How to Make a PDF Accessible: A Practical Compliance Guide

Most organisations discovered PDF accessibility the same way: someone asked for a document in an accessible format, or a compliance review flagged the resources section of a website, and it turned out that two hundred PDFs published over six years were all effectively unreadable to anyone using a screen reader.

The work of making a PDF accessible is well-defined and largely invisible to sighted readers — it happens in the document's structure rather than its appearance. This guide explains what accessibility actually requires, what drives it legally, how to fix existing documents, and where the genuine limits are.

What "Accessible" Means for a PDF

An accessible PDF is one that assistive technology can interpret correctly. A screen reader does not see a page; it reads a structure. If that structure is absent, the document may look perfect and convey almost nothing.

In practice it requires:

• Tagged content. Every element identified by what it is — heading level one, paragraph, list item, table header, figure. Tags are the document's skeleton.
• Correct reading order, which is separate from visual position. A two-column layout or a sidebar can read perfectly on screen and produce nonsense when read aloud.
• Alternative text on images conveying meaning, and decorative images marked as artifacts so they are skipped.
• Real headings in a logical hierarchy, so users can navigate by structure rather than reading linearly.
• Properly structured tables with identified header rows and columns, so a value can be announced with the heading it belongs to.
• Searchable text rather than scanned images. A scan without OCR is a picture of words.
• Adequate colour contrast, and information never conveyed by colour alone.
• Document language set, so the screen reader uses correct pronunciation.
• A document title in the properties, which is what is announced on opening.
• Accessible form fields with labels and deliberate tab order, where the document is a form.

That last point has its own considerations, covered in accessible fillable PDF forms. This article deals with documents generally — reports, policies, brochures, guides.

What Is Driving This

Accessibility has moved from good practice to a compliance question in several markets, and the timelines have already passed.

European Union. The European Accessibility Act has applied to covered private-sector products and services since 28 June 2025, extending obligations well beyond the public sector. The harmonised standard supporting it is EN 301 549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA and explicitly covers non-web documents including PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets and presentations. Enforcement and penalties are set by each member state and vary considerably. Microenterprises — broadly under 10 employees and under €2 million turnover — have limited exemptions in some contexts.

Public sector across the EU has been covered by the Web Accessibility Directive since 2020, which includes documents published on public-sector websites.

United States. Section 508 applies to federal agencies and their suppliers, and ADA-based expectations increasingly reach private organisations' digital content.

The technical standards. WCAG provides the principles; PDF/UA (ISO 14289) is the PDF-specific standard describing how those principles are implemented in a PDF.

If you sell into the EU, the practical point is that the main deadline is behind you rather than ahead of you. Requirements differ by country and sector, so confirm what applies to your organisation rather than relying on a general summary.

Which Standard Applies to You

These overlap rather than compete: WCAG sets the principles, EN 301 549 adopts them for European law and extends them to non-web documents, and PDF/UA describes how they are implemented inside a PDF. Meeting PDF/UA generally puts you in good standing against the others for document content, though the legal obligation itself comes from the regulation that applies to your organisation.

Where Documents Usually Fail

The same handful of problems account for most failures:

1. No tags at all. Common in PDFs produced by printing to PDF rather than exporting, and in anything generated by older tools.
2. Headings that are only visually larger. Text made bold and 16pt is not a heading — it is bold text, and a screen reader announces it as ordinary content.
3. Scanned documents with no OCR. Entirely inaccessible.
4. Images with no alternative text, or with unhelpful text such as the filename.
5. Tables without header rows identified, so figures are read as a stream of unlabelled numbers.
6. Reading order following creation order rather than visual order, particularly after editing.
7. Decorative elements not marked as artifacts, so borders and background shapes get announced.
8. Missing document title and language.
9. Low contrast, or meaning carried by colour alone in a chart.

Two Routes to a Fix

Remediating the PDF

Working directly in the finished file, adding the structure it lacks. Necessary when the source document no longer exists, and the only option for archives and third-party documents.

Fixing the source

Correcting the original Word, InDesign or design file so the exported PDF carries structure automatically. Slower the first time, and it fixes every future export rather than one document.

The choice is usually economic. For a single legacy document, remediate. For anything produced repeatedly — reports, newsletters, policy documents — fix the source and the template, because remediating the same document type every quarter is the most expensive possible approach.

Fixing It: Source First

The cheapest accessible PDF is one exported from a properly structured source document. Remediating in the PDF is always more work than building it correctly upstream.

In Word, that means: real heading styles rather than direct formatting, alternative text on images, tables built as tables with header rows marked, meaningful hyperlink text instead of bare URLs, document title set in properties, and export using "Save as PDF" with the document-structure option enabled rather than printing to PDF.

That groundwork is the same structural work described in professional Word formatting — which is why organisations that use styles properly find accessibility comes largely for free.

Remediating an Existing PDF

When the source is gone or was never structured, the work happens in the PDF:

1. Run OCR first if the document is scanned, and proofread the result.
2. Add or rebuild the tag structure, assigning correct tag types to every element.
3. Set the reading order explicitly and test it, rather than trusting auto-detection.
4. Add alternative text to meaningful images and mark decorative ones as artifacts.
5. Fix table structure, identifying header cells and their scope.
6. Set document title and language in the properties.
7. Check contrast and address anything failing.
8. Run the automated accessibility checker, then test manually — automated tools catch a minority of real barriers.
9. Read the document with a screen reader, which is the only test that reflects the actual experience.

Writing Useful Alternative Text

The part most often done badly, because it looks trivial.

• Describe the purpose, not the appearance. For a chart, the alternative text is what the chart shows, not "bar chart".
• Keep it concise — a sentence or two. For a complex figure, summarise and put the detail in surrounding text or a data table.
• Do not start with "image of". The screen reader already announces it as a graphic.
• Do not repeat a nearby caption. That produces the same information twice.
• Mark decorative images as artifacts rather than giving them empty alternative text scattered through the document.
• If an image contains text, that text must appear in the alternative text — or better, as real text on the page.

What Accessibility Does Not Fix

Being honest about the limits:

• A badly written document stays badly written. Tagging does not clarify unclear prose.
• Highly visual layouts are genuinely hard. Complex infographics and heavily designed brochures may need an alternative format to be truly usable.
• Remediation can be more expensive than rebuilding. For a document with no tags and a complex layout, recreating it from a structured source is often cheaper and produces a better result.
• Accessibility is not permanent. Edit a remediated PDF and you can break the tag structure. Re-check after changes.
• Some documents should not be PDFs. For content that needs to reflow on a phone, an HTML page is more accessible than any PDF.

Where to Start With a Backlog

Few organisations can remediate everything at once. A sensible order:

1. Anything legally required for your sector or jurisdiction.
2. High-traffic documents — the ones actually downloaded.
3. Documents people need to act on: forms, applications, policies, safety information.
4. Anything customer- or citizen-facing.
5. Templates, so everything produced from now on is accessible by default.
6. Archive material, last — and consider whether some of it should simply be withdrawn.

Fixing the templates early is the step that stops the backlog growing while you work through it.

Conclusion

PDF accessibility is structural work: tags, reading order, alternative text, table headers, and a properly OCR'd text layer. None of it changes how a document looks, and all of it changes whether the document can be used.

The most efficient approach is upstream — fix the source documents and the templates, and accessible PDFs become the normal output rather than a remediation project. For the backlog that already exists, prioritise by what people actually need to read.

This is a general overview of accessibility requirements and standards. It is not legal advice; obligations vary by jurisdiction, sector and organisation size, so confirm what applies to you.

Getting Documents Made Accessible

SBTEXMEDIA provides PDF accessibility and document remediation for businesses, schools, hospitals, NGOs, publishers and government organisations — tagging and structure, reading order, alternative text, table header structure, OCR for scanned material, document properties, contrast review, and accessible source templates so future documents are compliant on export rather than needing remediation afterwards. Where rebuilding a document is cheaper than remediating it, that is said plainly before work starts.

Related work on accessible fillable PDF forms, Word document structure and scanned document conversion is handled by the same team.

You can see examples on the portfolio, browse the full range of services, or send a sample document for an honest assessment of what remediation would involve, a fixed quote and a delivery date before work begins. More guides are on the SBTEXMEDIA blog.