How to Make Your PDF Compliant with Accessibility Standards

H&R Block, Domino’s Pizza, Netflix, Vueling. A tax preparation company, a fast food chain, a streaming service, and a Spanish airline. 

What do they have in common? 

All of these companies were fined for failing to comply with WCAG standards and provide accessible content to their customers. 

And with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in the US, EAA (European Accessibility Act) in Europe, and new stricter directives, such as Title II ADA, cases like these will undoubtedly make headlines more often than ever.

But even without the accessibility laws and financial risks, making your content accessible is the right thing to do. It means being thoughtful and considerate, and improving everyday life for a substantial part of our society, not to mention winning over new customers and growing your business.

In this article, we’ll explore why it’s important to make PDFs accessible, tools for creating and remediating ready PDFs, and an actionable checklist for fully accessible PDFs.

Why PDF Accessibility Matters

PDFs remain the most common format for many types of documents: from invoices and policies to catalogs and guides. PDFs are used for everything and everywhere. They are relatively easy to download and view, and offer some level of security, which makes them essentially omnipresent.

At the same time, PDF is a complex, often graphics-heavy format, not accessible out of the box.

Here’s just a small list of issues that can render a PDF inaccessible:

• No specified language: Confuses screen readers and hinders comprehension.
• No alt text: Makes images, charts, and other visuals inaccessible.
• Images-only: Scanned PDFs without real text cannot be read by assistive technologies.
• Poor color and design choices: Low contrast and complex layouts reduce readability.
• Structure problems: Missing headings, unclear links, and disorganized content make navigation difficult.
• No accurate tagging: Lacking proper structural tags causes screen readers to interpret content out of sequence and makes it nonsensical.
• Overlooking interactive elements: Forms, tables, and other interactive elements without accessible fields or proper structure are unusable for individuals relying on assistive technologies.

Accessibility Standards for PDFs Around the World

The first step to understanding PDF accessibility is knowing which regulations establish the global standards.

Law	Where it applies	Main focus
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)	United States	Civil‑rights law banning disability discrimination in jobs, public services, and businesses; used to argue that websites, apps, and digital services must be accessible.
Section 508 (Rehabilitation Act)	The US federal government	Requires federal agencies and vendors to make their IT, websites, and digital documents accessible as a condition for use and procurement.
European Accessibility Act (EAA)	European Union	Sets accessibility rules for products and services, including many private‑sector digital services like e‑commerce, banking, and transport.
Equality Act 2010	United Kingdom	General anti‑discrimination law; businesses and public bodies must avoid barriers for disabled people, including on websites and digital services.
Accessible Canada Act (ACA)	Canada	Federal law requiring the removal of accessibility barriers in areas like jobs, services, and communications, including digital services.
Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1992	Australia	Bans disability discrimination in everyday services; inaccessible websites and apps can be treated as discriminatory.
Act on the Elimination of Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities	Japan	Requires reasonable accommodation and better accessibility, including for digital services.
Brazilian Inclusion Law (LBI)	Brazil	Broad disability‑rights law that includes duties to make online services and digital content accessible.
Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016	India	Expands protections and requires better accessibility in services and information, including government and public‑facing digital content.

Various international accessibility laws protect people’s right to receive digital services, both in the public and private sectors. PDFs, being an integral part of almost all client and business communication, naturally fall under these regulations, too.

How to Create an Accessible PDF?

There are two main standards governing PDF accessibility:

• WCAG 2.2 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines): Defines best practices for accessible digital content.
• PDF/UA: A PDF-specific standard that ensures documents are fully accessible.

Here’s how to meet both:

#1 Make sure your text is selectable

This is essential for creating an accessible PDF. For screen readers to be able to recognize your text, the main content in your PDF should be searchable and selectable—not text in images. 

#2 Give your content a clear structure

Your PDF content should be organized logically and coherently to make it usable with assistive software. Include:

• Headings
• Bulleted lists
• Page numbers
• A table of contents

#3 Specify the document title and language

Giving your document a descriptive title and setting the language is an important accessibility step.

• A descriptive title helps users quickly understand what the document contains.
• Setting the correct language ensures screen readers use proper pronunciation and rules.

#4 Choose dyslexic-friendly typography

Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that affects a person’s ability to read and write, affecting 20% of the world's population. Clear typography can make a big difference.

• Use fonts like Arial, Calibri, Verdana, Tahoma
• Make headings at least 20% larger than body text
• Use 1.5 spacing
• Ensure that inter-character spacing is 35% of the average letter width

#5 Create bookmarks

Bookmarks provide an alternative way to navigate the content. If you don’t include a Table of Contents paired with the Bookmarks structure in the document, it may mean that the only way to go through your text is to read it from start to finish. This makes navigation inefficient, and adding bookmarks is a simple fix.

#6 Add alt-text to images

Alt-text is a text description for any meaningful non-text content, such as images, graphs, charts, etc. It’s not visible, but screen readers need it to help users understand what the content conveys.

#7 Include tags

Tags are an Adobe Acrobat Pro feature that you can use to mark any element, both text and non-text. It provides assistive devices with the content’s structure and reading order, which makes it critical for the accessibility of a PDF document.

You can learn more about tags in this guide from Adobe.

#8 Color contrast ratio

WCAG states that you need to use a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 (7:1 is preferred).

This requirement may be especially difficult to implement. For one, it can go against your or your designer’s creative choices. Also, a lot will depend on the color palette you choose, backgrounds, the scale of text, etc.

The only foolproof way to ensure your contrast ratio meets the WCAG success criteria is to run it through a color contrast checker as you develop the PDF design.

Source: CommonLook

#9 Links and forms

Remember to add descriptive anchor text to any hyperlinks to tell users where the link leads. Forms should be labeled correctly, and form fields should have tooltips.

#10 Tables

Screen readers often have problems recognizing tables, because they have a complex structure and the content within the cells may contain lists, paragraphs, or even another table.

To improve accessibility:

• Add headers to rows and columns
• Use a simple structure (avoid nested headers)
• Ensure content stays within cells
• Apply proper tagging 

How to Remediate a PDF Document?

PDF remediation is fixing an existing PDF to make it more accessible. Arguably, learning to do that is even more important than creating accessible PDFs from scratch, because all of us have to deal with old documents that we don’t have either time or resources to throw away and redo.

Luckily, even if you don’t have a source document, there’s a lot you can do to fix the old documents:

1. Check the accessibility of your PDF. You can do that with Adobe Acrobat Pro—it’ll tell you if your document conforms to the WCAG standards, and what needs to be done to improve its accessibility.
2. Run your PDF through the Adobe OCR scanner. This one is for scanned documents. The scanner will convert images into actual selectable text, making your PDF readable with assistive technology.
3. Check the tags. Make sure everything is in place and marked correctly.
4. Add navigation aid. Add alt-text to meaningful images, make sure links are descriptive, and add bookmarks.
5. Add a title and specify the document language. Be sure the title is descriptive, it will help the reader decide if your PDF is what they are looking for.

Completing these steps will ensure that your PDF has a basic level of accessibility, even though some issues may remain.

 

How Can You Provide the Best Content Experience for Everybody?

Whether you use PDFs for internal documents, marketing, sales, or educational materials, it’s important that your readers have the best experience with them. It means your documents should be easy to access on any device and comfortable to read. 

If you’re looking for a way to improve the readability of your documents, meet FlippingBook.

FlippingBook is a web-based app that converts your PDFs into HTML5 flipbooks. It hosts your documents in the cloud, which means that they are available by link the same way GoogleDoc files are. With this, readers can view the document on any device just by clicking on the link, or right on your website if you choose to embed the document there.

Plus, the flipbook format offers many advanced features PDF lacks:

• enhanced document security: password protection, access revocation, making it non-searchable on Google and other search engines;
• video, pop-up images, and GIF adding;
• views and clicks tracking along with more in-depth analytics;
• customizable lead capture form for in-content lead collection;
• branding options for instantly recognizable content.

FlippingBook offers the Accessibility feature that ensures your documents stay inclusive, even when made interactive. It adds a special accessible PDF for download to your flipbook. The Accessibility icon will appear at the very top of the document, so screen readers can recognize it immediately.

On top of that, FlippingBook HTML5 viewer meets the most important WCAG criteria: 

• it allows zooming in on the page;
• the viewer design is customizable so you can adjust colors and contrast ratio;
• the interface elements can be controlled with a mouse as well as a keyboard;
• content is easy to navigate through with search, thumbnails, and a table of contents;
• any dynamic content such as video or GIFs can be stopped.

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