTex Documents (2016)

#40

Post by dewey »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #22
dewey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if software engineers were actual engineers instead of glorified script kiddies. Maybe you shouldn't need to be an engineer to write a document with some formulas inside?

Back in the day we had engineers writing documents from markup. We called them typesetters. It was a qualified job, you don't expect the task to be something Joe Random could to with 6 weeks of training.

Back in the days operating a computer also needed weeks of training and was a qualified job. That doesn't mean it always has to stay that way.
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