ISO PDF/UA-2 standard released

In March 2024 the new Universal Accessibility standard for PDF (PDF/UA-2) was released. It is based on PDF 2.0 and improves accessibility compared to PDF/UA-1 (based on PDF 1.7) in many important aspects.

The standard is closely related to the Well-Tagged PDF (WTPDF) specification from the PDF Assocciation, and documents conforming to WTPDF are automatically compliant with PDF/UA-2. The WTPDF specification is freely available for download by the PDF Association, which gives you an easy access to all normative requirements in PDF/UA-2.

Examples of WTPDF / PDF/UA-2 documents produced by LaTeX

You will find a collection of examples that conform to the new accessibility standard in a post at the LaTeX tagged PDF project repository. All of the examples have been produced by LaTeX using the code from our LaTeX tagged PDF project. The files are a mixture of small examples demonstrating specific features, older out of copyright documents that have been re-typeset as tagged pdf, and contemporary documents including recently published arXiv papers, course notes, and conference papers.

They nicely demonstrate what is already possible with LaTeX when producing accessible documents conforming to PDF standards such as WTPDF, PDF/UA-2 or PDF/A-4.

Please note that this makes LaTeX one of the first (if not the only) producer of PDF documents that is already capable of producing documents conforming to the new PDF/UA-2 and WTPDF standards that were released in early 2024.

— Frank