Services · Compliance & standards
PDF Accessibility Audit: The Files Your Website Forgot
For the organization whose important content lives in PDFs, so menus, application forms, statements, and reports. Universities, clinics, and agencies, this door exists because of you.
What We Keep Finding
An untagged PDF reaches a screen reader as one long run-on, or as nothing at all. The application form somebody has to fill in. The menu a diner opens. The statement a customer downloads. If the file carries no tags, it is a locked door with a handle painted on it, and the person reaching for the handle has no way to tell the difference until they have wasted ten minutes.
Website audits routinely skip documents, which is odd, because a PDF served at a URL is a web page under the standard's own definition. The rules reach it directly, no special pleading needed. So a user hits the one file that mattered most, and everything the website got right stops counting.
Some of what a document audit finds is cheaper to fix than people expect. Giving a PDF a real title takes two steps, setting the title entry and setting the flag that makes a reader announce it rather than the filename, and between them they discharge a Level A criterion. Tagging a table properly is a morning. Rebuilding a scanned brochure that was never a document in the first place is not, and we will tell you which of those you are holding before you commit anybody's week.
What We Check
- Test each file with a real screen reader rather than a tag checker alone
- Verify tagging, reading order, and heading structure inside the document
- Check form fields for labels a screen reader actually announces
- Review tables, lists, and images for real structure and real alt text
- Check the title entry and the flag that makes a reader announce it, a free Level A win
- Rank the set, so fix these first and replace these with a web page
What You Get
A document audit runs the passes a document can take. An automated check of the structure, an expert review of the tagging and reading order file by file, and a professional blind screen-reader user opening the ones that matter most and telling you what actually comes out.
Worth being precise about the rule count here, because it is the one place our usual sentence would mislead. Several of the 55 WCAG rules are defined across a set of web pages rather than inside one document, so a single PDF cannot meaningfully pass or fail things like consistent navigation. You get a verdict on the criteria that reach a document, file by file, with the failing element pointed at and the repair named.
The Honest Limit
Two honest limits, and one piece of counting. We audit files and we never tag them, at any price, so what you get is a report telling your own team, or your document vendor, exactly what to repair in each file, and you can stop there and never hear from us again. There is no version of this where the findings list turns into our quote for the tagging, because we do not do the tagging. On counting, this runs at the normal audit prices and the unit is files rather than pages inside them, so 10 files on Rapid and 25 on Standard. If you are sitting on 400 documents, that arithmetic stops working, so email us the list and a written number comes back instead. And where a document should just become a web page, we will say so, usually before it has cost you anything.
What It Costs
Rapid Audit: $499, up to 10 pages you pick, report in 5 business days. Standard Audit: $1,499, up to 25 pages in 10 business days. Flat rates, no discovery calls, and a real blind screen-reader user on every engagement. Pick your pages. We bring the humans.
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Guides, checklists, tools, and terms that go with this service.