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Department of Mathematics College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

LaTeX Accessibility Guides and Links

This page has resources for generating accessible pdfs that are title 2 compliant, using LaTeX.

LaTeX Accessibility Talk

I gave a talk on how to generate ADA compliant LaTeX pdfs in LIT225 (and via Zoom) on January 20th, 2026 (recording here). The slides for the talk can be found here. Note that they are generated using the ltx-talk document class, and is a beamer-style presentation that is also ADA Compliant. You can get the .tex file (along with the pdf and supporting pictures etc) here.

Getting and Installing a sufficiently recent version of LaTeX

To get a version of LaTeX that contains the Phase 3 tagging release, you will currently need to install LaTeX manually as most (normal) installation methods do not update to a recent enough release. In particular, MikTeX and Overleaf, as well as most default apt repositories, are all currently providing a release for LaTeX that is not sufficiently recent. You can find instructions and links to manually install a sufficiently recent version of LaTeX here. You will need a version released on or after November 1st, 2025.

Additionally, after installing a sufficiently recent release of LaTeX, you’ll need to update packages (such as amsmath, tagpdf, etc.). It’s easiest to update all the installed packages rather than looking for the individual ones needed for tagging.
  • Windows: First you should open a terminal; you can do this by clicking the search bar in the taskbar and typing “terminal” or “cmd”. This should bring up a box where you can type in commands. Once you have this open, enter the command: tlmgr update --self --all --reinstall-forcibly-removed. This will update the update manager (tlmgr), then all the packages, along with fixing any corrupted packages that may generate issues depending on how long it has been since you last updated your packages.

  • Mac: If you’ve installed LaTeX via the MacTeX package (https://www.tug.org/mactex/), then the TeX Live Utility app was automatically installed in your Applications > TeX folder. Open the app, and then in the toolbar, click Actions > Update All Packages


  • Linux: Via the terminal, run tlmgr (https://www.tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html). There is a gui that you can use too.

A quick reference of examples

I have made a pdf with examples of common commands, options, and content, along with how to make it title-2 compliant. In most cases, the content is automatically generated with the necessary metadata to make it compliant, but in some cases additional commands or optional arguments are necessary, and examples of doing so are included. You can download the pdf of examples here. You can get the source tex file here, and the included picture of Xarlie here.

Verifying your PDF is compliant

To check that your pdf is indeed compliant, you should use veraPDF online, which is an industry-standard checker for pdf accessibility. Other suggested tools (such as Canvas ALLY, UDOIT, etc) can be used, but they are generally not embraced by the actual accessibility community. Since veraPDF is free, quick, and easy to use, it is highly recommended over most other checkers to verify your pdf is compliant.

Note: Although you can easily check to make sure that the structure of the pdf is correct (this is what veraPDF does) – this is only checking that things are tagged/labeled properly in the meta data. This is indeed useful/important, since the metadata is not something you can see in the pdf yourself, so it isn’t obvious when it is working or not without using a compliance checker. However, even if a pdf passes this structural test and is marked as compliant, that doesn’t mean that the actual mathematical content itself is correct. In other words, a pdf that passes a compliance checker means that the math (and other elements) are correctly labeled, but the content itself could be gibberish.

Nonetheless, for content generated via luatex using phase 3 LaTeX tagging; it is usually the case that, if the pdf passes the structural test, the math content is probably close enough to correct that students will be able to understand it. The only way to be sure about the math content is to use an actual screen reader to verify what is spoken by a screen reader when it is reading your pdf. Screen reader programs are available at the UF libraries.