Bridging the accessibility gap: Why LaTeX's native PDF tagging matters now

On September 17, 2026, we held a webinar featuring Kristin Terrill (Iowa State University) and Sara Gonzalez (Overleaf) on making STEM research accessible without expensive workarounds. This is a high-level summary, and you can watch the full webinar video here.

The pressure is imminent. The European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025. The U.S. ADA Title II update requires initial compliance by April 2027. Publishers are tightening their own standards. And institutions everywhere face the same uncomfortable truth: they don't have a scalable path to meet these mandates.

Before TeX Live 2025, the workarounds were complex. Buying expensive proprietary software to retroactively tag PDFs. Or manually add tags after the fact — hundreds of hours per document. At Iowa State, graduate students were literally sitting in an administrator's office learning what a "tag" is for the first time after completing their dissertations.

Then TeX Live 2025 shipped with native support for automatically tagged PDFs. It changed everything.

The old way didn't scale

Kristin Terrill, Senior Program Specialist in the Graduate College at Iowa State, tried distributing Adobe Acrobat Pro licenses to every LaTeX-using graduate student. On paper, reasonable. In practice, a nightmare.

"There were a lot of dissertations that could not be remediated with Adobe Acrobat Pro," Terrill recalls. When the automated tagging tool hit incompatible packages, and Iowa State's legacy templates had many, it would insert what she called "gunk": nonsensical tags that made the document unusable. Fixing it meant going in and manually adding tags bit by bit. For a 200-page dissertation, that's not a sustainable solution.

"When TeX Live 2025 shipped with native tagged PDF support, it was the light at the end of the tunnel," Terrill says. Here was a way to stop doing emergency remediation and start preventing the problem entirely.

How it works now

An accessible PDF has up to four components:

1. A structure tree, which is metadata that tells a screen reader what's a heading, paragraph, table, and the reading order.
2. Alternative text for figures to describe any data points.
3. High contrast colors that make text and figures easier to read and account for colorblindness.
4. Equations tagged with MathML so they can be correctly interpreted by a screen reader.

LaTeX now generates the structure tree automatically when you compile with TeX Live 2025. You get semantic markup built in — the same way Microsoft Word has for years. A graduate student using a modern template gets an accessible PDF by default. No extra steps. No proprietary software.

But LaTeX doesn't write your alt text. That still requires author judgment. When you embed a figure from Python or R, you decide what it means and why it matters. Terrill, puts it plainly: "Alt text is a situation that needs interpretation. You need to be in control of what your audience understands this image is doing within your argument."

What institutions need to do

At Iowa State, Terrill and colleagues spent two years rebuilding their thesis template from scratch. It shipped in September 2026. First semester results: no emergency remediation, no confused students, no manual workarounds.

If you're an administrator or librarian, here's what she recommends doing in the case of theses/dissertations:

1. Inventory your templates. If they haven't been updated in the last year, they're likely incompatible with modern tagging. In some cases, you may benefit from creating a brand new template rather than trying to fix an existing one.
2. Ensure you’re using TeX Live 2026. Overleaf projects created before TeX Live 2026 was released default to the TeX Live instance they last used rather than changing with each release.
3. Tag your templates in Overleaf's gallery with "accessible PDF." This signals to researchers that they're tested and compliant. This will be added during the approval process for your newly submitted template.
4. Develop training for your authors. Short videos on alt text, table structure, and equation notation will cover 80% of questions. (A new Overleaf Learning course on this topic is forthcoming.)
5. Test before you mandate. Make sure your support infrastructure is ready before telling all graduate students they must produce accessible PDFs.

The mindset shift

Approximately one in 90 students has vision loss requiring assistive technology. In a classroom of 300, that's three people. In an institution with thousands of graduate students, that's hundreds of researchers whose ability to participate depends on the availability of accessible resources.

The best way to start the road to compliance is to start now. You want to avoid remediating 10 years of legacy content, and ensuring everything new is built accessible from the start.

Download a PDF with a list of accessibility resources

How Overleaf can help

If you’d like to find out more about how Overleaf Commons AI can further help support users at your university create new or convert existing Overleaf projects to make them accessible, get in touch with our friendly sales team.