Does Your Software Produce Accessible PDFs?
Statements, invoices, reports, manuals, forms: if your system generates PDFs, accessibility law increasingly says people using screen readers must be able to read them. Fixing documents one at a time never ends. We find out why your PDFs fail and fix the process that makes them, so every document comes out right.
Why It Matters Now
Accessibility rules that once applied mainly to websites now reach the documents organizations send and publish.
European Union
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025 to many consumer-facing services, including banking, e-commerce, transport and e-books, and to the documents those services provide. EN 301 549, the European standard behind it, includes requirements for PDF.
United States
The Department of Justice's ADA Title II rule requires state and local government web content, including documents, to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. After an extension in April 2026, the deadlines are April 2027 for larger public bodies and April 2028 for smaller ones. Federal agencies already work to Section 508.
Your customers
Public-sector and enterprise buyers increasingly ask suppliers to confirm that the documents their software produces are accessible. A clear answer, backed by a report, wins and keeps contracts.
Who This Is For
Teams responsible for software or templates that produce PDFs in volume, not just a folder of finished files.
Software vendors
Your product generates reports, statements or exports as PDF, and customers are asking whether they meet PDF/UA or WCAG.
Server-side document systems
PDFs produced in bulk by a PDF library, a reporting engine or an HTML-to-PDF converter, where one fix in the pipeline corrects thousands of documents.
Document and publishing teams
Templates and authoring tools, such as Word or InDesign, whose export settings and styles decide whether the PDF that comes out is properly tagged.
The $950 Audit
A fixed price for up to five sample PDFs from one source, so you know what is wrong, why, and what fixing it costs before you commit.
1. Test
We check each sample against PDF/UA (ISO 14289) with automated validation, then by hand for what software cannot judge: reading order, alternative text, headings and table structure, as WCAG 2.1 AA requires.
2. Trace
For each problem we find where it starts: a template style, an export setting, a missing call in your PDF library, or a conversion step that throws structure away.
3. Report and quote
You get a written report of every problem and its cause, ranked by impact, and a fixed quote to fix it at source. Whether to go ahead, with us or anyone else, is then your decision.
Why fix it at source
Remediating finished PDFs, usually page by page in Acrobat, costs the same again for every new document. When the problem is in the template or the code that generates the PDF, fixing it there makes every future document accessible at no extra cost, and lets you regenerate many existing ones. Our checklist for software teams shows what the audit looks at.
Why Mapsoft
We work inside the PDF format
For over 30 years Mapsoft has built software that reads, writes and changes PDF at a low level: Acrobat plug-ins, server-side work with the Adobe PDF Library, and our own PDF Hub tools. Tagging and structure are part of that work, not an add-on.
Close to the standard
Mapsoft is a member of the PDF Association, the industry body behind PDF/UA, and takes part in its PDF/UA working groups. Our guides to PDF accessibility and tagged PDF explain the technical detail.
Confidentiality
Sample documents and source code stay confidential. We are happy to sign a mutual NDA before you send anything: download our template or send your own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you fix our PDFs one by one?
No. The audit is aimed at the system that produces your PDFs, so that every future document comes out accessible. If you also have a backlog of existing files, the report says which of them can be regenerated once the source is fixed and which need fixing individually.
Will a PDF/UA-conformant document meet the law?
PDF/UA (ISO 14289) is the recognized technical standard for accessible PDF and the practical way to meet the PDF parts of WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549. We report against those standards; whether a particular law applies to your organization is a question for your legal advisers.
What do you need from us?
Up to five representative PDFs from one source, and a description of how they are produced: the application, template, PDF library or conversion step. Source code or templates help but are not essential. We are happy to sign an NDA first.
Find Out Where Your PDFs Stand
Tell us what produces your PDFs and who reads them. We will reply with the next steps for an audit.