Accessibility in Thesis Documents

The University of Utah Thesis Office verifies that all official thesis documents meet formatting requirements. Starting in late April 2026, the thesis office will require that all submitted theses meet accessibility requirements.

In the Department of Mathematics this primarily means PhD theses, as Masters students usually complete a project instead of a thesis. However, it is still good practice for your document to follow accessibility standards.

Note that, in addition to accessibility requirements, the thesis must meet all other formatting requirements of the thesis office. Below are some tips and best practices for creating a thesis document that meets all requirements.

Generating an accessible thesis document

Warning iconThese instructions are in flux and changing frequently. Check back for updates. Warning icon

Theses in the Department of Mathematics are generated via LaTeX, so you should follow the instructions at Generating Accessible LaTeX PDFs to verify compliance. More specifically:

Write your thesis with the math department LaTeX template. At present we suggest using sample-thesis-0.
Open the file sample-thesis-0/sample-thesis-0.tex
Follow a slight modification of Option 2: pdfLaTeX + LaTeX source as alt text in the LaTeX setup for accessible PDFs instructions. Add the following command to the very top of your TeX file, this will ensure that your thesis is tagged:

\DocumentMetadata{
  lang        = en,
  pdfversion = 1.7,
  pdfstandard = ua-1,
  tagging=on,
  tagging-setup={math/alt/use}  
}

After the line \usepackage{varioref} add the following two lines:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

After the line \title{Integral Transforms in Quantum Physics} add the line

\hypersetup{pdftitle={Integral Transforms in Quantum Physics},pdfdisplaydoctitle}

Follow all other requirements when writing your thesis, for example use \section, \subsection, \title, \author, etc, and add alt text to all figures, tables, diagrams, and images. See the tips on the Generating Accessible LaTeX PDFs page.
Compile your PDF with pdflatex, i.e. run pdflatex thesis.tex to compile. This will require a version of TeX Live that is more recent than the 2025 version - install the 2026 version if possible.

Some pitfalls to avoid when writing the thesis document are:

Try not to use any packages to your thesis that are not on the compatibility list of the LaTeX Tagging Project
Follow the usage instructions of the LaTeX Tagging Project, especially regarding alt text and tables

Known issues with the department template

As of mid-spring 2026 we are aware of the following possible compatibility issues between the department thesis template and the LaTeX Tagging Project:

the thesis title is not necessarily being tagged correctly
chapters are not being tagged correctly

We are currently working on a fix to the template, it should be available soon. We will send out an announcement when completed.

Important checks before submission

Before submitting your thesis to the thesis office you should verify that it passes the following checks:

the document is tagged
there is alternative text available for every figure, table, diagram, and image in your document, or for any object in your document that is not text
color contrast guidelines are followed
tables are as simple as possible, and contain header rows

See the Thesis Office section on Accessibility from the Handbook for more information.

Tools for verification

The checks used above should be performed manually at least once. Additionally, you can use the following automated checkers once you have compiled the document:

UDOIT - provided by the university and accessible in Canvas
Adobe Acrobat Pro - available through the university and has a built in accessibility checker that will identify accessibility issues in your compiled PDF and suggest how to remedy them

In general, you should subject your compiled PDF thesis to the instructions on the External PDFs page to verify accessibility. The thesis office has told us that they will be using these checkers to verify that submitted documents have met the requirements.

Note that if either software identifies any issues you should try to remediate them in the source LaTeX document. Do not try to remediate them directly in the compiled PDF, if possible.