Guides

Procedural walkthroughs for the tasks that actually take the time.

A PDF accessibility checklist that is honest about limitsTwenty-two items in the order they should be done, each marked as machine-checkable or human judgement, with the Matterhorn condition behind it.
A screen-reader test script for PDFsTwelve minutes with NVDA or VoiceOver will tell you more than any checker. Here is the sequence, and what each step is actually testing.
Acrobat accessibility checker: every rule explainedWhat each of the 32 rules in Acrobat's Full Check means, which PDF/UA condition it matches, and how to fix it — from Tab order failed to Logical Reading Order.
ActualText in PDF: what it is and when to use itActualText changes what a PDF says without changing how it looks. When it is the right fix, how it differs from Alt, and the mistakes that silence text.
Arabic PDF accessibility: what breaks and whyArabic adds contextual letter shaping and ligatures on top of every right-to-left problem Hebrew has. What that does to extracted text, and how to check it.
Hebrew or Arabic text reversed when copied from a PDFYou copy a line of Hebrew or Arabic out of a PDF and it pastes backwards. Why it happens, a ten-second test that tells file from app, and how to fix it.
Hebrew PDF accessibility: the three failures that matterVisual-order storage, wrong document language, and left-to-right column order. All three are invisible to a sighted reviewer and to every mainstream checker.
How to add and write alt text for images in a PDFAdding alt text to a PDF image starts with deciding whether it is informative. Then what to say, what to leave out, how to add it free, and where AI helps.
How to check color contrast in a PDFNo PDF checker measures color contrast: it is on every checklist and no tool decides it. How to measure it properly, and what the ratios actually require.
How to check if a PDF is accessible: four free checkersCheck PDF accessibility free, online or on your own machine: four checkers against PDF/UA and WCAG, what each catches, and the failures none of them see.
How to export an accessible PDF from ExcelExcel's PDF export writes no structure tree on most versions. What that means, what to do instead, and why a spreadsheet is often the better deliverable.
How to export an accessible PDF from Google DocsGoogle Docs exports tagged PDFs and has done since 2022. What comes out right, the three things it cannot do, and what to fix afterwards.
How to export an accessible PDF from InDesignGet it right in the layout and the export is almost free. The Articles panel is the setting that matters most, and the one most people never open.
How to export an accessible PDF from PowerPointSlide decks fail differently: reading order comes from the selection pane, every slide needs a title, and SmartArt is a trap.
How to export an accessible PDF from WordThe export path that keeps tags and the three that silently destroy them, plus what still needs fixing in Acrobat afterwards.
How to fix PDF reading orderA working method for finding and repairing reading order, free in Acrobat and faster in Taggart, including the two-column case that costs the most time.
How to get PDF headings and bookmarks rightHeading levels are how a screen-reader user navigates a long document. Skipped levels, fake headings and empty bookmarks, and how to fix each.
How to handle PDFs on a website you are making accessibleA site audit that ignores its documents has audited the wrapper. Which PDFs are in scope, how to find them all, and the order to work through them.
How to make a PDF accessibleThe whole job end to end: what has to be true, what order to do it in, what is genuinely mechanical, and where a person has to decide — with real timings.
How to make a PDF form accessibleTooltips, tab order, structure placement and the printed-form case. Forms are transactions, which makes them the highest-consequence documents you own.
How to make a scanned PDF accessibleA scan has no text to tag. What OCR actually gives you, how to judge whether its output is usable, and when re-typing is genuinely cheaper.
How to make PDF links and annotations accessibleA link annotation is not a link. What has to exist in the structure tree, why bare URLs are hostile, and how to fix a document full of them.
How to mark page furniture as artifactsHeaders, footers, rules and background images should be excluded from the reading order, not given empty alt text. The distinction, and how to apply it.
How to name PDF form fields so readers announce themA field with an internal name and no tooltip is announced as Text1. The three properties that matter, and how to set them across a whole form.
How to produce a tagged PDF from LaTeXLaTeX's tagging project reached usable in 2024. What works now, what still needs post-processing, and the maths problem nobody has solved.
How to review remediation someone else deliveredAccepting a batch you did not remediate. The four checks that find the common ways an outsourced file passes a validator without being usable.
How to set a PDF's title so readers announce itThe most common accessibility failure in existence is one metadata field and one display flag. Both, in every tool that can set them, including free ones.
How to tag a table in a PDF for accessibilityTable structure, header scope, and the point where Scope stops working and Headers references become necessary.
How to tag an untagged PDFAuto-tag produces a structure tree that is wrong in predictable ways. The order to correct it in, and why that order saves about a third of the time.
How to triage a PDF backlogYou have thousands of documents and a deadline. How to find out what you are actually dealing with before committing to a plan, at no cost.
PDF/UA vs WCAG: which one applies to your documentsOne is a format standard a validator can test. The other is what your legal obligation cites. They overlap heavily and neither one contains the other.
What a PDF remediation deliverable should containA fixed file is not a deliverable. What a compliance buyer needs in the record, why a green tick is not evidence, and a structure that survives review.
What is a tagged PDF?A PDF page is drawing instructions with no idea what it draws. Tags are the structure that says. Why they exist, and why tagged does not mean accessible.
What PDF remediation actually costsVendor rates, what makes one document ten times another, what per-page pricing hides, and how to tell whether outsourcing or software is cheaper for you.
Which screen reader to test PDFs withNVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver disagree about PDFs in specific, documented ways. Which to use, what each one hides, and what a disagreement between them means.