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PDF and Document Remediation, Scoped Before You Pay for It

For the school, clinic, agency or business whose required reading lives in PDFs, and whose audit just flagged a folder full of them. We do not tag files. We do know exactly what tagging one takes, and roughly what it should cost you.

What Document Remediation Actually Involves

We do not remediate documents, we audit them, file by file, and hand you the list of what is broken in each one. So if you are here looking for somebody to tag a folder of PDFs, this page is the shape of that job written by the people who read the results afterwards rather than by the people quoting for the work.

First, why the files matter at all, because plenty of owners assume documents sit outside the rules. A PDF sitting at an address on your site is a web page under the standard's own definition, so the accessibility rules reach it exactly the way they reach your homepage. Which rules reach you depends on who you are rather than on the file format. A public school or a city is on the Department of Justice's clock. A clinic taking federal healthcare money is on a different one. Section 508 binds federal agencies and the Postal Service directly, and their vendors arrive through contracts rather than through the statute.

Then the work, which is craft rather than software. Tags that match the visual structure. A reading order that follows the argument rather than the layout. Form fields that announce their labels. Tables that hold together out loud. Alt text written by a person who knows what the chart is for. Software gets a file most of the way and then stops, and the part it cannot do is the part that decides whether the document reads.

So ask for the price per document rather than per folder, because page count, forms and tables are what actually drive it. Ask which tagging standard the supplier works to, since that spec now exists in two parts against two different PDF versions and a federal or European buyer may name either. Ask whether every finished file gets opened by a real screen reader before it comes back. And ask who checks the result, because a supplier signing off its own tagging has checked nothing.

One thing to settle before you send anybody a file list. A scanned document is a picture of a page, so there is no text in it to tag, and remediation there means running character recognition over it or rebuilding the document, both of which cost more than tagging does. Our own free PDF checker asks whether a file has real selectable text, and a scan carrying a stamped page number can come back looking like it has. So a folder that passed the free check can still be a folder of pictures, and that is better caught now than after you have budgeted.

The cheapest decision on this page is the one nobody selling tagging will offer you. Where a document should have been a web page, make it a web page. It costs a day of your web person's time, it reads better for everybody, and it takes the file out of the quote entirely. We say so in the audit, usually before the file has cost you anything.

What Our PDF Audit Hands the People Who Do the Tagging

Test each file against the criteria that can actually reach a document
Point at the failing element and name the repair, tag by tag
Say whether a file holds real text or is a picture of a page, before anybody quotes it
Check reading order, form labels, table structure, and the document title
Say plainly where a file should become a web page instead of a tagged PDF
Retest the finished files with a real screen reader once somebody else has tagged them

What You Get

A verdict per file, with the failing element pointed at and the repair named. That is the document a tagging supplier prices from, and it is the same document your own team works from if you would rather do it in-house with the free guide to tagging a PDF.

Worth being precise about the rule count, because our usual sentence would mislead here. 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 something like consistent navigation. You get a verdict on the criteria that can reach a document, file by file.

We work from the files your site already serves in public, so there is no private folder to hand over and no data agreement to negotiate before anything starts. If the documents you are worried about sit behind a login, say so when we confirm scope and we will tell you honestly what we can and cannot reach.

The Honest Limit

One honest limit. We can tell you what is wrong with a file and what it would take to put right. We cannot tell you which vendor to send it to, because we keep no partner list and take no referral fee, and a page arguing for independence has no business quietly earning a cut off the work it recommends. What we can do is check the tagging afterwards, which is worth more coming from somebody who did not do it.

What It Costs

The audit is flat-rate and the tagging is not ours to price. A PDF audit runs at the normal audit prices, and the unit is files rather than the pages inside them, so 10 files on Rapid at $499 and 25 on Standard at $1,499. Sitting on 400 documents? That arithmetic stops working, so email us the list and a written number comes back instead. Whoever ends up tagging the files, the retest afterwards is half price within 3 months.

Order your audit See the PDF audit, file by file

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