PDF Association’s press release: Accessible math in PDF – finally!

We are pleased to announce that the PDF Association (PDFA) has just issued a press release highlighting the LaTeX Team’s work to make accessible math in PDF a reality. With the latest developments based on PDF 2.0 and PDF/UA‑2, LaTeX can now automatically generate PDFs with STEM content, such as mathematics, that are truly accessible and compliant with the PDF/UA‑2 ISO standard. This change closes a major accessibility gap for STEM documents and opens the door to recompiling large archives of existing LaTeX‑based PDFs in an accessible form.

If you followed our work in the Tagging Project then this isn’t really news for you, but it’s especially gratifying to see our work appreciated and recognized by the broader community, and it is encouraging that the industry is embracing these standards more and more.

In particular, Firefox is now capable (with release 148) to correctly interpret PDFs that are tagged and contain MathML to describe mathematical formulas, and we have high hopes that Chrome will follow soon.

Learn more this in the PDF Association’s press release.

Enjoy — Frank