What’s new in babel 26.14

Draft

This version marks the beginning of the adaptation of babel to \DocumentMetadata and its PDF tagging features for accessibility. This is a work in progress and currently must be explicitly enabled using the following package options:

• babel-metadata=on if \DocumentMetadata is used but you are not interested in tagging.
• babel-metadata=tagging if PDF tagging has been activated and you want the babel extensions.

These options are temporary. They won’t be necessary in the future.

Document metadata

Currently modifies the instances for \chapter (and \appendix) and \part. For the moment it’s just a workaround and not the definitive code. This patch is applied if any of the following locales is loaded:

• \chapter (+ sometimes \appendix): basque, hungarian, japanese, kazakh, korean, lithuanian, chinese.
• \part: japanese, korean, lithuanian, chinese.

PDF tagging

Currently only text in \foreignlanguage is tagged. A new key actualtext is allowed in the optional argument of \foreignlanguage (e.g., with something like \foreignlanguage[actualtext=The actual text]{chinese}{...}).

Bidi text seems to be properly tagged with lualatex, but with xelatex, whose support for bidi text is limited, it doesn’t work. Reading aloud not yet tested. The PDF attribute /WritingMode is under study.