As of Feb 2021 I've stopped working actively on the accessibility package as it's basically not possible to implement something effective as an add-on package. Any change to the LaTeX kernel or any other packages in common use can introduce a breaking change for the accessibility package, and so it's a constant game of catch-up and there will always be incompatabilities. Accessibility is therefore not a viable solution to the problem of producing tagged and structured PDFs from LaTeX.
Fortunately there's an initiative by the core LaTeX team to introduce native tagging and structure as part of the LaTeX kernel. You can find out more about the project here, and status updates can be found on the LaTeX project website. TL; DR: wait 1-2 years and you'll see PDF tagging happen automatically.
In the interim, I am continuing to accept issues and encourage pull requests from users to fix small issues that are caused by e.g., naming clashes or outdated dependencies. This means that we might be able to solve some challenges on simple documents, but again, this is not a long-term solution, and this package should be considered experimental and unmaintained. It is not recommended for production use.
For those who need a better solution, you could consider:
- Exporting your document to another format via Pandoc. This brings many, many other problems!
- Using a different flavor of LaTeX such as ConTeXt to produce the document (see answers to this question on Stackoverflow)
- Introducing tagging and structure afterwards using e.g. Adobe Acrobat
and of course..
- Using a different document production tool in the first place that has native PDF export capabilities, e.g. from Microsoft or Adobe.
There is a good, in-depth discussion of all of this and the background challenges at Overleaf.
The following notes are the original README.md, and included for completeness.
- Andy Clifton, January 2023.
Authors: Babett Schalitz, Andrew (Andy) Clifton
Accessibility was written as a proof-of-concept showing how to improve the structure and tagging of PDF files generated from LaTeX. These features would make PDF documents machine readable and thus enable document readers (e.g. the Adobe Acrobat series) to automatically process and present the document.
This repository contains all of the files required to build and test the accessibility.sty file. It is not intended to be used directly in LaTeX.
- 23 Feb 2021: The question of accessibility in PDFs has now been taken up by the LaTeX project in a multiyear project and as a result I am stopping all work on this package and it should be considered "not maintained". See https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbytopic/pdf/ for news about progress by the LaTeX project. The article, "LaTeX Tagged PDF — A blueprint for a large project" may be particularly useful as an overview.
- Nov 2019: The
accessibilitypackage is now available through CTAN.
Accessibility was written as a proof-of-concept showing how to improve the structure and tagging of PDF files generated from LaTeX. These features would make PDF documents machine readable and thus enable document readers (e.g. the Adobe Acrobat series) to automatically process and present the document.
This package was predominantly targeted at documents produced using the KOMA-Script document classes.
accessibility should be considered broken and unusable for any application. If you want to see how it sort-of-works anyway, keep reading.
You can obtain the accessibility package through CTAN. That distribution has all of the files that you might require to install accessibility on your system. I suggest installation using an appropriate package manager.
If you really want to download the accessibility package from here, please download the current release from releases/. You can then install it on your own system. I cannot provide any help for this. Please see the 'Tex stackexchange for more information on the installation process.
Include
\usepackage[tagged, _options_]{accessibility}
in your preamble, where options should include either highstructure or flatstructure. Compile as normal.
You should use a tool such as Adobe Acrobat or PAC3 to check the output. Please see the manuals for those tools for more information.
- Changes to the LaTeX distribution since
acccessibilitywas first released appear to have broken the package quite comprehensively. It is no longer recommended for use at all. acccessibilityfails when sections cross page boundariesacccessibilitywas designed for KOMA-script documents.
See the issue tracker for more.
This package was experimental and is no longer maintained.
This style file might or might not work. The PDF output might be junk. Or you might have a document that needs something more. You might also have a suggestion on how to fix something.
Please report all problems and ideas to the accessibility package issue tracker on Github. Please provide a minimum working example.
The package was originally created as part of a diploma thesis by Babett Schalitz in 2007. The thesis was called 'Accessibility-Erhöhung von LATEX-Dokumenten'. More information can be found at her home page.
Andy Clifton took on maintenance of the package in May 2019 with permission and support from Babett Schalitz. Babett provided copies of the original files from 2007, not all of which were available online before. Those files can be found in the source/v1 directory and as release v0.2.
My immediate goal was to get accessibility on to CTAN. It is now available there and as of November 2019 it is included in the TEXLive and MIKTEX distributions.
Several changes were required to the source code to make it CTAN compliant. The updated source code for accessibility can be found in source/v2 directory. More information can also be found in that directory.
Now that the licensing for this package is clearly defined, I hope people will consider collaborating on maintaining and improving the package. If you are interested, please just get on and do whatever, or raise an issue to discuss.
This material is subject to the LaTeX Project Public License.
