The PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) Standard

What is PDF/UA?

PDF/Universal Accessibility is a set of guidelines that was published as an International Standard in 2012 (ISO 14289). It provides clear guidance to content editors for how to achieve universal access with their documents and includes the following technical requirements:

• All real (meaningful) content shall be tagged. Artifacts (non-meaningful content) shall not be tagged.
• The “tag tree” created by the individual tags (representing the document’s content) should be sorted to reflect the document’s logical reading order.
• All structure types in use shall be standard or mapped to standard.
• A manual check of the document is required to ensure that there is no information conveyed using visual means alone (e.g. contrast, color etc.), and that there is no flickering, blinking or flashing content.
• A document title must be given in the metadata. In the Document Properties, the Initial View settings must be set up so that the title (rather than the file name) appears in the window title (under Window Options).
• Any non-text elements (images, charts, graphs, infographics, logos, etc.) must have corresponding alternative text.

PDF/UA requirements are complimentary to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and are compatible with Section 508.