Make every PDF accessible, without adding a manual step
Why accessibility belongs in your production flow
PDF is everywhere.
Every day, you send out invoices, statements, reports, manuals, forms, educational material and public-sector documents as PDFs.
But a PDF that looks correct on screen is not automatically accessible.
If your readers rely on screen readers or other assistive technologies, missing document structure, incorrect reading order, untagged content or inaccessible tables can make your document hard to use, and sometimes impossible.
Accessibility requirements are tightening around the world, so your customers and regulators now expect PDFs that everyone can access.
If you produce documents at scale, that raises a practical question: how do you make PDF accessibility part of an automated production process?
What makes a PDF accessible?
An accessible PDF holds more than visually correct text and graphics.
It also carries an underlying semantic structure that tells assistive technologies how your document is organized. That structure can include:
- A logical reading order
- Correctly structured headings and paragraphs
- Properly identified lists and tables
- Alternative descriptions for meaningful images
- Correct document language and metadata
- Accessible links and form elements
- Proper tagging of the document structure
Tagged PDF carries most of that structure.
One of the key standards here is PDF/UA, short for Universal Accessibility. PDF/UA defines what a PDF needs in order for assistive technologies to interpret it reliably.
Passing a technical validation check is only part of the job. Your document can carry tags while those tags still describe the content inaccurately. Alternative text needs to mean something. Reading order needs to make sense. Tables need to communicate their structure correctly.
That is why accessibility combines automated processing with human judgment.
Why PDF accessibility matters now
The most important reason is straightforward: everyone should be able to use your digital information.
Legislation adds urgency.
In Europe, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has applied since June 28, 2025. It introduces accessibility requirements for a range of products and consumer services across the European Union.
In the United States, Section 508 already covers federal agencies. On top of that, the U.S. Department of Justice's ADA Title II web and mobile accessibility rule sets digital accessibility requirements for state and local governments. Following a 2026 extension, the compliance date is April 26, 2027 for entities serving a population of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments.
Other countries and regions are strengthening their digital accessibility requirements too, which makes this a global issue rather than a single-market one.
So for many organizations, accessibility is moving from best practice to formal requirement.
The effect reaches past the organizations that legislation names directly. As a print service provider, document producer or software vendor, you will increasingly see accessibility requirements arrive through tenders, contracts and production specifications from your own customers.
The real challenge is scale
Making one PDF accessible already takes real work. Making thousands of them accessible every day is a different problem entirely.
Traditional remediation happens after you have already produced the PDF. A specialist inspects the file, repairs its tags, reviews the reading order, corrects tables, adds metadata and checks the result against the required accessibility criteria. That works well for individual documents, and it stops working the moment your volumes grow.
This matters most if you already automate the processing of large PDF volumes from many different sources.
The question is less about whether an accessibility tool exists, and more about how accessibility fits into the production process you already run.
Instead of handling accessibility as a separate manual task, you need flows that identify issues automatically, remediate what they can, validate the result and call in a human only when necessary.
PDF accessibility comes to Enfocus Switch
To make that possible, Enfocus has partnered with PDFix, a specialist in PDF accessibility, automated tagging, remediation and validation.
Through this partnership, you can build PDF accessibility straight into your Switch flows. You will find more about PDF accessibility and PDFix technology at PDFix.net.
Two PDFix apps are available on the Enfocus Appstore today.
PDFix Validation
PDFix Validation checks your PDFs for accessibility automatically, as a step in your Switch flow.
The app validates against profiles including PDF/UA-1, PDF/UA-2, WCAG 2.2 and Tagged PDF.
Switch then routes each file based on the result. A compliant PDF continues straight through production, while a document with accessibility problems goes to remediation or manual review.
You can download PDFix Validation free of charge from the Enfocus Appstore.
PDFix Make Accessible
PDFix Make Accessible brings automated accessibility remediation into your flow.
The app processes incoming PDFs with PDFix technology and improves areas such as document structure and tagging, metadata, language information, bookmarks and other accessibility properties.
Instead of handling every incoming PDF outside your production flow, you make accessibility remediation one more automated step inside Switch.
Automation will not replace your accessibility specialists. Some decisions still need someone who understands the context and meaning of the document. But automation takes the repetitive work off their desk, so they can spend their time on the exceptions that genuinely need human judgment.
Learn more about PDFix Make Accessible on the Enfocus Appstore.
From individual tools to an accessibility flow
Validation and remediation deliver the most value when you combine them.
Your Switch flow can, for example:
- Receive a PDF.
- Validate it with PDFix Validation.
- Route non-compliant files to PDFix Make Accessible.
- Validate the remediated document again.
- Send successfully processed PDFs forward.
- Route remaining issues to a specialist for manual review.
That gives you a validate, remediate, validate, review process running inside a much larger production flow.
And because it all happens in Switch, you can combine accessibility with everything else you already automate: preflight, metadata handling, approvals, file conversion, job routing and delivery.
Make accessibility part of document production
Accessibility requirements will keep evolving, and so will standards such as PDF/UA and the technologies you use to create and process PDFs. If you handle PDFs at scale, you cannot answer every change by adding another manual step.
Accessibility needs to become part of your flow. Together with PDFix, we want to help you bring accessibility validation and remediation directly into the automated document production you already run, so that producing accessible PDFs turns into a natural part of producing digital documents.
Explore the apps: PDFix Validation | PDFix Make Accessible | PDFix.net
