[BlindMath] Beamer PDF Accessibility

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hello,

As a person who has been critical of LaTeX to pdf alone as a workflow, for a decade or more, I think I should comment that a serious commitment to generating pdf that is accessible is being worked on.

To meet my criteria, the process will not be accessible until every document created from LaTeX source is born accessible, without the author needing to do anything relating to extra packages or even knowledge of what makes a document accessible.

That is, no post-processing of documents by supposed experts in accessibility.

A pdf generated by LaTeX cannot meet my expectations, no matter if it is a slide deck, article,  or something else until the process of making it accessible is entirely embedded in the processing of all LaTeX documents.

That means you must get the source files.

I follow  process like that suggested by Bert if I have to work with a legacy LaTeX document. FWIW, I use markdown instead of LaTeX until I must meet someone's publishing constraints, at which point my markdown gets pushed into a tex file and processed as per the publisher's requests.


I do not think a blind  student should have to read raw LaTeX code. The ways we write source code in LaTeX is far from consistent and frequently lazy. Generation into HTML either by pandoc or another process is much smarter.

All the best,
Jonathan



-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Caitlin McKeown via BlindMath
Sent: Thursday, 13 November 2025 10:32 am
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Caitlin McKeown <cjmckeow at ncsu.edu>
Subject: [BlindMath] Beamer PDF Accessibility

Hello!

I am wondering if anyone has any experience, suggestions, or templates for
making Beamer PDFs accessible?

For a little background, I work at a university and nearly all of our math
and statistics faculty use Beamer to produce their lecture slides. For
those (like me) who are unfamiliar with Beamer, it is a program used to
convert LaTeX directly into presentation slides in PDF format. These slides
are generated directly from LaTeX so all of the underlying code and text is
there, but the output format from Beamer is a completely untagged PDF.
Because of all of the math notation, remediating the slides with Acrobat is
less than ideal, and feels like a step backwards when the LaTeX already
exists. Our faculty would prefer either a different process or a different
tool to make their content accessible using the LaTeX code they have
already written.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Caitlin

--

Caitlin McKeown, Ph.D.

Senior Instructional Designer

Digital Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA)

cjmckeow at ncsu.edu

delta.ncsu.edu


NC State University

Campus Box 7113

Center for Technology and Innovation

1010 Main Campus Drive
Raleigh, NC 27695


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