[Tex/LaTex] Revisiting producing structured PDFs from LaTeX

accessibilitypdfpdf-aviewers

I am trying to produce a structured or 'tagged' PDF from pdftex (Tex Live 2013) that passes automated tests in Adobe Acrobat for tagging. These tests are the de facto indicator for a document accessibility, which are often required by universities, government agencies and others worldwide for published documents.

To test a document for accessibility / tagging, try this:

  1. Open the PDF in Acrobat Reader
  2. 'file -> 'document properties' -> 'Description'
  3. under 'advanced', you'll see a field, 'tagged pdf'. Ideally it should say 'yes'. But it doesn't 🙁

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Question: does anyone know of any way to create a PDF which passes Acrobat's 'Tagged PDF' test directly from LaTeX?

The ideal solution would be a package or two that can be called from the preamble of a latex document. I want something that is very low effort for the author, and can thus be very easily integrated with existing workflows.

Note: There has been discussion about this in the past (see tags and links on the right), but as of May 2014, there was no clear solution to this. Much of the existing discussion is from 2012 or earlier (see How can tagged PDFs be created that support Universal Accessibility and reflowing?), and so I'd like to see if we can kick-start this discussion.

Why this isn't a duplicate question: When I first posted this question in July 2013, it was flagged as a duplicate of a question from 2010. The answer references a presentation given at at TUG 2010. That presentation basically says "we're working on it", and is not an answer that allows me to implement a solution.

Because it is now 2014, I think it reasonable to expect that:

  1. There have been new developments in this field through new packages or updates to core LaTeX
  2. Attempting to comply with Section 508 will have required that people figure out solutions. This is a relatively recent requirement and so solutions may have changed since 2010
  3. The software that is typically used to judge compliance (Adobe Acrobat) has changed several times since the question was not answered
  4. Packages that address accessibility have been proposed but not come in to widespread use or even disappeared (e.g. the accessibility package, http://www.babs.gmxhome.de/da_ergeb.htm), and it is therefore reasonable to revisit this issue with fresh eyes.

Best Answer

This question has a lot of votes, but hasn't received an answer. So I am giving a ConTeXt solution. To create a tagged pdf, simply add:

\setuptagging[state=start]

at the top of your document. For example:

\setuptagging[state=start]

\starttext
\startsection
    [title={A section title}]
  \input ward
\stopsection
\stoptext

Then, pdfinfo test.pdf gives:

Title:          test
Creator:        ConTeXt - 2014.04.24 09:39
Producer:       LuaTeX-0.79.1
CreationDate:   Fri May 30 11:58:32 2014
ModDate:        Fri May 30 11:58:32 2014
Tagged:         yes
Form:           none
Pages:          1
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
Page rot:       0
File size:      10992 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.6
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