PDF accessibility checklist
Use this checklist when your team needs a practical review before publishing customer-facing, regulated, or high-volume PDFs.
It goes beyond automated checks to cover practical workflow steps. The downloadable version groups checks into source quality, conversion, remediation, QA, and delivery.
What the checklist covers:
- Document title, language metadata, and tagged structure
- Reading order, heading hierarchy, lists, tables, and artifacts
- Alt text quality for meaningful figures and charts
- OCR checks for scanned or image-based input
- Accessible forms, labels, instructions, and tab order
- Delivery checks for browser-based viewing and product UX
How teams use it:
- As a release checklist before shipping regulated documents
- As a remediation intake checklist for existing PDFs
- As a handoff sheet between content, engineering, and QA teams
- As a scoring rubric when comparing document workflow vendors
If you need the broader platform view first, refer to the PDF accessibility solution hub. If you need API-first remediation, start with the PDF/UA auto-tagging API. If you need the standards context behind the checklist, read the PDF/UA compliance guide.
If your main bottleneck is moving Office files, HTML, scanned input, or existing PDFs into accessible output, review the PDF/UA conversion page.
Want help operationalizing the checklist? Book an accessibility demo or contact Sales to map it to your document pipeline.