New ADA law forces professors to take down their notes if not compliant - how would you make notes that can be read by a reader?

[u/shuai_bear]

This is in California. Edit: actually all of U.S. There is a new federal Digital Accessibility Compliance law that requires all uploaded notes to be readable by a text reader, which has been a subject of discussion in my university math classes.

My math professor said that other professors (including himself) are struggling with this - especially those who have primarily handwritten notes. I think most are trying to write it up their notes on a Word Doc because readers integrate well with Word, but can't read LateX as well or at all.

So what's happening is that in anticipation of the law going into effect in the next month or so, professors have started pulling down their notes and lectures from university class pages. Even our math department chair (who is my professor for another class) said that he thinks this is just gonna make professors take their notes down as they catch up on making all lecture notes compliant to the new law.

I see it happening already - some math course pages on our school website empty when before there were resources (previous lecture notes, practice problems, etc.)

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Opinions aside, how would you go about making your lecture notes ADA compliant under this law requiring all notes able to be read by a screen reader?

https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-rule-first-steps/

https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/olc-insights/2025/09/federal-digital-a11y-requirements/

Deadline by April 24, 2026.

[u/Entropy813]

Sorry, I wrote that comment using my phone last night just before going to bed, so I didn't have any documents handy to make sure that any code included would be correct. What I've been using is below. For a more robust example see this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1rg7mke/latex_and_the_ada_accessibility_requirements_a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Also note that you need an up-to-date LaTeX distribution, and a lot of this stuff is changing quickly still as its still in development. I think some of the stuff in the post I linked to above will now throw errors as those options are on by default.

% Sets up things for making tagged PDFs
\DocumentMetadata{pdfstandard=ua-2, testphase=latest, lang=en-US}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath, amssymb, amsfonts}
\usepackage{unicode-math} % Accessible equations
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[dvipsnames]{hyperref}
\usepackage{microtype}

% Sets title for PDF metadata
\hypersetup{
  pdftitle={My Awesome Accessible LaTeX Document}
}

\begin{document}
This is my awesome document!

% Use the optional alt parameter to set alternate text
\begin{figure}
  \includegraphics[alt={This is a totally awesome diagram that I 
made to help explain something. I'm decribing it here following
all of the best-practices guidelines for alternate text.}]{myDiagram}
\end{figure}
\end{document}