PDF already has exactly that. They separate they have a view layer and a text layer.
But it simply doesn't work, because people can't be bothered to get the text right, once the view layer is acceptable.
Also TeX minus the tags, is not the final text in any way, because it's not markup, it's code.
That's hardly "it's broken beyond compare." I think with accessibility formats which represent fully typeset written documents (as opposed to pre-typesetting, like Latex), it's always going to be an issue because they're mainly produced for people who are sighted initially.
We should simply start shaming programs which export to PDF wrongly, it's not really a difficult thing to get right.
Knuth is one of the most perfectionist computer scientists out there, and he still got it wrong.
The market economics are simply not in the favour of people doing extra work, and no amount of shaming will get that to change.
The alternative needs to be designed with accessibility builtin, and with decidability/markup as a conscious design choice.
We have such a format, HTML. The chances to get academics to use HTML with the coming open access wave are much better than getting them to rewrite all of their TeX templates.
It's more about the social economics --but if you can find me a tool that supports the PDF export wrongly, I'll fix it myself.
> The market economics are simply not in the favour of people doing extra work,
Most of the tools are open-source. Does Word or any of the closed source tools do a bad job of this? That would be the main stopping point I guess.
It's still super trivial for them to implement, and shaming them will get their PR team evaluating the risk of not implementing such a feature. You just have to be successful at shaming them.
An HTML file also doesn't represent a document on paper, most people writing papers wouldn't switch to a electronic-only format at the moment--each page is carefully typeset and designed, HTML is not at this level even today.
All that needs to be done is to have a accessible text section of the PDF--then Tex can just include the source of the document minus the Tex commands into the PDF, and PDF readers can have the screen reader work. The text could also just be stored per page, if the blind require to communicate where they found a particular item to a sighted person.