From LaTeX and Pandoc to accessible documents

Most accessibility professionals associate the term “LaTeX” with a mathematical markup language, but scholars have been using the full TeX and LaTeX framework for decades to generate scholarly articles and class notes in disciplines ranging from electrical engineering and economics to linguistics and symbolic logic.

Using markup, faculty and researchers can create documents with embedded math, automatically generated diagrams and headings. Although the LaTeX system is robust and low cost, the traditional workflow often generates an inaccessible, untagged PDF.

This session will review the traditional LaTeX workflow and explain how utilities such as Pandoc can streamline the process to produce accessible Word and HTML documents with customizable styles. We will also explore how LaTeX users can create more accessible graphics and tables to improve the accessibility of output documents. Demonstrations of different tools will be included in the presentation.