PDF Accessibility Checker - Free Online Accessibility Report

Why so many PDFs fail

A PDF looks finished the moment it is saved, so nobody sees what is missing underneath. Three habits cause most of the failures we see. People use "Print to PDF", which throws away the document structure. People scan paper, which produces a photograph with no text at all. And people make headings by making text bigger and bolder instead of using a heading style.

None of these shows up for a sighted reader. All three make the file hard or impossible to use with a screen reader, a magnifier or a phone's reflow view.

How the score works

Each rule has a weight based on how badly it affects someone using the file. Critical rules (tagging, title, language, real text, alt text, form labels, security settings) can lock a user out completely. Major rules make the file slow or confusing to navigate. Minor rules are polish.

A passed rule earns its full weight and a warning earns half. Any critical failure caps the score at 69, however well the rest goes. We added that cap after seeing an untagged file score in the 80s: to someone using a screen reader, that file was not mostly fine, it was unusable.

• 90 to 100: no critical problems. What is left is minor or needs a person to look at it.
• 70 to 89: usable, with real problems worth fixing.
• Below 70: at least one critical barrier. Start there.

Where to start

If the file came from Word, PowerPoint or Google Docs, export it again with tagging switched on. That one change usually fixes tagging, headings, lists, tables and the language. Set a title in the document properties before you export, and add alt text to every image that carries meaning.

If the report says the pages contain no text, the file is a scan. Run it through OCR first. Until there is real text, no other fix will help a screen reader user.