Accessible PDFs with LaTeX

With the release of TeX Live 2025 from the LaTeX Tagging Project team, you can use LaTeX to generate tagged PDFs that are accessible. This is important if you’re at a university or government agency, where you may be required to create accessible documents. This is because two pieces of legislation—the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which became effective in June 2025, and the ADA Title II Update, which goes into effect April 2026—are making this a legal requirement. This requirement includes a lot of the content that is produced in Overleaf.

The LaTeX Tagging Project is specifically designed to produce the structural tags required by PDF/UA-1 (and the upcoming PDF/UA-2). If a user follows the LaTeX Project's current tagging recommendations, they are effectively building a document that is "PDF/UA-ready," which is the strongest way to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA legal mandate required by US and European legislation. You can stay up to date with the Project’s work here.

What is accessibility and how might this affect me?

The US Department of Education defines accessibility as “a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use.”

Legislation in the United States and Europe is attempting to make accessibility a requirement for documents that are produced by governments and educational institutions. Even if you’re not in the US or Europe, you may still encounter these requirements if you’re submitting a manuscript to a journal for publication. Publishers are rolling out new submission guidelines that may require you to ensure the PDF you compile in Overleaf meets accessibility standards.

For PDFs, being accessible means:

• Content structure is well defined, e.g. differentiation between headers, body text, etc.
• Non-text elements are described, e.g. description of what trends are in a figure vs. a caption that describes what the figure is about
• Contains tagging that helps assistive technology, like screen readers, understand the layout of the PDF, e.g. multiple columns are read in the correct order

For LaTeX, providing accessibility support means that authors can easily produce accessible texts (PDF or HTML) from LaTeX source.

Why is accessibility important?

Aside from legal requirements, making documents accessible allows individuals with various disabilities (visual, auditory, motor, cognitive) to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with content. It also improves search engine optimization (SEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) to make your content more findable, and can provide additional context/analysis for those without disabilities.

What steps can I take to make a PDF accessible?

We’ve provided documentation here on recommendations for writing your LaTeX code to make the output accessible. LaTeX is particularly well suited to creating accessible documents because the structured content formatting translates easily to auto tagging. It performs especially well for long, complex documents and math content.

Accessibility standards and requirements can vary, such as PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2. If you are submitting a manuscript to a journal, you’ll also want to review any submission guidelines that may include recommendations on how to handle specific elements or using accessible colors. Your university may provide access to other tools, such as accessibility checkers, that can help you.

What else has Overleaf done to improve accessibility?

As a web application, Overleaf leverages the accessibility features and functionality of modern web browsers, which are regularly assessed by accessibility experts. The product itself conforms with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA, and has been tested thoroughly with screen reading technology.

In the editor, you can set the editor font to OpenDyslexic Mono, which changes the appearance of the typeface in the Code Editor as well as switch to dark mode. For some dyslexic users, it improves readability and reduces visual stress.

We’d love to hear from you!

We’re working on additional documentation to help with a variety of document types and use cases. We’d love to hear from you about any specific topics you’d like to see more documentation on, such as presentations. Share your thoughts with support@overleaf.com.