Taggart
PDF remediation software that shows its working
Find every machine-checkable failure, fix the mechanical majority without changing a pixel, and produce the audit trail. Validation free and unlimited.
What you are choosing between
Before comparing tools, it is worth being clear about the alternatives, because software is not the only one.
A remediation service charges USD 4–25 per page with a USD 250 minimum. For a one-off backlog that is often the right answer. As a standing cost it is ruinous, and it does nothing about the documents you will publish next quarter.
Acrobat alone is free in the sense that you already own it. Its checker is adequate and its Reading Order tool is the reason most people go looking for something else.
Free checkers — PAC, veraPDF, PDFix Desktop Lite — genuinely solve checking. None of them fix anything.
Dedicated remediation software earns its price on exactly two things: how fast it gets through reading order, and whether it produces evidence you can hand to somebody.
What to look for
A real reading-order editor. This is where the time goes, and most tools inherit Acrobat’s model: a tree you have to hold in your head, one drag at a time, no batch undo. Ask to see the order rendered on the page.
An appearance guarantee. Ask what happens if a fix reflows the document. If the answer is “it does not do that”, ask how they know. Taggart re-renders every output and compares it page by page; a file that fails is thrown away rather than returned.
Honest automation boundaries. A tool that writes alt text unattended is generating text nobody has read, in a file somebody will sign off. A tool that artifacts content on a heuristic will eventually delete a heading. The useful behaviour is to propose and wait.
A report with a decision log. The remediated PDF is what you deliver; the report is what you keep. It should record what was found, what was fixed, what was accepted with a justification, who decided and when.
Right-to-left, if you need it. No mainstream tool detects visual-order Hebrew or Arabic. If your work includes Israeli or Arabic-language documents, this is not a feature comparison, it is a capability nobody else has.
What Taggart does
Checks against the full Matterhorn Protocol rule set — every failure condition, mapped to PDF/UA-1 clauses and WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria — with three selectable profiles: PDF/UA-1, WCAG 2.1 AA and IS 5568.
Applies every mechanical fix in one pass with a diff and a single undo. Proposes the rest and records your decision.
Gives you a reading-order editor with numbered badges drawn on the rendered page, selection linked both ways between tree and page, keyboard reordering with Alt and the arrow keys, and an undo stack that spans a batch — plus a screen-reader preview beside it so you can confirm the result without leaving the editor.
Detects and repairs visual-order Hebrew and Arabic, which nothing else does.
Produces a remediation report in PDF and JSON carrying every finding, every fix, every accepted item with its justification, every human decision with an actor and a timestamp, the tool version, and the SHA-256 of both files.
And refuses to write a PDF/UA conformance claim its own re-validation cannot confirm.
What it costs
Validation is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, no expiry; up to 60 pages without an account, and a free account lifts that. Remediation is USD 29/month or USD 290/year for a single seat.
For comparison: axesPDF is USD 650/year and Windows-only; PDFix Desktop Pro is EUR 350/year; a single 80-page report costs about USD 320 to have remediated by a service.
Full pricing → · Compared with the alternatives →
Frequently asked questions
What does PDF remediation actually involve?
Three kinds of work. Mechanical fixes with one right answer — document language, title, table header scope, tab order — which software should just do. Structural work, mainly reading order, which needs a person driving a good editor. And judgement calls — is this image decorative, is this grid a data table — which no tool can make for you. Software that claims to do all three is claiming the third, which is the one the regulator specifically said cannot be automated.
How long does a document take?
It depends almost entirely on the reading order. A well-exported single-column document with a few missing bits is minutes. A two-column scanned academic paper with tables is an afternoon in Acrobat. The purpose of a dedicated editor is to move the middle of that range from forty minutes to about eight.
Can I try it on my own documents first?
That is the recommended order. The validator is free and unlimited, so run your real backlog through it before deciding anything. It tells you how much work you actually have, which is the number that determines whether any tool is worth buying.
Does remediation change how the document looks?
It must not, and in Taggart it cannot. Fixes edit the PDF object model rather than the content streams that paint the page, and every output is re-rendered against the input and compared at structural similarity ≥ 0.999 before you get it back. A result that fails that gate is discarded rather than returned.
Run your own file through it. The validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, and no account at all up to 60 pages — so you can see exactly what you are dealing with before deciding anything.
Last updated . Competitor prices are as published by each vendor.