Before you check a PDF document for accessibility, it is important that you have a basic understanding of what an accessible PDF actually isOnce you have this basic understanding, you need knowledge of the guidelines and laws for accessible documents so that you know what you need to check. In summary, part of the check can be automated using checking software, but some criteria also need to be checked manually.
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More InformationStep 1: Checking all machine-verifiable accessibility criteria
As in the article about the required programs As already mentioned, the PAC2024 Checker is the best tool for checking the machine-verifiable criteria.
1. Open PAC2024 Checker > Click the “Open document” button
2. Select document > “Open”
3. Click on “Detail Report”
Note: Before you click on the detailed report, you will see a summary of the document evaluation in the results overview. In the lower right area of the software, you can view the "Screen Reader Preview" and the "Logical Structure" of the document. These are generally useful functions for checking the document structure, but these functions do not give you any indication of which errors you still need to correct. So as long as the PAC2024 Checker is still displaying error messages, the detailed report is the most important function.
4. Expand/expand the error messages in the structure tree of the detailed report to find out more details and then correct them in Adobe Acrobat if necessary
For the last step you will find a List of solutions to common error messages. The effort you have to put into the last step depends largely on the structure of your source document. So make sure that you already have your source document (e.g. Microsoft Word) cleanly.
Step 2: Checking all remaining (H) criteria from the Matterhorn Protocol
Since the PAC 2024 Checker only supports the machine-verifiable criteria of the Matterhorn Protocol evaluated, you now have to manually check all (H) criteria from the Matterhorn (since human expertise is required to check them).
Step 3: Checking all remaining WCAG criteria
As soon as you have completed step 2, your document is PDF/UA or ISO14289-1 compliant. In order for the PDF to also meet the legal requirements of the German BITV2.0 (or the WGZ in Austria, the ech0059 standard in Switzerland), a few remaining WCAG criteria must now be checked. Most of the WCAG criteria are already covered by the PDF/UA standard and by testing with the PAC2024. However, a few criteria must also be checked. These are:
- 1.4.6 to 1.4.9
- 3.2.5
- 3.3.5 to 3.3.6
