PDF Accessibility and Standards – Quarto (Pre-release)

Pre-release Feature

This feature is new in the upcoming Quarto 1.9 release. To use the feature now, you’ll need to download and install the Quarto pre-release.

2025 was a big year for PDF accessibility. LaTeX and Typst both released support for PDF tagging and accessibility standards, just in time for new regulations in the EU (June 2025) and US (April 2026).

Quarto 1.9 brings this support to you as a Quarto user.

What PDF Standards Do

Currently LaTeX supports the newer UA-2 standard, and Typst supports the older UA-1 standard. Typst is likely to have UA-2 support later in 2026.

Both standards instruct the PDF renderer to provide screen readers:

The semantic structure of the text (title, heading, paragraph, figure, etc)
The natural reading order
Spatial coordinates for highlighting and assistive navigation
Required metadata such as title and language

How to enable a PDF Standard in Quarto

In Quarto 1.9, specify a PDF standard for your document or project with pdf-standard

PDF (LaTeX)

format:
  pdf:
    pdf-standard: ua-2

Typst

format:
  typst:
    pdf-standard: ua-1

pdf-standard takes a single standard name or list of standard names. PDF version is used if provided in the list, but otherwise inferred from the standard.

If you specify a PDF standard, Quarto first instructs LaTeX or Typst to use the standard when producing the PDF, and then validates the output PDF against the standard using veraPDF, an open-source PDF validation tool. If veraPDF is not installed, you’ll get a warning but still receive a PDF – it just won’t be validated.

Installing veraPDF

To install veraPDF, you’ll first need Java, then run:

Terminal

quarto install verapdf

When a document passes validation, you’ll see output like:

[verapdf]: Validating my-document.pdf against PDF/UA-2... PASSED

Creating accessible PDFs

Quarto’s Markdown-based workflow handles many accessibility requirements automatically:

Document metadata (title, author, date, language) flows into the PDF’s built-in metadata fields.
The semantic structure of Markdown satisfies PDF tagging requirements. For Typst this is always enabled; for LaTeX it is enabled when you specify a standard that requires it.
Alt text for images is carried through to the PDF for screen readers.

But you do need to make sure your document has:

A title in the YAML front matter.
Alt text for every image, specified with fig-alt. See Figures for details.

See the LaTeX and Typst documentation for more details.

If your document fails validation

LaTeX does not perform validation during PDF generation, so if veraPDF validation fails, that’s a warning, and you still get a partially-accessible PDF as long as you use pdf-standard: ua-2.

Typst fails and does not produce a PDF if its built-in validation fails during PDF generation. However, in Typst all accessibility features are on by default, so you can generate a partially-accessible PDF by rendering without pdf-standard.

Current limitations

We ran our test suite – 188 LaTeX examples and 317 Typst examples – to find where Quarto PDFs do not yet pass UA-1 or UA-2, and where users will need to change their documents.

LaTeX

Margin content is the biggest structural blocker. If you use .column-margin divs, cap-location: margin, reference-location: margin, or citation-location: margin, the resulting PDF will not pass UA-2. The underlying sidenotes and marginnote LaTeX packages do not cooperate with PDF tagging.

(Margin content does work with Typst and passes UA-1 – see Typst Article Layout.)

There are smaller upstream issues in Pandoc, LaTeX, and LaTeX packages, documented here.

Typst

In our tests, Typst catches every UA-1 violation, and fails to generate the PDF. veraPDF did not detect any violation that Typst did not.

Typst also seems to do a very good job of generating UA-1 compliant output by default – almost all errors were due to missing titles or missing alt text.

However, we did discover that Typst books are not yet compliant. There is a structural problem with the Typst orange-book package and we’ll work with the maintainers to correct it.

Conclusion

Although Typst currently targets an the earlier UA-1 standard, today it seems to offer better PDF accessibility than LaTeX.

We expect PDF accessibility support to improve through the LaTeX ecosystem throughout 2026 as awareness of UA-2 and the new regulations spreads.

If you run into accessibility issues with PDF output, please search the Quarto discussions and open a new one with the accessibility label for any issues you discover.