1. Identify the required standard
Clarify the accessibility standard, policy or procurement requirement that applies to your project. Different organisations and use cases can have different obligations. Agree how completion will be assessed instead of assuming that one automated score proves accessibility.
2. Locate source files
Where possible, gather the original Word, PowerPoint, InDesign or other source files alongside the PDF. A clean source can make structural corrections more reliable than trying to repair a flattened or scanned document alone.
3. Group documents by complexity
Separate born-digital documents from scans and identify documents with dense tables, forms, equations, footnotes, multi-column layouts or complex diagrams. These characteristics affect effort and testing needs.
4. Review document structure
Check whether titles, headings, lists and links have meaningful structure. Reading order and tag hierarchy matter because assistive technologies rely on more than the visual appearance of a page.
5. Prepare alternative text and table context
Identify informative images, charts and diagrams that need meaningful text alternatives. For tables, check whether headers and relationships are clear. Decorative visuals may need different treatment from content-bearing figures.
6. Plan human and technical validation
Automated tools can flag some issues, but they do not reliably judge every reading-order problem or whether alternative text communicates the right meaning. Agree tool-based checks, manual review, representative sampling and the reporting format.
7. Define acceptance and maintenance
Agree file naming, version control, issue severity, correction cycles and acceptance criteria. If the source document changes later, establish who owns updates and whether the remediated PDF needs to be reviewed again.
Before the project begins
- Applicable accessibility requirements confirmed
- Original source files and PDFs gathered
- Document inventory grouped by complexity
- Scanned pages, tables, forms and equations identified
- Images requiring alternative text flagged
- Validation approach and reporting format agreed
- Version control and acceptance criteria documented
Need help putting this into practice?
DGx Creators can discuss the requirements, volumes and review process for your project. Share your brief to explore a suitable next step.
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