BlogPosts tagged “accessibility”

The pressure is imminent. The European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025. The U.S. ADA Title II update requires initial compliance by April 2027. Publishers are tightening their own standards. And institutions everywhere face the same uncomfortable truth: they don't have a scalable path to meet these mandates.

Before TeX Live 2025, the workarounds were complex. Buying expensive proprietary software to retroactively tag PDFs. Or manually add tags after the fact — hundreds of hours per document. At Iowa State, graduate students were literally sitting in an administrator's office learning what a "tag" is for the first time after completing their dissertations.

Then TeX Live 2025 shipped with native support for automatically tagged PDFs. It changed everything.

With the release of TeX Live 2025 from the LaTeX Tagging Project team, you can use LaTeX to generate tagged PDFs that are accessible. This is important if you’re at a university or government agency, where you may be required to create accessible documents. This is because two pieces of legislation—the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which became effective in June 2025, and the ADA Title II Update, which goes into effect April 2026—are making this a legal requirement. This requirement includes a lot of the content that is produced in Overleaf.

The LaTeX Tagging Project is specifically designed to produce the structural tags required by PDF/UA-1 (and the upcoming PDF/UA-2). If a user follows the LaTeX Project's current tagging recommendations, they are effectively building a document that is "PDF/UA-ready," which is the strongest way to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA legal mandate required by US and European legislation. You can stay up to date with the Project’s work here.