[dredmorbius]

LaTeX as designed is generally semantic (formatting is left to the applied style), and whilst HTML5 is in theory reasonably semantic, in practice, LaTeX tends to be used far more semantically than HTML is.

Some of those reasons are technical, though as noted elsewhere in this subthread, economic and other factors seem more dominant, and I severely doubt that LaTeX on its own will address the broader scope of issues raised in TFA.

[ttybird]

Is this why after all these years there is STILL no sane way to make accessible pdfs from LaTeX?

LaTeX is almost never semantic. People are encountered to think only about the document presentation (mostly due to LaTeX's own failures).

As for footnotes being "first class". It's just a macro, nothing first-class about that when compared to HTML's solution.

[dredmorbius]

"After all these years" being the four and change since the tagged-PDF standard ISO 32000-2, 14.8 was released, in January 2017?

https://www.pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf

The LaTeX project announced an a16y project in January of this year. A tool is now available, though success varies.

https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbytopic/pdf/

Of footnotes: LaTeX has the macro, it's common across multiple document types. HTML does not.

[ttybird]

To respond to your question: no. Not sure why you linked me the PDF 2 specification. PDF/UA is from 2012, and the ability to tag PDF files for accessibility is a thing since 2001 (with PDF 1.4).

Various tools and packages that attempted to generate accessible pdfs from LaTeX have existed for aeons, all of they had a common characteristic: they sucked. I am convinced that by this point everyone who cares about accessibility has moved to other formats (like HTML).

"HTML does not"

<aside> is "first class".