Dominic Mazzoni, Chrome's technical lead for accessibility, announced today that starting with Chrome 85, Chrome will automatically generate a tagged PDF when users choose to print a web page and save it as PDF.

A "tagged PDF" is a PDF that contains additional metadata about the document, including things like titles, lists, tables, paragraphs, and image descriptions.

This feature helps improve accessibility for people with disabilities or difficulty reading web content (such as people with low vision who need to use a screen reader). In addition, tagged PDFs can also be used for other purposes, such as making it easier for certain software to extract data from PDFs and process them automatically.

The tag description feature has always been available in web pages, and the Chrome team thought it was time to add this metadata to PDFs as well: "We hope this will help make content exported from Chrome accessible to more users."

The Chrome team found that many software suitable for content creation do not currently support direct generation of tagged PDFs, and often require third-party services to be compatible with this feature. Now, by having it built into Chrome, they hope people who use HTML as a document workflow can take advantage of the feature and easily produce more compatible PDFs.

This work has been in the works for two years and is currently in an experimental stage. You can start trying it by enabling it in chrome://flags/#export-tagged-pdf. Next work will focus on improving the quality of generated PDFs, as well as improvements to Chrome's built-in PDF reader. The stable version is expected to be released with Chrome 85 in late August.