PDF accessibility standards
Two standards matter for PDF accessibility: WCAG, which says what accessible content achieves, and PDF/UA-1, which says how a PDF file must be built.
Sample document
How WCAG and PDF/UA relate
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), from the W3C, describe what accessible content achieves, in testable success criteria at levels A, AA and AAA. They apply to web content, and the Title II rule applies them to the documents public entities publish online.
PDF/UA, from ISO, describes how a PDF file must be built, with structure tags, a reading order and text alternatives, so that assistive technology can use it.
Docability is designed to support WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA-1. It does not certify compliance or guarantee that a document meets a particular standard. Review each rebuilt PDF before you publish it. For the laws that point to these standards, read the legislation.
The standards and their sources
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
A W3C Recommendation published on 12 December 2024, with three conformance levels (A, AA and AAA) built on four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Content that conforms to 2.2 also conforms to 2.0 and 2.1, except that 4.1.1 Parsing was removed.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
Published in June 2018 as an extension of WCAG 2.0. Content that conforms to WCAG 2.1 also conforms to WCAG 2.0. Level AA of this version is what the Title II web rule requires.
- PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1)
The ISO standard for accessible PDF files built on ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7). Conforming to it does not by itself ensure that a document’s content is accessible.
- PDF/UA-2 (ISO 14289-2)
Published in 2024 for PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2), with provisions for annotations and structure element attributes that PDF/UA-1 mostly lacks.
- Matterhorn Protocol 1.1
A list of failure conditions for testing PDF/UA-1 conformance. Software can determine most of them; the rest need a person’s judgment.
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