There are so many agencies and companies who offer PDF remediation services. And they all tell you they can make your PDFs fully accessible and conformant / compliant with every standard and law:
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- WCAG 2.2 AA
- PDF/UA
- Section 508
- Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
- European Accessibility Act (EAA)
But, at the same time, the overwhelming majority of service providers don’t return PDFs that meet the standards they claim. And here’s a big reason why:
PDF remediation can be extremely complex. You can’t automate it (no, not even with AI or specialty software) and this means the only way to return truly accessible and fully conformant documents is through good ol’ fashion manual remediation.
For simple documents, this is fairly quick. As the complexity starts to increase with tables, form fields, and graphs, the amount of manual work necessary ramps up as well.
As a result, what ends up happening is all too often buyers get back partially remediated documents.
High Risk Roulette
Let’s say you want documents remediated to meet both WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF / UA standards. And if your documents are indeed fully conformant when delivered, those are 10/10 documents. Super high quality. Perfect. Chef’s kiss
What happens a lot is buyers get back 4/10 to 6/10 quality documents. Yes, they have been remediated… to a point. So they are more accessible, but they aren’t fully accessible and/or compliant with, say, the new ADA Title II web rule.
This is the longstanding problem in the accessibility industry: buyers have no way of knowing the quality of the deliverables they get back unless they hire an independent consultant who actually knows what they’re doing to review the, in this case, documents.
Of course, this leads to subsequent problems:
- You’re paying even more for the consultant when the service provider should take care of everything.
- Even if the consultant correctly identifies the omissions and errors,
- is the original agency actually going to correct everything?
- do you even want them to correct after they returned incomplete documents?
- is this going to delay your project to where you don’t meet the deadline?
The Premium Path
There is an alternative to playing PDF Russian roulette: you can pay a premium to go through a 5-star name like Adobe Certified PDF legend Dax Castro and his podcast partner, also Adobe Certified Chad Chelius.
Or maybe another document accessibility company with rave reviews, but prices starting at $12/page.
The premium route can be viable if you have a small project, but as more and more pages start flipping, that 25% to 40% extra can cause even bigger budgeted corporations to start fidgeting.
Door Number 3
Our position on the market is why can’t one accessibility company offer both excellent, 10/10 quality and affordability?
So we have.
We’ve partnered with a IAAP certified Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) and DHS Trusted Tester to be our Director of Document Accessibility.
For context, they’re not giving away these certifications. An IAAP Certified Accessible Document Specialist (ADS) has demonstrated mastery of document accessibility standards through rigorous testing by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals — the field’s leading credentialing body. Meanwhile, DHS Trusted Tester certification means our director has been trained and certified by the Department of Homeland Security in the same testing methodologies used by federal agencies to evaluate digital accessibility compliance. These aren’t just resume lines — they represent hundreds of hours of specialized training and real-world expertise in the exact standards your documents need to meet.
We’ve also brought on another super talented PDF remediation specialist to be our Senior Document Accessibility Specialist.
Both contractors are based in the United States and will oversee all of our document accessibility operations. This work includes:
- Client communications
- Providing remediation services
- Leading training and workshop sessions
- Quality assurance reviews on all deliverables
- Recruiting highly skilled people to add to our team
Excellent quality is everything to us and the only way to provide quality at scale is to bring the experts in-house so that’s exactly what we’ve done.
And, like Costco, we’ve found a way to keep everything affordable.
Did you know that Costco limits brand name products to a markup of 14% maximum, with Kirkland Signature products markup only at 15%?
With those type of margins, you might wonder how Costco makes money. Well, it’s because Costco provides the best overall value in the marketplace and so everyone shops there.
We’ve adopted that same approach to deliver high-quality document accessibility services at Accessible.org.
If you’d like to get a quote on your PDF remediation, we’d love to help.
Just send us a message below or contact us and we’ll be right with you.
