New feature for Chrome: Automatically generate tagged PDF

Technical lead for Chrome accessibility, Dominic Mazzoni today issued a document announced that starting from the Chrome 85, when you print a web page and choose the “Save as PDF” destination, Chrome will automatically generate a tagged PDF.

“Tagged PDF is one that contains extra metadata about the structure of a document, including things like headings, lists, tables, paragraphs, and image descriptions. Tagged PDFs are more accessible to users with disabilities, such as blind users who use a screen reader to access PDF files.”

For people who are disabled or have difficulty in reading web content (for example, people with low vision who need to use a screen reader), this feature helps improve accessibility. In addition, the tagged PDF can also have other uses, such as making it easier for some software to extract data from the PDF and automatically process it.

The tag description function is always available in web pages, and the Chrome team believes it is time to add these metadata to the PDF: “We hope this helps make more content exported from Chrome to be accessible to even more users.”

The Chrome team found that many software suitable for content creation currently does not support the direct generation of tagged PDFs, and third-party services are usually required to be compatible with this feature. Now, by building it into Chrome, they hope that people who use HTML as their document workflow can take advantage of this feature to easily generate more compatible PDFs.

This work has been going on for two years, and it is still in the experimental stage, you need to enable it in chrome://flags/#export-tagged-pdf flag to start trying this feature.