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Creating Accessible LaTeX Documents

LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most frequently used for technical or scientific documents, and is commonplace in the College of Science and Engineering, particularly in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences.

Because LaTeX was designed as a typesetting program, PDF documents created using LaTeX do not include the document structure and tagging required for accessibility by default, and can be challenging for visually-impaired students or staff who rely on assistive technology such as screen readers. This webpage is designed to assist you in creating a more accessible HTML file from a LaTeX source. There is no one 'magic bullet' that ensures a 100% accessible PDF, but the guide below, courtesy of a research project in the University of Aberdeen, has produced the best results and is reproduced with permission.

What you will need to install

Experienced LaTeX users will likely already have their own installation of choice. For Mac users, MacPorts (an open-source, easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading command-line software on Macs) may proves useful.

If you have not already installed them, you will need texlive-latex (fundamental LaTeX packages) and LaTeXML (for HTML conversion).

Command Line Commands

This guide assumes you have a file called notes.tex with related images etc in a specific directory. Command line commands are illustrated in bold italic.

Turning a TeX file into a HTML file with LaTeXML is a two stage process: TeX files are processed into an internal XML representation, and then into HTML for output. You should not need to edit the xml directly, although this may be necessary in extreme cases.

The first step is handled by the program latexml, which we can run to produce the xml file

latexml notes.tex --dest=notes.xml

This command produces a lot of textual output, and may take some time if your document is large or uses a lot of macros or packages, e.g. processing a large file notes takes 20 minutes.

This will create a new file in the same folder with the name notes.xml.

Next we produce the HTML file with the command

latexmlpost notes.xml --dest=notes-folder/notes.html --split --splitat=section --navigationtoc=context --javascript="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js?config=MML_HTMLorMML" --urlstyle=file --timestamp=0

This is a single command that should be typed in one line, and will run much faster than the previous one. The full options are explained in the Word document below, but suffice to say that latexmlpost is instructed to create a new folder called notes-folder which will contain the file notes.html and any files it depends on. We are also instructing it to include MathJax for rendering mathematics in a screen-reader friendly way. The entire contents of notes-folder should be accessible if you make this file available online or in Canvas.