PDF accessibility has become a critical responsibility for development teams across industries. Whether you're building content generation pipelines, document-heavy platforms, or enterprise tools, ensuring PDFs are compliant with accessibility standards like WCAG 2.2 and PDF/UA is no longer optional. Yet developers often discover that PDF remediation is far more complex than other accessibility tasks.
If you're working on PDF workflows or integrating accessibility checks into your product, here are the top PDF remediation challenges developers face and how to solve them effectively.
Top 7 PDF Remediation Challenges for Developers
1. Lack of Semantic Structure in Source PDFs
One of the biggest barriers to accessibility is the absence of a proper semantic structure in the original PDF. Many PDFs are generated from scanned documents, PowerPoints, or design files that contain no tags at all.
How to Solve It
- Start at the source. Encourage your content creators or upstream tools to export structured PDFs whenever possible.
- Use automated tagging tools. Tools like documenta11y can auto-detect visual patterns, generate tag trees, and reduce manual work.
- Add validation checkpoints. Integrate automated accessibility checks into CI/CD pipelines to prevent untagged PDFs from reaching production.
2. Incorrect or Missing Reading Order
Even when a PDF contains tags, the reading order often doesn’t match the visual layout especially in multi-column layouts, forms, or design-heavy documents.
How to Solve It
- Use programmatic heuristics to detect likely reading sequences based on spatial relationships.
- Implement developer-friendly review tools.
- Restrict layout complexity where possible.
3. Table Structuring and Complex Layouts
Tables are difficult to tag correctly especially large tables with merged cells, nested headers, or irregular structures.
How to Solve It
- Use smart table detection.
- Enforce table rules at creation time.
- Create reusable components.
- Define standardized table templates that your application or team can use.
4. Alt Text for Images and Non-Text Content
Developers often underestimate how frequently images appear in PDFs like icons, decorative elements, graphs, photos, screenshots, and more.
How to Solve It
- Define image metadata rules. For automatically generated PDFs, embed alt text at the source level.
- Use AI-powered descriptions to speed up remediation, followed by human review.
- Create authoring guidelines that clearly differentiate between decorative and informative visuals.
5. Form Field Labeling and Interactivity Issues
Interactive PDFs—forms, surveys, or signature documents—introduce a new layer of complexity.
Why It’s a Challenge
Form fields need: clear accessible names, role and state information, proper tab order, keyboard accessibility.
How to Solve It
- Enforce form tagging rules.
- Automatically detect unlabeled fields.
- Use a consistent form structure across your organization to reduce variability.
6. Fonts, Color Contrast, and Visual Accessibility
PDFs with custom fonts, low contrast text, or stylized elements often pass visual review but fail accessibility checks.
How to Solve It
- Embed all fonts during PDF generation.
- Check color contrast automatically.
- Adopt accessible design templates aligned with brand guidelines to reduce remediation later.
7. Ensuring Continuous Compliance
PDF accessibility is not a one-time effort. Teams frequently create new documents, update templates, or integrate new PDF-generation workflows.
How to Solve It
- Use accessibility checkers, automated tagging, and cloud-based remediation pipelines.
- Train internal teams
- Document your remediation workflow
Additional Resources for Developers
If you want to dive deeper into PDF accessibility, tagging, automation, or developer workflows, you can explore technical posts on dev.to.
Explore relevant posts here:Dev.to Accessibility
Conclusion
PDF remediation is challenging, but with the right strategies and tools, developers can streamline the process dramatically. From semantic tagging and reading order fixes to form labeling and contrast checks, understanding the common pdf accessibility pitfalls helps you build more accessible, compliant PDFs from the start.
Author Bio:
Briana Collins is part of the Content Marketing team at DocumentA11y, a leading pdf remediation and document accessibility service provider's focused on helping organizations make their digital documents accessible and compliant with global standards like WCAG and Section 508. She creates solution driven content that connects with professionals seeking ways to improve document accessibility.
Top comments (1)
Great job putting this together — it’s a clear and insightful breakdown of the real challenges developers face with PDF accessibility.