A practical checklist for a more accessible PDF
Searchable text helps, but accessibility also depends on structure, reading order, descriptions and human review.
Start with real text
A page that contains only a scan cannot be searched or interpreted as text by many assistive technologies. OCR can recover a draft text layer, but recognition errors must be corrected—especially headings, names, numbers and punctuation.
Test by selecting sentences and copying them into a plain-text editor. The order should still make sense. Multi-column layouts, sidebars and tables often need more careful remediation than a simple page.
Structure matters beyond appearance
Large bold text may look like a heading without being tagged as one. Accessible documents need meaningful heading levels, lists, table headers, language information and alternative text for informative images. These are best created in the source document before export.
PDF Creator’s extraction and OCR tools can help inspect or recover content, but they do not claim to produce a fully tagged, standards-conformant accessible PDF. Formal accessibility requirements need a dedicated checker and manual review.
Test more than one interaction
Use keyboard navigation, zoom the page substantially and check text contrast. Listen with a screen reader when accessibility is a requirement. Verify that link text describes its destination and that form fields have labels.
Keep the editable source because fixing headings or image descriptions there is usually more reliable than repairing the final PDF. Re-export and repeat the checks after meaningful changes.
Use the workflow
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