PDF Accessibility: Best Practices for Inclusive Documents

Why PDF Accessibility Matters

An untagged PDF is, to a screen reader, a picture of text: unreadable. Making converted documents accessible means preserving structure, adding alternative text, fixing reading order, and using real text instead of scanned images. It also keeps you on the right side of rules like the ADA, Section 508, and the European Accessibility Act. This guide covers the practices that matter and how to verify them after a conversion.

PDF/UA and WCAG in Brief

PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) is the ISO standard for accessible PDFs. It calls for tagged content, a correct reading order, alternative text for images, and proper structural elements such as headings and lists.

WCAG 2.2 covers web accessibility broadly and applies to downloadable documents too. Level AA is the widely accepted minimum to aim for.

Preserve Document Structure

When you convert from Word or HTML to PDF, the heading levels, lists, and table structures need to carry through as tags. A flat, untagged PDF reads as one undifferentiated block to assistive technology.

Start from a well-structured source: use real heading styles rather than large bold text, mark lists as lists, and build tables with header rows. Structure that exists in the source has a chance of surviving the conversion; structure that was only visual has none.

Add Alt Text to Every Meaningful Image

Every non-decorative image needs descriptive alternative text, and purely decorative images should be marked as such so screen readers skip them. Add alt text in the source document before you convert, since that is where you have the context to describe each image well.

Get the Reading Order Right

Multi-column layouts, sidebars, and callout boxes can scramble the order in which a screen reader announces content. After converting, navigate the document with a screen reader and confirm it moves through the content in a logical sequence rather than jumping around the page.

Use Real Text, Not Images of Text

Scanned documents are the most common accessibility failure, because the "text" is just pixels. Run scanned pages through OCR so the words become a selectable, readable text layer. Novitora's OCR for PDFs produces that text layer, which is the prerequisite for everything else on this list.

Test the Output, Do Not Trust It

Conversion does not guarantee accessibility, so verify it:

• Run the file through a checker such as PAC (PDF Accessibility Checker) or Acrobat's built-in accessibility check.
• Fix what the automated tools flag: missing tags, absent alt text, uncertain reading order.
• Finish with a manual pass using an actual screen reader, which remains the most reliable test.

Automated checks catch the majority of problems, but they cannot judge whether your alt text is useful or your reading order makes sense. That part is still a human review, and it is worth the time.