In September, Ulrike, Joseph, and I attended PDF Days in Berlin to present our work on making complex STEM documents truly accessible. The core message: PDF/UA-1 simply isn’t designed for mathematics, so marking documents as “compliant” doesn’t mean they’re actually usable by people with disabilities. PDF/UA-2, on the other hand, handles math properly through MathML support—it’s the standard that actually works for STEM.

The challenge is industry support. PDF/UA-2 is relatively new, so tools and workflows are still catching up. But there’s progress: several hundred LaTeX packages are now compatible with accessible output generation and an end-to-end workflow exist, meaning researchers and technical writers can start to produce accessible documents with minimal extra configuration. And doing so will hopefully push industry adoption further along.

The talks are now online. Beyond my presentation, there are several worth checking out if accessibility in PDF matters to your work.

One note on the recording: you’ll notice I restart the audio output in my examples several times, insisting it wasn’t working. The irony is that the speech recorded perfectly—it was the conference room microphone that failed in real-time. Lesson learned: even at accessibility-focused events, the technology doesn’t always cooperate.

We also presented a poster on the topic, which is now also available online together with a few others.

Enjoy — Frank