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Is PDF not supposed to improve on paper...? I'm rather surprised at the revelation that PDF is not accessible.

PDF is tied to page layout. PDF is a way to digitally describe something that's intended to be printed to paper, on a sheet of a certain size.

And as a format, it's much more sane than, say, Word or Excel.

Even if the focus on "where do I put this glyph" means the original text isn't in there by default.

Yea, but that's a terrible explanation for lack of basic accessibility in 2020. Literally just laziness.

FWIW this is not a technical barrier; it would be absolutely trivial to associated blocks of non-flowed text with the layed out text.

My use is exclusively "this will end up on paper in a minute", so any improvement would be irrelevant.

Why would I want document type that can't even refloat on display size to represent any longer written text that is supposed to be consumed on digital device?

I would ask a blind person.

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