A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first step towards making PDF math accessibility an ISO standard. I said that the international ISO meeting in Beijing was going to consider a proposal for including MathML tags into PDF (officially known as ISO 32000). This was a proposal that Design Science made to the PDF/UA committee, who approved it and sent it to the US ISO committee who also approved it.
The US ISO committee presented the proposal along with other items to make PDF documents more accessible to the international ISO meeting and I'm very pleased to report that the MathML proposal and most of the other accessibility proposals were accepted. It will probably be two or three more years before these become part of an official ISO standard. Objections might be raised later on, but for now (and hopefully forever), it is part of the ISO 32000-2 proposal. This is a big step forward for math accessibility of PDF documents.
To find out more about this and other accessibility work that Design Science is involved in, take a look at our article How is Design Science making math more accessible? and the other accessibility solutions pages at the Design Science website.
