LaTeX Template Service for Journals & Publishers: WCAG & PDF/UA Compliance
We update journal and conference LaTeX classes so that every article they compile is a tagged, accessible PDF meeting WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA. One engagement at the template level, instead of a remediation invoice on every article you publish from now on.
This is engineering work on your class files, done to your specification and your production workflow, with before-and-after audit evidence you can put in front of your accessibility lead. Your authors keep writing the way they already write.
LaTeX template projects for journal and conference publishers
When This Service Is a Good Fit
- Your journals accept LaTeX submissions and your class files predate tagged PDF output, which in practice means every article you publish is inaccessible by default.
- You are paying an external vendor to remediate article PDFs one at a time, and the per-article line item does not scale to your volume.
- Your accessibility statement promises WCAG conformance for new content and your LaTeX production pipeline cannot currently deliver it.
- You publish math-heavy content, where standard remediation approaches quietly fail because the equations stay unreadable to assistive technology.
Society publishers, university presses, and journal platforms are the usual buyers. If you run one journal or a portfolio of forty, the work is the same kind: the class file decides what every article’s PDF contains.
WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA: The Compliance Picture for Publishers
Three pressures are converging on journal PDFs. The European Accessibility Act has applied to new digital publications since June 28, 2025, with backlist content due by June 2030. In the United States, ADA Title II requires the public universities that buy your content to provide WCAG 2.1 AA material, and Section 508 imposes the same on anything sold into federal contexts; both push the requirement upstream to you through procurement and licensing. And research funders are adding accessibility conditions of their own.
The common technical target behind all of them is the same: tagged PDF, meaning WCAG 2.1 AA conformance and the PDF/UA standard. For LaTeX-produced journals, whether an article meets that target is determined almost entirely by the class file it compiles through. That is the single point where the problem can actually be fixed.
Tagged PDF at the Source, Not Per-Article Remediation
The current industry workaround is to compile the article, then pay a vendor to inject accessibility tags into the finished PDF by hand. It works, article by article, but the economics are wrong: the cost recurs on every article in every issue indefinitely, it adds days to production schedules, and hand-applied tags are lost the moment a corrected proof is recompiled. For mathematical content it is worse than wrong, because tag injection typically leaves equations as images with text labels, which assistive technology cannot actually navigate, while automated checkers continue to report a pass.
Fixing the class inverts the cost structure. The engagement is paid once per class family, and from then on every submitted article compiles to a tagged, compliant PDF as a side effect of normal production. No vendor queue, no per-article fee, no schedule delay. The math is straightforward: at any real publication volume, class remediation pays for itself within the first year of avoided per-article costs.
What We Do
You provide your class files and a few representative published articles. We deliver the class family updated so that it:
produces tagged PDFs meeting WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA by default, through the modern LaTeX tagging pipeline rather than after-the-fact injection
preserves your journal’s typography and layout exactly: your page geometry, running heads, float behavior, and citation styling stay as your readers know them
outputs mathematics as MathML, genuinely navigable by screen readers, which matters most in the STEM journals where remediation vendors fail
handles the author side defensively: document metadata, language, alt-text plumbing for figures, and clear behavior when an author’s preamble loads a package that conflicts with tagging
Legacy publisher classes are large codebases, and parts of them predate the tagging pipeline by decades. Where code has to change, we document what changed and why, so your production team and typesetting partners are never guessing.
What You’ll Receive
The updated class family
Drop-in compatible with your submission and production workflow, ready for your author guidelines page.
Before-and-after audit evidence
An independent engine report on the class as it was and as delivered, showing exactly which accessibility capabilities changed. Your accessibility lead can verify the output on a real article with a screen reader; we tell you what to test and what you should hear. We never ask you to rely on a checker score, including our own.
Author-facing guidance you can publish
What authors must supply (chiefly figure descriptions), what they must avoid, and what the class now handles for them.
Twelve months of re-checks
The LaTeX tagging pipeline is under active development, and annual TeX Live releases can change behavior. We re-audit the class against updates during the first year and flag anything that needs attention before your authors find it.
How It Works
1. Contact us
By email ([email protected]) or through the request form, with your class files or a pointer to your author template page.
2. We audit the class and respond within 2 business days
With a written assessment: what the class produces today, what compliance requires, and a proposed scope.
3. Pilot one journal.
For portfolios, we recommend starting with a single journal’s class as a fixed-scope pilot, so your production team can validate the workflow end to end before committing the portfolio.
4. Portfolio rollout
Under a fixed-fee proposal per class family, with delivery dates in writing and the maintenance year included.
Why TheLatexLab
LaTeX PDF compliance is our core work.
Making a class file produce genuinely compliant tagged PDFs is a narrow discipline that LaTeX itself made possible only recently, and the failure modes are specific: components common in legacy publisher classes are incompatible with tagging in ways that break output outright. We work in this pipeline daily and maintain a free LaTeX accessibility checker that identifies these problems from source; run your own class through it and you will see in thirty seconds what an engagement would address. There is also a free PDF/UA checker for auditing what your published article PDFs contain today.
Mathematics is handled properly.
Equations output as MathML under PDF/UA-2 are navigable content, not pictures. We state plainly which assistive technologies support this today, and for the rare content that current tooling genuinely cannot make accessible, certain chemistry notation for instance, we say so and document it rather than papering over it.
Evidence, not assurances.
We do not use the words “certified” or “guaranteed” about accessibility, because no honest vendor can. What you get instead is verifiable: audit reports on the class before and after, and a delivered PDF your own team can test with a screen reader. For a publisher whose accessibility statement is a public commitment, verifiability is worth more than a vendor’s adjective.
Request a Proposal
Publisher engagements are scoped individually: class families differ enormously in size and age, and portfolios differ in how much they share code. The process:
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Step 1
We review your class files and representative published articles.
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Step 2
We define the scope with you: one journal as a pilot, or the class families across a portfolio.
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Step 3
You receive a fixed-fee proposal per class family with exact deliverables, a delivery timeline in writing, and the first maintenance year included.
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Step 4
Work begins after your approval and contracting. We can work within publisher procurement and can sign your NDA before reviewing anything sensitive.
Questions before sending anything: [email protected].
Frequently Asked Questions
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Get Your Journal's LaTeX Template Rebuilt for Accessibility Compliance
We rebuild your journal's LaTeX class to produce tagged PDFs that meet WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA. Your typography and layout stay the same. Fixed fee per class family, delivery dates agreed in writing before work starts.