[choeger]

The thing is: LaTeX might try hard to look like a declarative language for structured documents, but it is not. It is a set of TeX macros. And TeX is a type setting system.

There is no good reason to put the accessibility into the type setting. Instead, use a declarative (e.g., any markup) language, translate that a) to (LaTeX) and b) to accessibility annotations and then combine the two results. Problem solved.

Unfortunately you will either lose a lot of expressiveness along the way or you have to find a very sophisticated markup language.

[romwell]

Why not simply augment LaTex with PDF tags which would be inserted manually, in the process of typesetting?

Something like:

    \pdftag{blah}

Common packages could then generate these tags, and very few modifications of TeX source would be needed.

[choeger]

Yeah, one could do that. But then again, one could do that with any other scripting language. A true declarative document would mean a single source of truth and freedom from those technical matters.