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 It seems LaTeX is in the process of implementing this: https://www.pdfa.org/presentation/tagged-and-accessible-pdf-with-latex/
But put me in the "PDFs are not worth the hassle" camp anyway. I know some people in the LaTeX project have been working on a new document container format that still offers precise printing, but that can also reflow text for different screen sizes. The name escapes my memory right now. Maybe it'll be really cool. But for current research publication, I'd settle for HTML.
Jeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥
Julian Fietkau
geolaw