PDF Accessibility Checker
Check any PDF against PDF/UA and the document requirements of WCAG 2.1 AA — free, in your browser, in about five seconds. The file is never uploaded.
What it checks
Seven machine-checkable requirements. These are the ones an auditor’s tooling tests first, and the ones a document has to clear before any human judgement is worth applying.
- Marked as a tagged PDFWithout the tag flag, assistive software has no structure to read and falls back to guessing at the raw text order.
- Structure tags (headings, paragraphs, tables)Tags are what turn visual formatting into something a screen reader can navigate — jumping heading to heading, reading a table by row and column.
- Document language setScreen readers choose a pronunciation engine from this. Without it, English gets read with the wrong phonetics, or worse, in another language entirely.
- Title exposed to screen readersThe window title should be the document's real title, not the filename it happened to be saved under.
- Image descriptions (alt text)Every image that carries meaning needs a text description; decorative ones need to be marked as decorative so they're skipped.
- Reading/tab order follows structureA two-column layout that reads straight across instead of down the first column produces fluent nonsense.
- File not locked against assistive accessSome PDFs carry permission flags that block text extraction outright, which blocks screen readers along with everything else.
Why this is suddenly urgent
Under the US ADA Title II rule, state and local government web content — explicitly including PDFs — has to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. After the DOJ’s April 2026 extension the deadlines are 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people, and 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special districts.
In the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025, with enforcement stepping up through 2026 and penalties that run well into six figures. It binds companies outside the EU that sell into it, and exempts only micro-enterprises.
Most organisations discover the scale of the problem by checking a handful of documents and finding that nearly all of them fail. That is what this tool is for.
FAQ
Is my file uploaded when I check it?
No. The check runs entirely in your browser — the PDF is opened on your own computer and never transmitted anywhere. You can load this page, disconnect from the network, and it still works.
Does passing this check mean my PDF is fully compliant?
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. These are the machine-checkable basics — the same class of test an auditor's tooling runs first. Failing here means the document is definitely not accessible. Passing means it clears the automated bar; whether a description is actually well written, or a reading order actually makes sense to a human, is a judgement no validator can make.
What standards is it checking against?
PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1), which is the PDF-specific accessibility standard, and the document-level requirements of WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the standard named by ADA Title II in the US and by EN 301 549 in the EU.
It says my PDF fails. Now what?
You can remediate it yourself in Acrobat Pro — it's slow but entirely doable — or we can do it automatically for $3 a document, returning a file that looks pixel-identical alongside a veraPDF validation report proving it passes. Scanned documents and some already-auto-tagged files need different handling; the checker tells you which kind you have.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
It will tell you that a scan is what you have, which is the useful answer. A scan is a photograph of a page: there is no text layer to tag, so it needs OCR before accessibility work can begin at all.