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Accessibility in LaTeX

Note

Accessibility in LaTeX is an ongoing project. The information in this section was last updated in November 2024.

LaTeX is a typesetting system first and foremost. This means that during its development, there was not a focus on accessibility. However, since the development of LaTeX3 there has been a focus on improving the accessibility of LaTeX documents. This has been done through development from Ulrike Fischer and the LaTeX3 team.

To see the status of accessibility in LaTeX, you can visit the LaTeX3 GitHub page.

For further information on the how-to setup accessibility in LaTeX, you can visit the Accessibility Usage Instruction page.

The majority of packages in LaTeX are accessibility friendly with a few exceptions. There are five document classes that are fully compatible. These are:

  • article
  • report
  • book
  • ltugboat
  • proc

Implementing accessibility in LaTeX is done through the basic addition of a document metadata class at the start of the document before the \documentclass.

\DocumentMetadata{
  lang        = en,
  pdfversion  = 2.0,
  pdfstandard = ua-2,
  pdfstandard = a-4f, %or a-4
  testphase   = 
   {phase-III,
    title,
    table,
    math,
    firstaid}  
}
\documentclass{....}

This makes short document metadata performs a lot of work in the background to make the document accessible. This redefines a number of commands to ensure that the document is accessible. This is a great first start to making an accessible document. However, there are additional steps that can be taken to improve the accessibility of a document.

For images that are being loaded through the \includegraphics command, the new alt key can be used to add alternative text to the image.

\includegraphics[alt={This is an image}]{example-image}

If there is not a suitable alternative text to be added the image can be marked as decorative by declaring it as an artifact.

\includegraphics[artifact]{example-image}

Unfortunately there is no way to add alternative text to tikz images or float environments such as tables and figures. This is a limitation of LaTeX and is something that is being worked on by the LaTeX3 team.

For more information please refer to the following documents by Ulrike Fischer and Frank Mittelbach:

Note

The beamer package is not currently accessible. This is due to the way that beamer is designed. There is work being done to make beamer accessible, but it is not currently accessible.