How to create accessible PDFs from the start
(typst.app)86 points by leephillips 10 days ago
86 points by leephillips 10 days ago
The problem was "have documents that look the same on any device, including printed paper and computer screens", and the approach was "PostScript does that for printers, let's simplify it and make it more universal". Both the problem it's solving and the approach were fine, maybe even great. Since then over three decades have passed, pdf has gained a plethora of features, some less well thought out than others, and real-world requirements are completely different than they were in the early 90s. If we were to invent pdf today it would likely look completely different. But it's still good enough that it's hard for a new format to offer an advantage compelling enough to replace pdf.
PDF is fine as output format and for archiving.
Thing is people want to do bunch of things they shouldn’t with PDF like automated parsing, editing or adding forms to it.
Ideally you should have an API or other structured data to pass around but of course life is more complicated. Like PDF is all you get because API would cost more than it makes sense to do bad job parsing PDF.
#show strong: set text(fill: blue)
Join us for a David Lynch double
feature with *Mulholland Drive* and
*Inland Empire* next Tuesday
at 8:15 PM.
ConTeXt has also been making strides in creating accessible PDF files:
* https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2024/talks/hans+mikael/con...
* https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Input_and_compilation/Accessi...
Isn't that example the exact opposite of mixing content and presentation? The * notation applies the strong [emphasis] tag, the show rule (re-)defines the presentation. Ideally you would of course separate the two into separate files (template + content).
In my time using Typst, I found that Typst makes it possible/easy to make content even more abstract: write the content as a "data structure" and then present parts of it in various places around your document. For instance to list quantity/weight of a parts description in a parts index at the end.
I've noticed a very lagy performance when reading specifically Texas instrument datasheets, I scroll 2 pages and bam 5s lag, then it usually works or lags occasionally. I passed the PDF through some gpt-concocted ghostscript woodoo and then they work just fine:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
-sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdfTypst doesn't (yet) do math accessibility I think, and Math is a lot of what it is about.
Wondering why they omitted that information from a blog post promoting Typst for accessibility use cases...
> It will be read in the wrong order
I really dislike it when this happens. This also affects copy/pasting. This typically seems to happen with LaTeX-style two-column layouts, where columns are supposed to be read top to bottom, left to right, but tools end up reading paragraphs from left to right, top to bottom. It's infuriating.
PDFs suck. And it's awful that they're the least bad option for a lot of things.
TIL: PDF/UA is a thing!
While reading the article I could only think that all this semantic stuff is what html is about!
So, I think it makes more sense to do what arxiv is doing: providing a html version of articles on top of pdfs. I’d even say html should be the source and the PDF should be generated from it instead.
IMO PDFs should just be gone. Nobody should use them. They are a solution in search of a problem. The most common argument I hear is "well we need document fidelity!" But IMO this completely ignores the fact that this just isn't needed when we have digital signatures and a PKI and certificates and all that to prove that a document hasn't been tampered with. Making sure a document appears the same on any kind of device/OS or whatever would be a great idea in theory if the way it was done was actually thought through, but it wasn't and now the PDF format is even worse than HTML is (and that's really saying something). Every single time I have had to interact with a PDF it has always been a total disaster. Don't even get me started on the clusterfuck that is PDF forms.