draft: pdf accessibility blog post#1898
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gordonwoodhull
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Now contains results of testing, and what to expect. I think it's ready for review. Note: this is based against prerelease and links to prerelease documentation; if this goes out after release we should update it. |
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cwickham
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Looking good, Gordon. This is mostly structural and organizational feedback. I'm more than happy to do a finer grain wording review on the next pass.
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| `pdf-standard` takes a single standard name or list of standard names.PDF version is used if provided in the list, but otherwise inferred from the standard. | ||
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| If you specify a PDF standard, Quarto first instructs LaTeX or Typst to use the standard when producing the PDF, and then validates the output PDF against the standard using veraPDF, an open-source PDF validation tool. |
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Should we call out that users need to install veraPDF with:
quarto install verapdf
It might also be nice to show what the output looks like when a document passes validation.
| title: PDF Accessibility and Standards | ||
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| 2025 was a big year for PDF accessibility. LaTeX and Typst both released support for PDF tagging and accessibility standards, just in time for new regulations in the EU (June 2025) and US (April 2026) |
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Let's get Quarto in this intro somehow:
| 2025 was a big year for PDF accessibility. LaTeX and Typst both released support for PDF tagging and accessibility standards, just in time for new regulations in the EU (June 2025) and US (April 2026) | |
| 2025 was a big year for PDF accessibility. LaTeX and Typst both released support for PDF tagging and accessibility standards, just in time for new regulations in the EU (June 2025) and US (April 2026). Quarto 1.9 brings this support to you as a Quarto user. |
Otherwise, the first mention isn't until line 18 which I think is too far down.
| title: PDF Accessibility and Standards | ||
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| 2025 was a big year for PDF accessibility. LaTeX and Typst both released support for PDF tagging and accessibility standards, just in time for new regulations in the EU (June 2025) and US (April 2026) |
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We should probably link to the regulations...
| * The semantic structure of the text (title, heading, paragraph, figure, etc) | ||
| * The natural reading order | ||
| * Spatial coordinates for highlighting and assistive navigation | ||
| * Required metadata such as title and language |
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This is all about upstream support, but I'm not sure how clear that distinction is to our users. Should we give this a section heading, something like:
## What's new in LaTeX and Typst| * Spatial coordinates for highlighting and assistive navigation | ||
| * Required metadata such as title and language | ||
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| ## Enabling a PDF Standard for Accessibility |
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With above we could call this:
## What's new in Quarto|
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| Typst also seems to do a very good job of generating UA-1 compliant output by default - almost all errors were titles and alt text. | ||
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| However, we did discover that Typst Books are not yet compliant. There is [structural problem with the Typst orange-book package](https://github.com/flavio20002/typst-orange-template/issues/38) and we'll work with the maintainers to correct it. |
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Link to new Typst books documentation, since this will be new to most...
| Typst also seems to do a very good job of generating UA-1 compliant output by default - almost all errors were titles and alt text. | ||
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| However, we did discover that Typst Books are not yet compliant. There is [structural problem with the Typst orange-book package](https://github.com/flavio20002/typst-orange-template/issues/38) and we'll work with the maintainers to correct it. | ||
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We need a closing paragraph...
Something to the effect of "we don't want meeting accessibility requirements to stop you from using Quarto", repeat statement about opening discussions (do we have an accessibility tag people should apply?).
| ### Both formats | ||
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| Your document needs a title. | ||
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| Your document needs alt text and/or a caption for every image. |
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I think we should move this section up to the previous one and frame it as: you don't need to do much but you do need to do this.
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| If you specify a PDF standard, Quarto first instructs LaTeX or Typst to use the standard when producing the PDF, and then validates the output PDF against the standard using veraPDF, an open-source PDF validation tool. | ||
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| ## Markdown is naturally good for Accessibility |
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I wonder if this section might be better framed as ## Creating accessible PDFs. Rather than focusing on the advantages of the workflow, focus on what a user needs to do (some of which they probably do already).
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| See the [LaTeX](https://prerelease.quarto.org/docs/output-formats/pdf-basics.html#accessibility-requirements) and [Typst](https://prerelease.quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst.html#accessibility-requirements) documentation for details. | ||
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| ## What to expect |
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"What to expect" is a little vague. This feels like "what to expect will pass accessibility validation", but that is obviously too wordy.
Some brainstorming:
"Accessibility support in Quarto", "How accessible are Quarto documents?", "Limitations", ...
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@cwickham
This turns out to be slightly longer than I thought, but still manageable. I think I'm getting the right balance, but if anything is too technical we can take it out.
QUARTO_PDF_STANDARD.I need to dig a little deeper but at first glance I would summarize as Typst will solve almost everything except for needing alt text/caption and title, but in LaTeX you need to be more careful.
https://prerelease.quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst.html#accessibility-requirements
which is a list of ways that quarto and markdown automatically fill in a lot of what you need for accessibility.