When most people think about web accessibility, they immediately picture features and functions built into a website — things like buttons, text contrast options, keyboard navigation, and so on.
However, a fully accessible website must address not only its code and interactive features, but also the files it allows visitors to view or download — and that includes PDF documents.
PDFs are used across virtually every sector: government portals, educational institutions, and private businesses alike — from e-commerce sites that provide technical manuals for appliances, to professionals displaying their licenses, to restaurants offering downloadable menus.
Regardless of what kind of website you run or what its purpose is, if it hosts PDF files, those files contain essential information that must be available and accessible to all users, including people with disabilities.
PDF accessibility is separate from website accessibility because a PDF is an external document uploaded to the site — it is not "built" as part of it. For that reason, each document requires its own dedicated remediation.
How Is PDF Accessibility Different from Web Accessibility?
Making PDF files accessible is significantly more complex than making a website accessible.
On a website, you can write code that resolves an accessibility issue and deploy it instantly across tens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages at once.
With PDFs, however, the remediation process must be done manually — line by line, page by page — making the necessary adjustments as you go.
Many of the world's leading technology companies have tried, and continue to try, to develop an automated accessibility solution for PDF files, but none have succeeded. PDF accessibility remediation therefore remains a manual process.
A Quick Primer: What Exactly Is a PDF?
Before we go further into the remediation process, it's worth pausing for a moment to explain what a PDF actually is — you'll quickly see why this matters.
PDFs were created in the early days of the internet. The need arose because opening a Word document on a Mac or a different operating system (such as Windows) often caused the formatting to look completely different.
Adobe came up with a solution and created the PDF format to solve this problem.
What Adobe did was establish a format with a complete set of standardized settings, allowing documents created on different operating systems to open with identical layouts, formatting, and design. For this reason, the format was widely adopted across many sectors and industries — academic publications, government and institutional documents, and more — and countless businesses and organizations now upload PDFs to their websites.
See also: Document Accessibility
Where Does This Come Into Play During Accessibility Remediation?
In practice, there is a software application called Adobe Acrobat Pro that allows you to make changes and edits to PDF files.
Among the features it offers, Adobe Acrobat Pro allows you to add what is known as a "tag tree" for accessibility purposes.
This is an interface that enables screen reader software — used by people who are blind or have low vision — to "read" (i.e., speak aloud) the text within the document. For images or graphics, it also allows you to embed descriptive text within these tags. These are known as ALT tags — alternative text that describes what appears in an image or design element.
Accessibility regulations require that if you upload a PDF to your website, it must be the fully remediated version — one that has undergone complete accessibility work using this software.
Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to create and organize these tags in accordance with accessibility standard requirements is exactly the manual remediation process we referred to earlier.
File Compression and "Shrinking" Documents
There is one more critical point worth highlighting.
PDF files can be quite large, and many website owners and administrators tend to compress them using various online tools.
What actually happens when these tools compress a PDF is that they convert it into an image. In other words — the letters and fonts saved in the document become part of a flat image, and a screen reader then sees only an image with no readable text whatsoever.
If we want to make a PDF like this accessible, we are required to manually retype all the text inside ALT tags so that users who are blind or have low vision can access the content.
As tedious as it sounds, that is exactly what the process involves — going through every single page and retyping the text from scratch.
We Hope This Clears Things Up
If you have any further questions, the team at User A is ready and available to help with a professional and experienced crew.
Our company provides accessibility remediation for all types of websites, ensuring full compliance with applicable regulations and requirements.
For those of you who are curious to explore more accessibility topics, we invite you to visit our blog — you won't be disappointed! And we'd also love to point you to a related topic: check out our article on presentation accessibility.