Confronting the Urgent Challenge of Using LaTeX to Create Accessible Course Materials

Instructors in higher education across the United States are faced with a looming April deadline to update their course materials to comply with new digital accessibility standards. Creating accessible materials presents a significant challenge for faculty, many of whom are unfamiliar with standards for digital accessibility. Users of the document preparation software LaTeX, which includes many faculty in the STEM disciplines of physical chemistry, engineering, physics, and mathematics, are particularly strained by the new standards because of the Tex engine’s intrinsic lack of accessibility features. While heroic efforts have been made to make LaTeX more accessible, there is no general method that allows straightforward remediation of existing projects, especially if the contents of these projects may change in the future. This article highlights some background features of the problems surrounding digital accessibility for common file formats and suggests an indirect method for the creation of accessible materials from LATEX source code. Proactive advice is also given to ensure that documents retain the author’s intended content to the greatest extent possible. This workflow is amenable to continual updating of document contents without additional arduous interventions. Nonetheless, sustained future efforts will be necessary for accessibility to become practical, especially for users of LaTeX.