My understanding of PDF/UA is a very valid requirement to make texts
accessible through standard tools, in particular but not limited to
users having visual deficiencies, for example. This is the reason, not
hype, behind the US government pushing this standard.
Alternative rendering (via web browsers, for example) will remain
inferior for most uses as it will not benefit from much of what the TeX
engine can produce, so this cannot really be the motivation.
For reasons of Universal Accessibility, it would be a good idea for
ConTeXt to indeed activate tagging by default. The argument of runtime
and filesize (when proofing and in automatic workflows) is somewhat
weak for one can ALWAYS deactivate this tagging for such cases. May I
suggest that Hans reconsider his stand on this issue for the sake of
promotion of ConTeXt as a very advanced typesetting tool.
Alan
On Mon, 19 Oct 2015 22:35:46 -0400
Andrew Dunning
On 19 Oct 2015, at 5:33 PM, Hans Hagen
wrote: Indeed context supports tagged pdf already for a while, although only acrobat can do something with it. Making it default is not really an option as there is overhead involved (a bit more runtime and much larger filesize) that makes no sense when proofing documents and in workflows for print, but enabling is easy with
\setuptagging[state=start]
Thank you! Would it also be possible to have something to the effect of `\setupbackend[format={pdf/ua:2014}` to set up the appropriate options?
Btw, this feature relates to export to XML. Personally I wonder why this UA is such a hype, probably because publishers are reluctant to embed the document source in the pdf, which make much more sense when alternative rendering is needed.
I agree that I would prefer to see PDFs given alongside good HTML, but the reality is that this will not happen for some time to come, and in the meantime PDFs remain inaccessible to anyone with a print disability (and inconvenient for the rest of us). If we can improve this situation, it is only right that we do so. If we can in the process encourage wider adoption of ConTeXt, even better.
All best,
Andrew Dunning