Can anyone recommend a good (and if possible, free) tool to check the accessibility of a PDF? Additionally, any good resources you can recommend on creating/designing accessible PDFs? Please RT for reach! #a11y
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I’ll ask my colleagues at work! I think they might know some online validators. Acrobat Pro is your best bet for more involved stuff, but it’s very much not free 😬! In terms of creating them, the product I work on , PrinceXML, can output accessible PDFs from HTML+CSS.
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- PAC: more comprehensive than the accessibility checker in Acrobat Pro, a bit slow. access-for-all.ch/en/pdf-lab/pdf
- VIP PDF reader: renders PDF from the tag structure. Unusably slow for larger documents, IIRC. access-for-all.ch/en/pdf-lab/500
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- pdfGoHTML: plugin for Acrobat, converts tag structure back to HTML.
- PDF checker: online checkers.eiii.eu/en/pdfcheck/
- PAVE (couldn't get it to work)
- CommonLook PDF Validator (untested)
Relevant page:
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Hope that helps! We should really add these tools to our documentation too, so this is a good reminder for us - thanks! It's a more recent thing that we haven't had a chance to document. Ours is a paid program, so no pressure, but if it's useful: princexml.com
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Wow, thanks so much for all of these resources!! I'm so grateful!! 🙏🏼 I came across a few of these while looking it up, but it's useful to know that people have tried them ☺️
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No problem! Good to know that there are other people out there in the world that care about accessibility!
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I’m a newbie at accessibility, but given that I focus on diversity in tech at work, it would be a bit ridiculous to publish something that isn’t accessible, so I’m trying my best (and once more, Twitter came to my rescue) ✨
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Yeah, definitely! I followed you after I saw your excellent talk online from that Reason Conference. Glad to see you are following through on some of that stuff in your own work. 😊
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Wow, that’s so cool. I had no idea! Thank you for the follow, glad you enjoyed the talk ☺️

