Question about accessibility, animations, and headings

[Jeffrey-Kuan]

[Imported from https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1sjpol0/comment/ofth1lu/]

So for context, my department and college invested quite a bit of resources to get ready for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring WCAG2.1AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), going into effect April 24th. We have an entire team of people working on it, including myself. I also do research, so it's natural for me to work on accessible slides. You can download the slides and the TeX source on my webpage. It seems to work pretty well, based on testing with NVDA with the MathCat add-on.

However, there are a few things that I am not sure about, so I thought I'd ask here.

First question

Initially, the animation was compiling as several hundred individual images without alternative text, and JAWS was tabbing through each individual image. Obviously that's not good, so I tried making it intentionally untagged. NVDA now reads it as "button, multimedia button", which seems ok. I did this by using \usepackage{animate} and

\begin{center}

\leavevmode\SuspendTagging{animation}\animategraphics[loop,autoplay,height=2in]{12}{images/Time}{2}{260}\ResumeTagging{animation}

\end{center}

Is there a better TeX code for this? I don't want to recommend something to my very busy colleagues and then have to change it later.

Second question:

One of my colleagues here figured out getting \section{...} and \subsection{...} with page numbers into the footer of each slide. The footer is intentionally untagged. So I have my title, "Quantum Groups, Interacting Particle Systems, and Writing a Paper with GenAI" as a \section{}, which compiles as an H1. Then I have "Introduction" as a \subsection{}, which complies as an H2. Then the title page is an H4, which is at the top of each slide. However, the H1 and H2 aren't visually shown, and there's no H3. What do you all suggest?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: in case you don't want to click to my webpage, here is the relevant code for the second question:

\DocumentMetadata{

lang=en-US,

tagging=on,

pdfversion=2.0,

tagging-setup={math/setup=mathml-SE}

}

%...

\documentclass[10pt]{ltx-talk}

\section{Quantum Groups, Interacting Particle Systems, and Writing a Paper with GenAI}

\subsection{Introduction}

\begin{frame}\frametitle{Title Page} %it seems that there can be a compilation error if the first line or last line of the frame in LaTeX is empty

\begin{center}

\Large Quantum Groups, Interacting Particle Systems, and Writing a Paper with GenAI

\normalsize NAME

AUTHOR

\end{center}

\end{frame}

[josephwright]

Taking the second question, the relationship between frame titles and sections/subsections is still open. I really want to get views from consumers of accessible content - that means that I'm not really interested in what automated validators say. It's really not at all clear if frame titles have structural meaning, if this might depend on the presentation authors, etc. So the 'gap' is by-design to allow a 'space' for that discussion.

[Jeffrey-Kuan]

Let me talk to some people and get back to you!

[Jeffrey-Kuan]

After some deeper thought, and some discussions with screen reader users, I think the most common preference is that headings in PDFs from ltx-talk should be similar to headings in PowerPoints. I think the consistency is helpful for most students. Does that seem plausible to you?

[u-fischer]

and what does PowerPoints do here?

[u-fischer]

Regarding the first question: the best is to get in contact with the maintainer of the animate package and to ask him if he is willing to add some tagging support. There is an open issue latex3/tagging-project#1191 and if needed he can add questions there or contact us directly.

[josephwright]

Yeah, I guess my wider worry is that animation in PDFs is really not a great idea - I'd strongly favour having multimedia as separate files you load as required.

[cfr42]

Inline animations are the only ones I've ever had which actually worked during the presentation, though. The others all fail when I'm actually standing in front of a class. And, actually, multimedia generally just never seems to work unless it is simply a link to a web page.

For sure, this must be my fault, but it does suggest that inline animations are more user-friendly in terms of actually working in arbitrary viewers. And for simple things, it can work OK, though it does make the pdf rather huge,

[josephwright]

Seems about right oo me: animations are fragile whatever way they are inserted into a presentation.