The PDF Association @PDFassociation announced their "all-new" Product Showcase in January. The new interface provides an improved search, and the ability to search by product types, standards, and features.
For example, you can search for only open source or no-cost solutions. Or ones that offer Tagged PDF or PDF/UA-1 or 2. Or filter the results to only list those who offer "Remediate Tagged PDF" service.
https://pdfa.org/product-showcase
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If you are confused about your schedule, here's a summary. The PDF schedules provided by the City of Toronto and Circular Materials are both correct. Some map areas have changed their pickup schedules: for example, Parkdale used to be Wed Day 2 and they have now switched to Wed Day 1. The PDF versions of the maps show these changes correctly. But the mobile app and website lookup function don't.
Folks affected by Day switches should have received special printed mail notices about these changes, but some didn't.
One disappointing note about the PDF calendars: while those on the city's site are visually identical to those on Circular Materials site, the ones used by Circular Materials are inaccessible and untagged. Why don't they use the same tagged versions that are on the city site? Who knows! Does Circular Materials even know about the AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act)? No they don't.
2/5
#Accessibility #AODA #a11y #TaggedPDF #recycling #calendars #Toronto #CircularMaterials
@ctietze I need to be able to make slides from #OrgMode files. But #Beamer cannot (and will not) be made to produce #taggedPDF output (thanks, @mxp). So rather than bang my head against #TeXLaTeX, I took a step back.
Check this out:
pandoc why-yes-i-am-a-wizard.org -o why-yes-i-am-a-wizard.pptx && soffice --headless --convert-to pdf why-yes-i-am-a-wizard.pptx
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/start_parameters.html
No Haskell noodling required.
NEW POST (as promised): "Org mode, LaTeX, and tagged PDFs: producing accessible documents"
#Emacs #OrgMode #accessibility #a11y #debian #TeXLaTex #taggedPDF
[Howell breathes a long relieved sigh]
Before and after.
Canvas' infamous automatic ratings of #accessibility. In the proud bean-counting brain-dead tradition of provosts and deans, the thing they can measure is the thing we must make number-go-up.
Lots of steps to get Debian to run #texlive2025. Then a few steps to configure Org properly to export #TeXLaTeX that produces #taggedPDF output.
I promise the Fediverse I will write up all the steps and make a blog post.
tl;dr thanks to Dr. Kenny Ballou at Cal State San Marcos https://kennyballou.com/blog/2025/08/tagged-pdfs-org-export/index.html
Okay, gang, more vacation-work. Going all-in on #accessibility, and it appears I need #texlive2025 to produce semantically #taggedPDF output from #TeXLaTeΧ. I'm still on #Debian12 so here goes.
# may take several hours to run
LOL
Advice or pointers to resources welcome. Obviously the final goal is #OrgMode export in #Emacs.
A couple recent PDF software releases you might have missed:
1. PAC 2026:
A new version of the free PAC (PDF Accessibility Checker) includes AI-assisted checks. [1]
2. Stirling PDF v2:
This open source set of PDF manipulation tools is now available as a desktop app [2]. Download available for Windows/Mac/Linux. [3]
[1] https://pac.pdf-accessibility.org/en/resources/ai-checks/technical-details-about-ai-assisted-checks
[3] https://www.stirling.com/download
#PDF #PAC #TaggedPDF #Accessibility #StirlingPDF #AdobeAcrobat
Big update to the annotated edition of G.H. Hardy's ‘A Mathematician's Apology’: the PDF is now *tagged* (plus various minor improvements).
(A #TaggedPDF contains extra semantic information to assist screen-reading software etc.)
The new version is available (#OpenAccess as always) at https://archive.org/details/hardy_annotated
The LaTeX tagging system is still under development [https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/], but I have been making progress in adapting my LaTeX styles to be tagging-compatible.
For the annotated ‘Apology’, I also had to re-implement a subset of the functionality of the "manyfoot" package (which is currently not tagging-compatible), because there are two different kinds of footnotes in the annotated ‘Apology’. (Hardy's original footnotes and the annotations.)
Although the PDF passes VeraPDF validation, there may of course be mistakes in the tagging. Feedback, especially from users of screen readers, would be much appreciated, especially because I now hope to add tags to ‘Form & Number: A History of Mathematical Beauty’ [https://archive.org/details/cain_formandnumber_ebook_large].
#GHHardy #HistPhil #Mathematics #MathematicalBeauty #TeXLaTeX #Accessibility
‘Bertrand Russell & Trinity: A college controversy of the last war’ is a pamphlet written by G.H. Hardy in 1942, giving an account of the dismissal of Russell from his Trinity College lectureship in 1916 following his criminal conviction for anti-war political activity. (Hardy was at the time a fellow of Trinity and opposed Russell's ouster.)
I have uploaded a re-typeset version of Hardy's pamphlet to the Internet Archive [https://archive.org/details/hardy_russellandtrinity].
Creating this version was an exercise for me to learn how to (start to) adapt my LaTeX styles to the new interfaces created by the ongoing LaTeX tagging project [https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/]. (A #TaggedPDF contains supplementary information to assist screen reading software, data extraction, etc.)
Also, Hardy's work is in the public domain; there seemed to be no downloadable ebook version of this pamphlet; and I thought that it would be a useful companion to the ‘Annotated Mathematician's Apology’ [https://archive.org/details/hardy_annotated].
I have made available the #LuaLaTeX source code on #Codeberg, in case anyone is interested in how the style was created: https://codeberg.org/ajcain/hardy_russellandtrinity
#GHHardy #BertrandRussell #WorldWarI #HistPhil #TeXLaTeX #Accessibility
@djwudi Thanks for sharing your initial thoughts. I haven't taken the new Affinity for a test drive yet, but I'm hoping that the new integration of components gave them a chance to rework the native file format and code.
Old Canva was very frustrating for PDF tagging and accessibility, despite years of work to improve it. I always figured that part of Canva's challenge came from technical debt owing to not having had accessibility in mind at the start.
A new version of my LuaLaTeX package ‘marginalia’ is now available on CTAN. [https://ctan.org/pkg/marginalia]
This package allows the placement of marginal notes (or other marginal content) anywhere, without \marginpar’s limits, and automatically adjusts positions to prevent either overlaps or content being pushed off the page, and uses key–value settings that allow fine-grained customization.
The main change in this new version is tagging support. (A tagged PDF contains supplementary information to assist screen reading software, data extraction, etc. #LaTeX is in the midst of a multi-year development project to add tagging support. [https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/])
Credit for explaining how to add tagging support is due to Ulrike Fischer of the LaTeX team.
Are you the kind of person who has always wondered how to tag a subtitle, or whether a Title in a PDF should be tagged as a Heading 1, or what to do with tags when a heading breaks across several lines?
Then you might want to check out the free webinar offered by the @PDFassociation on May 15.
Free Webinar – Techniques for Accessible PDF: Headings
https://pdfa.org/event/webinar-techniques-for-accessible-pdf-headings/
2/2
Last month, the @PDFassociation released their second set of "Techniques for Accessible PDF". This set focuses on Headings. [1]
The Techniques series provides pass/fail conditions for various tagging structures demonstrated in pared down sample PDF files. The first set covered 5 Fundamentals. [2]
[1] https://pdfa.org/techniques-for-accessible-pdf-headings/
[2] https://pdfa.org/techniques-for-accessible-pdf/
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[1/2] Die zweite Präsentation bleibt beim Thema Barrierefreiheit und Ulrike Fischer zeigt einige unterschiedlichen Varianten um #TeXLaTeX nach #HTML zu wandeln.
Ein Ansatz, den ich zum Beispiel für das frühere Backend der @datenschleuder umgesetzt hatte, um epub mitzuliefern.
Es wird #tex4ht, #Pandoc, #LaTeXML, #lwarp und auch der Weg via #NGPDF (HTML aus den #TaggedPDF) gezeigt und verglichen.
[1/3] Der Freitag startet mit „Märchenstunde mit Frank [Mittelbach]“. Zuerst mit den Eingeständnis, dass es die Erkenntnis gebraucht hat wahrzunehmen, was wir mit den Dokumenten der letzen Jahrzehnten Personen, die auch #ScreenReader angewiesen sind „angetan haben“.
Er gibt allen, die sich bisher nicht Barrierefreiheit beschäftigt haben einen kleinen Einblick darüber was das bedeutet.
In case you missed it, a couple weeks ago the @PDFassociation published a web page listing "Tools for Accessible PDF".
There are two tables listing various tools along with columns for platform and license - one table for commercial, the other for free and/or open source. The lists include pretty much all the major vendors and tools, as well as a few that I didn't even know about (!).
The Techniques for Accessible PDF [1] from the @PDFassociation explain 5 (so far) "Fundamentals":
1: Basic Technical Rules
2: Text
3: Content
4: Logical Content Order
5: Appropriate Semantics
Along with some 40 example PDFs demonstrating either Pass or Fail conditions.
A background document provides some helpful detail on how to make use of the Techniques. [2]
[1] https://pdfa.org/techniques-for-accessible-pdf/
[2] https://pdfa.org/techniques-for-accessible-pdf-background/
Folks who rely on PDF standards may be interested in the "Techniques for Accessible PDF" published last week by the @PDFassociation.
It's a set of sample PDFs demonstrating pass/fail techniques for specific tagging cases.
I personally don't find the material very practical or easy to browse, but it's targeted more at technical implementation than practical tagging advice.
I expect the collection to grow in the future.
#PDF und #Linux ist ja eh ein spezielles Thema, aber kennt irgendwer ne Möglichkeit, PDF-Tags in Linux zu bearbeiten? Kenne in Windows den Adobe- und Axes-Kram, läuft aber nicht unter Linux.
Darf natürlich auch was kosten, Einmalkauf aber bevorzugt.
Ich selbst habe zwar Zweifel, aber vielleicht überrascht mich ja jemand 🤷
