Revolutionizing Accessibility: New Technical Rules for Accessible PDFs

Making PDFs accessible has long been a complex task – conflicting tagging methods, ambiguous structures, and a lack of clear guidance have left many struggling to get it right. But that’s changing. The PDF Association’s newly released Techniques for Accessible PDFs finally provide a standardized approach, eliminating the guesswork. As contributors to these techniques, the PDFix team brought its expertise to help shape these best practices. Now, the question is: how can you leverage these new techniques effectively? And how can PDFix streamline the process for you? Let’s dive in.

The PDF Association has just unveiled its first release of Techniques for Accessible PDF – a game-changer for developers, authors, and remediators aiming to create PDFs that truly work for users with disabilities. Crafted by the PDF Accessibility Liaison Working Group and shaped by community input, these techniques offer clear, expert guidance. They align with ISO 14289 (PDF/UA-2), the global standard for accessible PDFs, and W3C’s WCAG, ensuring your documents meet the highest accessibility standards.

Vendor-Neutral PDF Accessibility Techniques

The Techniques for Accessible PDF from the PDF Association are completely vendor-neutral, ensuring that accessibility isn’t tied to any specific software. Instead of focusing on how a PDF is created, these guidelines prioritize the structure and integrity of the file itself. This means that regardless of the tools you use, you can apply these techniques to improve document accessibility. By providing clear, standardized methods, these techniques help advance digital accessibility across all PDF use cases – ensuring inclusivity for all users, no matter their software or platform.

Accessibility Made Easy with PDFix

As a proud member of the PDF Association, PDFix plays a key role in shaping the future of PDF accessibility. Our tools are designed to seamlessly align with the latest Techniques for Accessible PDFs, which we were actively involved in developing. This ensures that your PDF accessibility tool provider meets the highest standards of expertise, reliability, and industry alignment. As trusted experts, we make it easier than ever to adopt these best practices and create fully accessible documents.

Techniques for Accessible PDF

Each PDF Association Technique comes with a functional PDF example, showing both the right and wrong ways to approach accessibility – making it easier to understand and apply best practices. Read more about Fundamentals.

Fundamental 1: Basic Technical Rules

Software that creates a PDF must follow basic technical rules for tagged PDF, so that other software can process the PDF for accessibility.

pass

PDF100 G1_01 Custom tag correctly role mapped – UA1_Tpdf-G1_01

FAILURE

PDF-F1 G1_F01 Custom tag incorrectly role mapped – UA1_Tpdf-G1_F01

Fundamental 2: Text

Text content in PDF files must be machine-readable in order to allow assistive technology to present the document’s content as text.

PASS

PDF101 G2_01 Text content correctly tagged (in one container – UA1_Tpdf-G2_01

PDF102 G2_02 Text content correctly tagged (one container per word – UA1_Tpdf-G2_02

PDF103 G2_03 Text content correctly tagged (one container per character – UA1_Tpdf-G2_03

PDF104 G2_04 Special character with correct Unicode mapping – UA1_Tpdf-G2_04

PDF105 G2_05 Graphics representing text correctly tagged – UA1_Tpdf-G2_05

PDF106 G2_06 ActualText provides correct extractable characters in place of OCR errors – UA1_Tpdf-G2_02

FAILURES

PDF-F2 G2_F01 Special character missing Unicode mapping – UA1_Tpdf-G2_F01

PDF-F3 G2_F02 Special character with incorrect Unicode mapping – UA1_Tpdf-G2_F02

PDF-F4 G2_F03 Graphics representing text incorrectly tagged as figure – UA1_Tpdf-G2_F03

PDF-F5 G2_F04 Extractable characters are not present in a document with visible text – UA1_Tpdf-G2_F04

Fundamental 3: Content

Accessible PDF files must clearly distinguish between real content, the information the author wants to convey to the reader, and artifacts (e.g., lines, page headers and footers).

PASS

PDF107 G3_01 Real content correctly tagged – UA1_Tpdf-G3_01

PDF108 G3_02 Decorative content correctly marked as artifact – UA1_Tpdf-G3_02

FAILURES

PDF-F6 G3_F01 Real content not tagged – UA1_Tpdf-G3_F01

PDF-F7 G3_F02 Real content incorrectly tagged – UA1_Tpdf-G3_F02

PDF-F8 G3_F03 Decorative content incorrectly tagged as figure – UA1_Tpdf-G3_F03

PDF-F9 G3_F04 Decorative content not marked as artifact – UA1_Tpdf-G3_F04

Fundamental 4: Logical Content Order

The logical content order is determined by the order of the tags in the tag tree, and expresses the author’s intent for consumption of the content.

PASS

PDF109 G4_01 Content order correctly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_01

PDF110 G4_02 Order of marked content sequences within a tag correctly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_02

PDF111 G4_03 Content in columns correctly ordered – UA1_Tpdf-G4_03

PDF112 G4_04 Sidebar correctly located in the document’s content order – UA1_Tpdf-G4_04

PDF113 G4_05 Tab order for pages with annotations correctly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_05

FAILURES

PDF-F10 G4_F01 Content order incorrectly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F01

PDF-F11 G4_F02 Order of marked content sequences within a tag incorrectly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F02

PDF-F12 G4_F03 Content in columns incorrectly ordered – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F03

PDF-F13 G4_F04 Sidebar incorrectly located in the document’s content order – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F04

PDF-F14 G4_F05 Order of content within a marked content sequence incorrectly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F05

PDF-F15 G4_F06 Tab order for pages with annotations incorrectly set – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F06

PDF-F16 G4_F07 Tab order for pages with annotations missing – UA1_Tpdf-G4_F07

Fundamental 5: Appropriate Semantics

Appropriate tags allow software to distinguish between elements of real content to deliver information that would otherwise be conveyed purely via layout.