PDF Accessibility Remediation Services

In the context of accessibility, PDF accessibility remediation refers to the process of making the document accessible for a user with a disability who is reliant upon an assistive technology—like a screen reader—to interact with that digital content.

At a high level, PDF accessibility remediation involves properly tagging content (headings, paragraphs, etc.) to establish a logical structure, ensuring the content reads in the correct order, creating descriptive or alternative text for images, utilizing proper color contrast, and more.

You can read more about PDF remediation in our blog What is PDF Remediation?

Many global laws require accessibility for all digital content—including PDFs. These laws include the ADA, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the European Accessibility Act—or EAA—Canada’s AODA and others. In order to meet legal compliance requirements, PDFs must be made accessible.

But beyond compliance requirements, it’s important to create, publish, and make available content that any user can engage with—including those users who are blind, color blind, or who have low vision.

PDF accessibility remediation can require a high-level of technical expertise, but there are software tools on the market that simplify the process, including or CommonLook PDF software suite.

Remediation steps depend on the software or tools used, but at a high level should include:

• Properly tagging content (headings, paragraphs, table structures, etc.) to establish a logical structure
• Ensuring the content reads in the correct order
• Creating descriptive or alternative text for images
• Utilizing proper color contrast
• Making sure form fields are properly labeled

The answer in many cases may be both. Organizations that only have a few PDFs or are generating relatively low volumes of documents may acquire end-user software, like our CommonLook PDF, to empower their teams to create accessible PDFs and remediate any existing documents. However, your organization may also have an overwhelming backlog of PDFs that need to be addressed. In that case, PDF remediation services may be the fastest, lowest-risk option to ensure full compliance.

Allyant will work with you to identify which solution, or combination of solutions best meet your need, budget, and timeline.

Request a quote for Allyant’s PDF remediation services.

The cost of PDF remediation is directly related to the quality of the remediation work completed.

Some vendors will offer a low-cost solution, but the quality of remediation may be lacking—elevating your organization’s legal compliance risk.

A vendor you choose should demonstrate expertise in the legal compliance and PDF accessibility standards space, as well as back each remediated PDF with a 100% conformance guarantee.

Questions to ask your vendor:

• What accessibility standards do you test against?
• How can you ensure the PDFs you deliver are accessible and compliant?
• How will I know what work has been done on each PDF you remediate?
• How quickly can I expect you to return remediated PDFs?

Allyant’s PDF remediation services team is the largest, most experienced team in the world, with leadership actively participating in the working groups that establish the ongoing standards for PDF accessibility. Every document we remediate comes with a 100% conformance guarantee, along with a conformance report that details the work completed—down to each individual tag. We regularly serve highly regulated industries with strict service-level agreements, and we can deliver fully accessible and compliant documents within five business days.

can host. We collaborate with you to build accessibility templates for each workflow based on your existing design. Using machine learning, we train the accessibility template to account for page breaks, tables, headers, or images, and map the information that is imported from your existing Customer Communications Management (CCM) system or database. Each template is tested for quality assurance before moving to live production. Accessibility rules can be applied as the document is created or as it is in post-production.

Creating new templates and updating existing ones is easy and can be managed by your team or ours. Whether you require large-batch processing for recurring monthly statements or need “on-demand” accessible downloads, the capacity of our automation solution can scale to support templated document workflows generating billions of pages.

Economies of scale does apply, making our high-volume PDF accessibility solution most economical for organizations that produce millions of documents every year. Common use cases include credit card or financial statements, utility bills, tax forms, and other templated documents. If your total number of annually produced documents is less than 500,000 pages, engaging our PDF remediation services may be a more cost-effective approach.

Advancements in AI and automation are accelerating PDF accessibility—specifically when those documents are templated. Examples include bank statements, phone bills, healthcare provider directories, pharmacy formularies, standardized tests, or enrollment forms. Allyant’s high-volume PDF accessibility solution leverages closed-source AI and machine learning to produce accessible PDFs at scale.

Highly variable (non-templated) or complex content will require manual remediation in order to meet compliance requirements.