Accessible Thesis Template

This thesis template is meant to provide the basis for creating an accessible thesis.

It utilizes the latex tagging project instructions

Attempting to modify the old university templates to use \DocumentMetadata were not successful. Instead, I opted to use the standard book class in order to maintain compatibility with the ongoing tagging effort.

Instructions for the university's accessibility requirements can be found under Digital Accessibility Requirements. Please also see instructions for using Acrobat to generate an accessibility report.

Quick Start Guide

In general, search for TODO in thesis.tex and edit where appropriate.

You need to edit the section in thesis.tex where hypersetup sets several pdf metadata fields as shown below.

%TODO Change these
\hypersetup{
    pdflang={en},
    pdftitle={the title},
    pdfauthor={the author},
    pdfsubject={what subject},
    pdfkeywords={comma delimited keywords},
    hidelinks
}

Add your content to the files in the /contents folder.

Add alt tags to figures as described here and shown below

\begin{figure}[hbt!]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=.5\textwidth,alt={This is alt text for a figure of the CWRU logo.}]{cwru_logo.eps}
    \caption{This is a figure of the CWRU logo.}
    \label{fig:logo}
\end{figure}

TODO: what else is needed for accessible pdfs?

Prerequisites

You will want a recent tex installation like tex-live 2025.

You want make. You can install make in Ubuntu Linux by running apt install build-essential. Alternatively, use something like VS Code and the LaTeX Workshop plugin.

Building

In this folder, run make

Look for the file thesis.pdf

Cleaning make clean

Useful Tips

Code editors are generally lacking in finding typos and mistakes. You can export to a word format using pandoc to facilitate spelling and grammar checking.

pandoc thesis.tex -s -o thesis-2025-03-11-0100.docx

If using VS Code, the rewrap plugin is really useful to manage text lines so they don't get too long.

I used this website to submit sample thesis to see what issues existed. https://pave-pdf.org/index.html?lang=en

Memory issue when building

Issue with inability to compile, The following was found in the thesis.log file:

TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=5000000].

Had to modify /some/path/to/texlive/some/subpath/web2c/texmf.cnf for the main_memory = 5000000 line to main_memory = 10000000

and then run:

sudo fmtutil-sys --all