How to Remediate PDFs at Scale
Making one PDF accessible by hand is straightforward. Making a backlog of hundreds or thousands accessible is a different problem — one of strategy and prioritization, not just technique. Here is how to approach it without trying to fix everything at once.
Inventory and triage
Start by finding every PDF and ranking it by impact. You almost never need to remediate everything immediately — focus effort where it matters most.
- Prioritize high-traffic documents and anything in an active user journey.
- Prioritize forms and legal or financial documents, where exclusion is most harmful.
- Retire or replace documents that are outdated or duplicated rather than fixing them.
- De-prioritize low-traffic archival files, but have a plan to fix them on request.
Fix at the source where you can
For documents you still produce, fixing the template or authoring workflow once prevents hundreds of future remediation jobs. This is the highest-leverage thing you can do.
Automate the repeatable parts
Auto-tagging, OCR, title and language metadata, and detecting missing alt text can all be automated or batch-processed. Automation will not produce a perfect file on its own, but it clears the mechanical work so human effort goes to the judgment calls — meaningful alt text and correct reading order.
Measure progress with checks
- 1Run an accessibility check across the inventory to get a baseline score for each file.
- 2Remediate in priority order, automating what you can.
- 3Re-check to confirm, and to track your overall compliance rate over time.
An API or batch checker makes this practical — you can check each document programmatically. Start by running a free check here to see the kind of report you would get for every file.