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.