Talks at TUG 2026 (from the team and others)
Frank, Ulrike and Marcel attended the TUG 2026 meeting in early August in Calgary. They presented two papers there
- Ulrike gave an update on the Tagged PDF project (video and paper), showing off how things are working and giving advice on keeping up to date with developments generally in this work. For most end users, the tagging project is quite transparent (minimal source changes), so this is an opportunity to see ‘under the hood’ a bit.
- Frank talked about updating document classes using templates (video and paper). This is more aimed at document class authors, who will need to think about taking steps to update their code to let users have that transparent experience.
But it wasn’t only the team who talked about tagged PDFs and accessibility.
Timothy Erickson and Aarush Bhat
talked about the realties of making content accessible for a visually impaired
users (video): Aarush is blind.
This gave a real sense of the day-to-day requirements for truly accessible
content. Tim Prescott gave two talks, back to back, one focussed on converting
a textbook to tagged PDF (video
and paper)
and a second on making accessible presentations using ltx-talk
(video and
paper). Tim has been
very active in working with the team to deliver for US education, so it was
excellent to hear him. Finally, John Lienhard looked at his work on the MIT
thesis class (video and
paper), making use
of the new template methods to update the flexibility of the class as well as
producing accessible results.
Overall, the conference was an excellent showcase of the work in the TeX community on building accessibility into standard workflows.
Enjoy — Joseph