Documents are part of your website — in law and in practice
Ontario’s web accessibility requirement covers web content, and a PDF on your site is web content. It is also, very often, the content that matters most: the agenda, the report, the form, the handout. A site can pass every check and still exclude people at the moment they click Download.
We validate, remediate and re-author PDF documents to WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA, verified with PAC, and we do the same for the Word, PowerPoint, Excel and InDesign files behind them. Where the original source file exists we work from it, because a document built accessibly at the source stays accessible every time it is republished.
The structural work is engineered, the judgment is human
Most of an accessible PDF is structure — and structure is where most remediation is either done by hand in Acrobat’s tag tree, an hour per document, or not done at all. We built tooling for it. Our PDF/UA post-processor for InDesign exports, published on ACHECKS, clears the structural findings PAC 2024 flags — tag-tree clutter, broken and untitled links, tables of contents exported as loose paragraphs, orphaned figures, missing bookmarks, tab order — in under a minute, and its free pre-flight audit will show you, on your own export, which PDF/UA checks pass, which can be fixed automatically, and which need a decision from an author.
That tool describes the floor of the service, not the ceiling. The decisions it deliberately leaves to a person — alternative text, reading order, meaningful headings, colour contrast, what a table actually means — are the decisions we make on every document we remediate, and they are the difference between a file that passes a checker and one a screen-reader user can use.
Remediate the document, or fix the template
There are two kinds of document problem. One is a stock of existing files that have to be accessible now — we remediate them, in batches, on a schedule. The other is the flow of new documents your organization produces every week, which will keep arriving inaccessible until the templates and the authors change. For that we correct the templates, set up the export, and train the people who publish. The best outcome of a remediation engagement is that it does not have to be repeated.
Send the files below for a quote prepared from the documents themselves. If you have a hundred of them, send a representative handful and tell us the count.