PDF Accessibility Check is an independent tool for testing whether a PDF meets PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) — the technical accessibility standard that sits behind the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and its German implementation, the BFSG.
Why this exists
Since June 2025 the EAA has required many customer-facing documents to be accessible, and most organisations discovered the requirement without any practical way to find out where they stood. The existing options were enterprise software priced for large publishers, or manual audits costing more than the fix.
Nearly every PDF that fails does so for the same reason: it was exported without a tag structure. Untagged, a document is close to unreadable for a screen reader no matter how clear it looks on screen. That single cause is common enough — and cheap enough to fix at the source — that a free checker seemed more useful than another consultancy.
How the checking works
Two stages, deliberately separated:
- The instant check runs in your browser. It uses your browser's own PDF processing (pdf.js) to read the file locally and report the fundamentals — tagged or not, document title, language. Your file is not uploaded, and you can confirm that in your browser's network tools.
- The full audit runs on our servers. If you choose it, the file is uploaded over an encrypted connection and validated against every PDF/UA rule using veraPDF, the open-source validator maintained by the PDF Association and the reference implementation for the standard. We do not substitute our own interpretation of the specification for theirs.
What we add is the translation: veraPDF reports clause-level conformance failures, which are precise but close to unreadable unless you already know the standard. Each finding is mapped to plain-English text explaining what it means for someone using the document and what to do about it.
What automated checking cannot tell you
This is the part most tools are vague about, so to be direct: automated validation proves a document is structurally sound. It cannot judge meaning.
A tool can confirm every image carries alternative text. It cannot tell you whether that text describes the image. It can confirm headings are tagged as headings, not whether they reflect the document's actual structure. It can confirm a reading order exists, not whether it reads sensibly. Those checks require a person, and any tool claiming a document is fully accessible on automated evidence alone is overstating what it measured.
So a high score here means the foundations are right and nothing is obviously broken. It is not a pass mark, and we never present it as one. For the same reason this service will not stamp the PDF/UA identifier into a document on the strength of automated checks: that identifier is a formal claim of conformance, and it is not ours to make on your behalf.
What this is not
Results are automated checks against a technical standard. They are not legal advice, and they are not a certification of compliance — no automated tool can issue one, ours included. Reports state what was checked and what was found, dated and stamped with a hash of the file, so they work as evidence that you tested. Whether your organisation falls within the EAA's scope, and what it must do about it, is a question for a qualified adviser.
Handling of your documents
Uploaded files are processed in the European Union (Frankfurt) and deleted the moment analysis completes. We keep only the results, a SHA-256 hash of the file and the file name. We set no cookies, store nothing in your browser, and never use uploaded documents to train anything. The privacy policy sets this out in full.
We also publish an accessibility statement for this website, including the shortcomings we know about. A tool that checks accessibility and hides its own would deserve the criticism.
Contact
Questions, corrections and bug reports: lukeramsdale01@gmail.com. If you think a result is wrong, we would genuinely like to know — the checking rules are tested against a corpus of real documents, and counter-examples are how that corpus improves.
New here? Start by checking a PDF, or read the guides.