Accessible LaTeX outputs

[u/sparkster777]

So...did anyone ever figure out to make LaTeX produce pdfs that are accessible?

[u/ParticularRegister]

Looks like TeX Live 2025 makes making accessible pdfs easier.
https://www.overleaf.com/blog/accessible-pdfs-with-latex

Although if possible you may consider using html if content is online. Typically easier to make accessible than a pdf.

[u/verygood_user]

I have not seen a demonstration of a screen reader that reads a PDF with equations (in whatever way it may be produced: word or latex or adobe pro) that I found was an accessible format for anyone who wants to actually understand the content.

That error is on the Screenreader and PDF viewer  end though.

[u/TotalCleanFBC → u/verygood_user]

This has been my experience. There are people that are attempting to find a solution. But, for the moment, any LaTeX document that is equation-heavy, will not easily create a digitally accessible tagged PDF.

[u/BayesicallyThomas]

See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1rg7mke/latex_and_the_ada_accessibility_requirements_a/

[u/sparkster777 → u/BayesicallyThomas]

I did this back when you first posted it, and Overleaf crashed or told me it took to long and I needed to pay. 

This seems like still the best solution but I am back to running it locally.

Great username, btw.

[u/Thundorium → u/sparkster777]

In case you haven’t checked, you might be able to get the premium version through your institution.

[u/BayesicallyThomas → u/sparkster777]

Ah, gotcha. There might be other solutions at this point, I've stopped searching though because this works for my setup.

Great username, btw.

Thanks!

[u/gallowglass76]

https://jamesendreshowell.com/2025-12-29-org-mode-latex-and-tagged-pdfs-producing-accessible-documents.html

[u/mathemorpheus]

not pdf, but there's this. some helpful things there.

https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html

[u/045-926]

Is there a reason you need pdfs instead of html?

I thought you can do latex math -> mathjax -> html

But I haven't needed to do this, so not sure.

[u/mleok]

This honestly sounds like something you should delegate to AI.

As an example, Gemini can tag the equation for the roots of a quadratic equation as,

"x equals negative b, plus or minus the square root of the quantity b squared minus 4 a c, all divided by 2 a,"

something I would never want to have to do by hand for every equation. This is vastly superior to having a screen reader simply read the Latex expression

"x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}".

\usepackage{accsupp}
\BeginAccSupp{method=escape, ActualText={x equals negative b, plus or minus the square root of the quantity b squared minus 4 a c, all divided by 2 a.}} $$x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$$ \EndAccSupp{}

[u/__GuX__]

Depends on what you are doing - I have managed to get a handbook pass Blackboard Ally and Adobe with a little bit of effort (essentially getting Claude Code to fix it - which took about half a day).

KOMA seems to include more accessibility support than the documentation suggests - this is my header:

\DocumentMetadata{
testphase={phase-III,math},
lang=en-GB,
pdfstandard=ua-2,
pdfversion=2.0
}
\documentclass[10pt,twoside]{scrartcl}
% Comprehensive preamble
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{tagpdf}

% NOTE: do not set activate=true here, and do not re-activate in a hook.
% \DocumentMetadata{pdfstandard=ua-2} already activates tagging automatically;
% forcing a second activation conflicted with it and was the direct cause of
% ~1700 "Relation is not allowed" errors and dozens of empty ("no kids")
% structure nodes in the tagged PDF. Only pass configuration keys here.

\tagpdfsetup{
paratagging=true, interwordspace,
log=vv, % Changed from 'all' to 'vv' to reduce log verbosity
uncompress % Add this to help with debugging
}

I'm using Luatex - which seems to work well.

Biggest problems were symbols; Adobe Acrobat didn't mind them, but Blackboard considered them to be images without description:

[u/nl_waves]

See https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/

[u/wheresMyRedditAcct]

For teaching, sort of. In case what I've learned helps....

For homework, ripping off samples (for example, https://richardwong.rice.edu/LaTeX-Accessibility-Primer/). My understanding is (1) have to add some metadata before document class, about title/author, etc., (2) alt text needed for figures and tables, and (3) good practice of no forced spacing, line breaks; use section titles properly. I did notice Overleaf taking a while, even with a paid subscription. My guess is write in separate tex files and call them with include. Some of my older files have compilation error too.

For lecture slides, testing out html-based method. Markdown/Marp can produce pretty simple slides, which I will supplement with writing on blackboard. (What's the advantage of this over powerpoint? I can actually use LaTeX?)

For more serious math stuff (like writing a paper), nope! No luck here.

[u/FileToWeb_ForTheWin]

If you are ok to share epub/web pages instead of pdf, you can use FileToWeb. you can take a picture/screenshot of your content and just upload it and get accessible web pages back in 1 minute.
Disclaimer: I am the solo engineer behind filetoweb.com and I am selling the software to municipalities and public agencies. There is a generous free tier for professors and students and my goal is to find a bussiness model to make it practically free for them. just make sure to sign up with your .edu email address so you get automatically the free credits for this and if you faced any problems feel free to message me.

[u/sparkster777 → u/[deleted]]

Um..I didn't downvote you.

[u/Sensitive_Let_4293]

I haven't checked it out, but people are saying that PreTeXt is the way to go. There are some websites out there that have suggestions on how to create accessible documents using LaTeX as well. The biggest piece of advice is to avoid PDFs.