we have chosen to put most of our research into documents in PDF format.
PDFs are a huge pain to make accessible.
most scientists write their papers in Latex, overleaf, etc., which cannot produce accessible PDFs.
to make such PDFs accessible, one uses Adobe Acrobat, which is expensive and proprietary.
increasingly, we post our PDFs to arXiv, which ~forbids accessible PDFs b/c they can't be compiled from source.
~none of our science is accessible.
artifacts (and file formats) have politics.
@jbigham hmm, in which way is LaTeX PDF output non-accessible? At least it doesn't produce rasters like, well, Photoshop & other things, so that must be some other problem…
Do you mean text blocks ordering or some other stuff?
@jbigham https://lmgtfy.app/?q=latex+pdf+tags
Don't know how extensive they are but there are ways to do it it seems. Sure they need more exposure, and push for arXiv to consider making it mandatory.
@jbigham just like surely not everyone using Acrobat know or will use the accessibility tags properly anyway.
People still want to fake radio buttons in HTML, so there's a long road ahead…
@jbigham makes me wonder how well LibreOffice handles that in PDF it generates, as I've been using it for years thinking it was just fine.
Same for pandoc I use to generate user manual through LaTeX from markdown… 🤔
Jeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥
mmu_man