Hi Hans, On Thu, 2025-07-10 at 10:54 +0200, Hans Hagen via ntg-context wrote:
On 7/10/2025 9:08 AM, Max Chernoff via ntg-context wrote:
- I had to manually tag every paragraph with \startparagraph/\stopparagraph, which was annoying.
well, that also depends on the concept of paragraph i guess .. one can't make structure from non-structure
Right, but any text outside a tagged structure automatically fails validation, so incorrectly tagged paragraphs is better than nothing. And "indentnext=auto" usually does a decent job visually, so you can probably use the same heuristics for tagging.
- "\setupbackend[format=pdf/ua-2]" needs to come before "\setuptagging[state=start]", otherwise lots of stuff will silently break.
Indeed, the format influences some later settings (arbitrary order initializations would complicate the code with no real gain)
Right, this is more of a note in case anyone else ever runs into this issue. but adding a warning might be a good idea (although maybe not worth the effort).
and it comes for free (so it's not driven by some paid project that can set priorities)
There is the TUG development and accessibility funds https://tug.org/tc/devfund/grants.html https://tug.org/twg/accessibility/ but the grants tend to be quite small, especially considering how complicated/annoying the accessibility work is.
- I've heard that it's actually usually better to put the TeX source in the Alt text for math instead of the current generated prose, because most people reading math are familiar with TeX anyways.
Well, i never meet people who are familiar with latex input ... or expect that from us ... do you expect me to generate something latex math from less verbose context math? And what about all kind of (educational) stuff inside there. We try to accomodate what users expect and challenge us to because that's the world we deal with. The latex is just a different world (to us); little or no overlap.
LaTeX and ConTeXt inline math (_not_ display math) syntaxes are essentially identical, since they're both essentially "Plain TeX with \frac instead of \over", so I don't think that many LaTeX users would struggle with ConTeXt's syntax.
And the embeded xml blob is probably more reliable than any context -> latex math conversion. When it comes to math I think most context users are in education so that's what we focus on.
Yes, I also agree that focusing on MathML is probably the best way forwards.
You need to keep in mind that when we started with all this there were no programs that did anything useful with tagging,
Viewer support is still very weak---MathML only works with Foxit and a version of NVDA released less than a month ago.
that the spec was (and is) not stable, that validation is a moving target etc ... it's all about adaptation and it's always easy to point out whatever without looking at the past and reality one has / had to deal with.
Yup, the very recent PDF 2.0 specification defines the <H> tags, and then the UA-2 spec arbitrarily decides that those are now invalid.
A few decades from not all this tagging will probably be seen as kind of rediculous anyway.
Yeah, I'm also fairly skeptical of all this PDF tagging stuff, mainly because it seems much more compliance-driven than accessibility-driven. But it's also a classic chicken-and-egg problem between viewer support and document support, so if/when viewer support gets better, it should be much more useful. Thanks, -- Max