LaTeX and Accessibility

Overview

LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. There are known accessibility issues with the PDF’s that are created with LaTeX. It is important to be aware that the system currently does not automatically generate tagged PDF’s needed for accessibility readers. Therefore, when these PDF’s are uploaded to the DLE, Ally (our in-built accessibility checker) will flag this as having accessibility issues.

In our testing, LatTeX used within Moodle Labels and Pages was not detected and therefore was not readable by the screen readers we used.

What are The LaTeX Project doing to work on these Accessibility Issues?

The LaTeX Project have a ‘LaTeX Tagged PDF project’ which are working towards enabling automatic PDF tagging. It appears from the article linked below, that we will soon (June 2023) see improvements to LaTeX’s automated PDF tagging.

Read about their work so far:

• Towards automated PDF tagging: Pre-release of LaTeX 2023-06-01 is available for testing
• PDF, Tagging and Accessibility
• There is some useful reading about LaTeX in The LaTeX Project.

Current Work arounds?

Some other academic institutions have proposed various work arounds:

• Queens University Belfast: Accessibility, LaTeX and Me
• University of Glasgow
• Lancaster University
• Michigan State University
• This article published by Moodle goes into detail about Using TeX Notation within the Moodle environment.