Automated Generation of Accessible PDF

Abstract

LaTeX is widely used in STEM fields for creating high-quality documents that are converted to the Portable Document Format (PDF) for dissemination. Currently, available LaTeX systems do not guarantee that the generated PDFs are compliant with international accessibility standards. In this work, we present AGAP (Automated Generation of Accessible PDF) that automates and makes accessible the process of generating accessible PDFs from LaTeX. AGAP flags accessibility violations and provides guidance on how to fix them at compile time. AGAP allows interaction through speech synthesis and keyboard shortcuts thus making it fully accessible to persons with vision impairments (PVIs). Evaluating the accessible PDF generated using AGAP with a standard accessibility checker resulted in a much smaller number of violations as opposed to the PDF generated using another desktop LaTeX editor.