Instructions on PDF/A friendly (and Accessibility in general) images

[ppietikainen]

Transparent images cause problems for PDF/A. #1 does most of it, but we will probably need instructions (3.2.1?) to remind students to remove transparency, what are the best file formats for their images etc.

#5 has some bits on Accessibility we should also use

convert unilogo.png -background white -alpha remove -alpha off unilogo_nobg.png

[ppietikainen]

Not full PDF/UA, but

The Accessibilty package in LaTeX can be used to add the structure, tagging, and alt text that PDF's created with LaTeX lack. To use the package, you will need to load it into the preamble of your LaTeX document and choose the package options. There are two option arguments accepted for the package:untagged or taggedandflatstructure or highstructure. In order to create a more accessible PDF, you will want to choose [tagged, highstructure].

\usepackage[tagged, highstructure]{accessibility}

Once you have loaded in the accessibility package, you can use the \alt environment to add alt text to figures.

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{apollo17_earth.jpg}
\alt{Image of the Earth from outer space}
\caption{Image of the Earth from the Apollo 17 mission}
\label{fig:earth}
\end{figure}

After PDF/A changes land, try this and then just use \alt{} in the template if it produces even slightly more accessible output.

[ppietikainen]

gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sColorConversionStrategy=UseDeviceIndependentColor -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=2 -sOutputFile=image-pdfa.pdf image.pdf seems to be a mostly working way of handling PDF images. Or if it fails, then recommend .png. Still needs to be written into the instructions somehow.