Why PDF accessibility matters
A PDF that looks fine on screen can be unusable to the people who rely on assistive technology. That is a problem for them first, and a legal, compliance and reputational one for the organization that published it.
An animation of a sample public hearing notice in two columns. Without tags, a screen reader reads its words in the order they were drawn, mixing the columns. With tags, it reads the heading, the subject, the date and the place, in order.
The legal and compliance risk
Public documents are how people pay a bill, read a meeting agenda or apply for a permit. When a PDF can’t be read by assistive technology, some people can’t use it at all.
That is also a legal risk. In the United States, a person who can’t use a public document can file a complaint or bring a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule sets compliance dates for public entities. The Legislation page has the details and the sources.
Who is affected
People who are blind
Screen readers read a PDF aloud from its tags. Without them, a page can come out as silence, or as text in the wrong order.
People with low vision
Enlarging text only works when the document reflows and the reading order is right. Images of text can’t be enlarged without blurring.
People with motor disabilities
Many use only a keyboard or voice control. Headings, links and form fields have to be real, marked-up elements to be reachable.
People with cognitive and learning disabilities
A clear heading structure and a predictable reading order make a long document easier to follow, and text-to-speech tools depend on both.
Everyone else
A tagged PDF is easier to search, to read on a phone and to copy from. Accessible documents tend to be better documents.
Common PDF accessibility problems
No tags
The PDF has no structure, so assistive technology can’t tell a heading from a paragraph.
Scanned pages
A scan is a picture of text. Until the text is recognized, it can’t be read aloud or searched.
Images without descriptions
A chart or photo with no description is invisible to a screen reader.
Wrong reading order
Content is read in the order it was drawn, which for columns, sidebars and forms is often not the order it was meant to be read.
Tables without headers
Without marked header cells, a screen reader reads numbers with no row or column to attach them to.
No title or language
The file is announced by its file name, and text can be pronounced in the wrong language.
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