Metadata & Accessibility

[allefeld]

I realise this might be a lot of work, but I have to ask – is there any chance Decktape could improve the extraction and use of metadata in the produced PDF? Especially "Bookmarks", but also Author and Title.

This is also important for accessibility. The Revealjs HTML I produce with Quarto has information supporting accessibility, but none of that seems to carry over into the PDF – it's purely presentational.

I use Quarto / Revealjs for learning materials, and uploaded on the learning platform Moodle this is shown:

The gauge, apparently generated by "Anthology Ally", indicates a perfect score for the Revealjs HTML, and quite bad for the PDF. The PDF generated with the browser's print function after switching to Revealjs' "PDF Export Mode" – which is broken visually – gets at least a medium score.

I have to admit I'm no expert on accessibility, and I don't know how reliable Anthology Ally's ratings are.

[mattwigway]

I can confirm that decktape-generated PDFs contain no accessibility tags that would help screen-reader users navigate the PDFs. For example, for this deck, Acrobat shows that the exported PDF has no accessibility tags whatsoever. The original slide deck has alt text and document structure for accessibility. I did try the Acrobat auto-tagging but it didn't correctly deduce the slide structure.

Incidentally, I'm in exactly the same situation as @allefeld, producing slides for my lectures, though I do have the advantage of being married to a digital accessibility professional. She's said that avoiding PDFs whenever possible is best as HTML is much better suited for creating accessible documents, but it would still be nice to have the PDFs as accessible as possible. Some students prefer PDFs because they can more easily annotate them and use them on the go.

I wonder if tagging the PDFs is something that can be done in decktape or if it has to be done upstream in puppeteer/chromium.

[allefeld]

avoiding PDFs whenever possible is best as HTML is much better suited for creating accessible documents

That aligns with my experience, but it is interesting it is said by an accessibility professional. I think office documents (docx, pptx) are somewhere in between, but it depends a lot on the proficiency of the user.

I'd love to share documents / slide decks as HTML only, but unfortunately most software (e.g. email clients, SharePoint) doesn't treat an HTML file as a document like they do an office document or a PDF, so that the user has to download and open in a browser manually, or if it is displayed the functionality is crippled.