PreTeXt accessibility manifesto/cheat sheet

[Steven Clontz]

I'm talking to a lot of people about PreTeXt accessibility recently! It would be very helpful to have a "cheat sheet" of talking points that explains why PreTeXt-produced documents are inherently accessible (and what caveats I need in order to make that claim), particularly vs. LaTeX-produced PDFs (even considering recent updates such as the tagging project).

Has anyone created such a thing?

[Mark Fitch]

This would be very helpful. We are trying to help faculty here and my employer has not produced anything yet (nor do I expect it).

On 2/18/2026 7:04 AM, Steven Clontz wrote:

I'm talking to a lot of people about PreTeXt accessibility recently! It would be very helpful to have a "cheat sheet" of talking points that explains why PreTeXt-produced documents are inherently accessible (and what caveats I need in order to make that claim), particularly vs. LaTeX-produced PDFs (even considering recent updates such as the tagging project).

Has anyone created such a thing?

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[Rob Beezer]

Thanks, Steven, for the advocacy.

Have you seen:

https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/topic-accessibility.html

It is important to distinguish what we (PreTeXt) do *automatically*, and what we
*enable* authors to do.

"Skip to Main Content" is a great example of the former - likely unknown to
sighted readers. It also makes a great short demo for the uninitiated. Image
descriptions are an example of the latter.

I've got to believe we can easily leverage the "tagged PDF" work. But I am
waiting for somebody to step up and take the lead. It sounds to me like simply
invoking the right package might get us real far with almost no work? We could
also do better with EPUB, I suspect, which I view as a superior offline
electronic format (superior to PDF).

Rob

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[Steven Clontz]

Yes Rob, but thanks for including this reference that I should have included myself!

This does a good job of explaining the good things PreTeXt does for accessibility. But what I think we also need is a (respectful) comparison with other solutions in the math-heavy typesetting world, which sells the reader that writing first in PreTeXt (and more philisophically, a semantic markup language) is the best way to maximize accessibility in the long term.

[Rob Beezer]

> I think we also need is a (respectful) comparison

Agreed.

On 2/18/26 20:06, Steven Clontz wrote:
> Yes Rob, but thanks for including this reference that I should have included myself!
>
> This does a good job of explaining the good things PreTeXt does for
> accessibility. But what I think we also need is a (respectful) comparison with
> other solutions in the math-heavy typesetting world, which sells the reader that
> writing first in PreTeXt (and more philisophically, a semantic markup language)
> is the best way to maximize accessibility in the long term.
>
> On Wednesday, February 18, 2026 at 6:34:37 PM UTC-6 bee...@privacyport.com wrote:
>
> Thanks, Steven, for the advocacy.
>
> Have you seen:
>

> https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/topic-accessibility.html <https://
> pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/topic-accessibility.html>

> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext->
> > a11y/8a8ad427-228f-435c-b447-def84b2fc5a5n%40googlegroups.com
> <http://40googlegroups.com> <https://
> > groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext-a11y/8a8ad427-228f-435c-b447- <http://
> groups.google.com/d/msgid/pretext-a11y/8a8ad427-228f-435c-b447->
> > def84b2fc5a5n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer
> <http://40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>>.

>
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