Accessibility

, PreTeXt, Quarto, ...

Jan Hlavacek
SVSU

An accessibility discussion

March 24, 2026

Abstract

We will cover using , PreTeXt, and, if time permits, Quarto to produce a variety of accessible documents.

This is a second paragraph of the abstract for this talk, just so we have something a bit more substantial.

\begin{equation*} \definiteintegral{-\pi}{\frac{3\pi}{2}}{\frac{\sin t}{t}}{t} \end{equation*}

Observations

Some things that I found mostly produce "accessible" pdfs.

Issues

First, some issues I ran into:

  • What is "accessible"?
  • Several standards (ua/1, ua/2, …)
  • Standards are vague (both feature and bug).
  • Different "validators".
  • Some things cannot be validated.

UA/1 vs. UA/2

produces UA/2

Typst produces UA/1, automatically?

You can probably convert from to Typst using Pandoc.

What I did

  1. Use lua, not XeLaTeX or pdf
  2. Turn tagging on and specify standards: \DocumentMetadata
  3. Use unicode-math with good unicode font (Luciole)
  4. Include additional metadata using hyperref package
  5. Limit what packages I use
  6. Provide alt text for any graphics

Turn on tagging

\DocumentMetadata{
     lang        = en,
     pdfstandard = ua-2,
     pdfstandard = a-4f, %or a-4
     tagging=on,
     tagging-setup={math/setup=mathml-SE} 
   }

Use unicode math

\usepackage{unicode-math, fontspec}
\usepackage{luciole-math}
\setmainfont{Luciole}
\usepackage{fontawesome6}

Additional metadata

\usepackage[implicit=false]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
    pdflang={en-US},
    pdftitle={Exam 1 for Math 132B, Winter 2026},
    pdfauthor={Jan Hlavacek},
    pdfsubject={Statistics}
}

Limit what packages I use

Tagging Status of LaTeX Packages and Classes

My pet peeve: enumitem!

Also avoid things like margin notes, footnotes etc.

Alt text

\includegraphics[alt = {A short description}]{filename.png}


\begin{tikzpicture}[alt={Line with some labels}]
    \draw[thick] (0,0)node[left]{origin} --node[above]{line}
    (3,0)node[right]{$x$};
\end{tikzpicture}

Validation

  • verapdf
  • show-pdf-tags

PreTeXt

The idea of PreTeXt

  1. It is relatively easy to make simple web pages accessible.
  2. has a good way to enter math formulas.
  3. MathJaX formats formulas for web in an accessible way.
  4. It is hard to produce HTML from .
  5. Create a system that has many features of but is easy to convert to an accessible HTML.
  6. Make it also easy to convert to so we can produce pdfs
  7. While we are at it, let’s also produce a Braile version of the documents

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <pretext>
       <book>
           <title>Hello world!</title>
           <chapter>
               <title>Getting Started</title>
               <p>Welcome to PreTeXt!</p>
               <p>Math example: <m>x^2 + 2x + 1</m></p>
               <p>Display math:
                   <me>\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}</me>
               </p>
               <!-- TODO: find something more to say... -->
           </chapter>
       </book>
   </pretext>

Documentation and guides

Quarto

Website

quarto.org