Document Accessibility Check
Built for non-experts. Upload a publisher document, get a compliance-grade audit you can send back to the publisher, and a clear path to remediation if you need it.
A sample audit
Every audit produces a verdict against the major accessibility standards. This is a real audit of a real publisher PDF, summarised here.
Not met
Four defects affect screen reader output. One blocker, three high-impact.
Not met
Fails 1.1.1, 1.3.1, 1.3.2. Cognitive load high (Grade 14.6).
What you receive
A procurement officer needs WCAG mapping and severity counts. A remediator needs page numbers and Acrobat steps. A screen reader user needs a transcript that matches their tool. A cognitive reader needs short blocks, plain words, and predictable order. The audit ships as four short documents plus an orientation page, each for one audience.
The standards-grade audit. Findings tied to PDF/UA-1, WCAG 2.2 AA, GIGW 3.0, RPwD Act 2016, with severity, page reference, and Acrobat repair steps. Shaped for procurement, legal, and remediation teams.
For: procurement, legal, remediation
Reader-perspective demo. Each finding pairs an NVDA transcript, a tag tree, and a page screenshot. Hear-it-aloud buttons let sighted reviewers experience the same audio path a screen reader user follows.
For: reviewers, remediation, screen reader users
Reading level, sentence length, all-caps usage, grouping, column order, and bookmarks. Side-by-side before and after rewrites show what each repair changes for a cognitive reader.
For: plain-language reviewers, authors, course leads
The audit itself, restated in Easy Read style for cognitive readers and for the audience the audited PDF originally failed. One idea per page. Photo-symbol pairs. No jargon.
For: cognitive readers, self-advocates, disability services
The problem
A blind student or a student with low vision who uses a screen reader cannot read most publisher textbooks the way they are delivered. The publisher has not added image descriptions, has not set the correct reading order, has not labelled tables, has not declared the document language. The student finds out only after they try to read the file. By then it is too late, and there is no quick way to ask the publisher to fix it.
Document Accessibility Check audits the file in minutes and produces a report that names every defect in plain language, with the screen reader transcript and the standards citation alongside. The institution sends the report to the publisher. The publisher cannot ignore it.
Why a pipeline
Most academic publications in India arrive inaccessible at source. WCAG 2.2 AA, PDF/UA-1, the RPwD Act 2016, and GIGW 3.0 are all in force on paper. None is currently enforced against publishers in a way that creates commercial pressure. Publishers therefore continue to ship documents the way they always have, and the cost lands on students with disabilities.
The same publishers ship fully accessible versions to US universities, where the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 procurement standards create commercial pressure they cannot ignore. The Global South education market has no equivalent leverage today.
The lever exists. It sits with the procurement teams at universities and government bodies who could refuse to license a document that does not meet the accessibility standard the publisher already meets elsewhere. They cannot use that lever now because they have no way to test a document before they purchase it, and no way to send findings back to the publisher in a form the publisher's compliance team has to take seriously.
Libraries, disability services offices, and faculty who want to fix this hit three walls inside their own institution.
Accessibility expertise lives in a small number of trained remediators. Almost none of them sit on staff at universities or libraries. Faculty and disability services teams are asked to verify accessibility without ever being taught what it looks like.
Commercial remediation is priced for the markets where regulators create commercial pressure on publishers. A university in the Global South with thousands of titles in its catalogue cannot match that pricing. Most documents are never remediated as a result.
No service audits a document, remediates what automation cannot do, ships the corrected file back, and trains the institution to handle the work itself over time. Each piece of the workflow lives somewhere different, if it exists at all.
EquitableDocs is built to remove all three walls. The audit tool catches what is wrong. The Accessibility Collective remediates what automation cannot, so a blind student receives a readable document, not a diagnosis. The training programmes build the institution's own capacity, with the goal of self-sufficiency within twelve to eighteen months. The transparency portal aggregates the evidence so the case for regulatory enforcement gets stronger each year. This is a pipeline-level intervention, not a single-tool fix.
For practitioners
Strong specialist tools already exist for PDF accessibility. veraPDF and PAC are excellent at what they do. They verify whether a document conforms to PDF/UA-1, checkpoint by checkpoint, and produce a report a trained accessibility specialist can act on. They are not designed for anyone else.
Most of the people who need to act on a document's accessibility are not specialists. They are faculty assigning a textbook the week before classes start. Library workers acquiring a title. Disability services staff confirming that a document is usable for a student. Students with disabilities themselves, advocating for their own access. None of them has been trained in Matterhorn protocol numbering. None of them should need to be.
Document Accessibility Check is the bridge. It runs the same compliance checks the specialist tools run. It cites the same standards in the same wording. Every finding is also translated into reader-experience plain language: what a screen reader reads aloud, where the document fails the student, what changes on the page when the issue is fixed. The technical detail sits in a quiet footer per finding, available for the specialist remediator who eventually does the work. The plain-language headline is for the faculty member or the student who needs to know now.
Content accessibility has historically required specialist vocabulary to participate. The people on the ground, working with students with disabilities every day, have been kept outside the conversation by language they were never taught. This tool closes that gap by translating every finding into a form a non-specialist can act on, while keeping the specialist record alongside.
Three jobs
Detect
Seven categories of defect: tagging, alt text, reading order, table structure, headings, forms, language. Evaluated against PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2 AA. Each defect carries a screen-reader transcript and tag-tree screenshot as evidence.
Explain
A faculty member, a library worker, or a student can read the report and understand what each issue means for a blind reader. No Matterhorn jargon up front. The technical detail sits in a quiet footer per defect, available for procurement and remediator records.
Advocate
PAC-style conformance verdict on the cover. Quotable statements ready for letters and slides. Standards citations across WCAG 2.2 AA, PDF/UA-1, EN 301 549, GIGW 3.0, RPwD Act 2016, and UN CRPD Article 24. Cite-able for procurement, legal, and disability-services correspondence.
How it works
Four steps from upload to remediated document.
Drag a PDF or Word file onto the page. We accept up to 200 MB. No account required to try it on a single document.
The tool runs seven detector classes, evaluates 31 PDF/UA-1 checkpoints, and captures screen-reader transcripts for every defect.
A multi-page audit report lands in your inbox: cover verdict, executive summary, defect entries, standards reference, resubmission checklist.
If the document needs work that an automated tool cannot do, the EquitableDocs Accessibility Collective handles it. Same workflow, no other vendor required.
The differentiator
Other audit tools end at the report. We do not. When a document needs human work that automation cannot do, the EquitableDocs Accessibility Collective handles it. STEM equations and MathML, complex diagrams in medical and engineering content, scanned PDFs without a text layer, alt-text meaningfulness, Indic-script OCR depth: all routed to a Collective member with the relevant specialism, all in the same workflow. The institution does not need to find another vendor. The blind student does not need to wait for one.
Standards
Each report carries a verdict against six standards on the cover page. Cite-able for procurement, legal, and disability-services correspondence.
Audiences
Three audiences in priority order. Each can produce a report tailored to the conversation they need to have.
Faculty
Run the check the week before classes start. Quote the cover-page verdict in a request to the publisher. Use the plain-language headline in a department meeting. Point at the report; the report does the talking.
Disability services
Audit every document a faculty member flags. Keep the reports as a paper trail for procurement and for institutional accountability. The 31-checkpoint compliance summary is cite-able in compliance correspondence.
Library teams
When a publisher says a textbook is accessible, run the check. The audit report tells you what the publisher actually shipped. Send it back if the claim does not stand up.
Honest scope
EquitableDocs is the bridge and the last-mile delivery. This is what the automated tool covers, what the Accessibility Collective handles in the same workflow, and what is on the roadmap.
Covered automatically by Tool 6
Last-mile, by Collective members
v2 and v3 roadmap
FAQ
Yes. Students, faculty, and library teams can audit documents at no cost. Universities that need a high-volume institutional integration are invited to look at our partnership tiers, which run on transparent cost-only pricing.
PDF in v0.1. Word with limited inline-image checking. PowerPoint is on the v2 roadmap. Scanned PDFs without a text layer are converted by the Accessibility Collective as part of the last-mile workflow; you do not need to OCR before uploading.
Most documents are audited in minutes. Longer textbooks take up to an hour for the automated pass. If the document also needs Collective-led remediation, the institution receives an estimate alongside the audit report.
Yes. The report is designed for that purpose. It carries an institutional letterhead placeholder, a PAC-style conformance verdict on the cover, a quotable headline finding, citations across six standards, and a 31-checkpoint compliance summary. A simple cover letter accompanies the report; both are editable before sending.
The audit verdict is a reasoned outcome of running the named detectors against the document, not a legal certificate. Full WCAG 2.2 AA conformance for any document requires human review beyond what an automated tool can provide. Our scope panel on every report names what is checked and what is not.
You have two paths. Send the report to the publisher with a request for remediation; the report is structured to support that conversation. Or commission EquitableDocs to remediate the document directly; the Accessibility Collective handles it in the same workflow, with cost-only pricing for institutional partners.
EquitableDocs is a non-profit initiative for accessible documents in higher education, with a focus on the Global South. India is the launch country. Read more at the about page.
Upload a PDF, Word, or PowerPoint file. The audit runs in the background; the report lands in your inbox.
A representative audit is available as a preview while you wait. Generated from a real publisher ebook PDF: 78 pages, PDF 1.7, no structure tree, no document language declared, no title in metadata.