Many organisations publish hundreds or thousands of PDFs that do not meet PDF/UA (ISO 14289). This may look like a technical detail, but it directly affects legal accessibility requirements and practical use with screen readers.
The challenge: inaccessible PDFs
A PDF can look visually perfect and still be inaccessible:
- No tags (Tagged PDF) → screen readers cannot identify headings, paragraphs, lists and tables.
- Incorrect reading order → multi-column layouts, text boxes and footnotes are mixed up.
- Images without alternative text → important information is missing for assistive technology.
- Tables without headers → relationships between row or column headings and cells are unclear.
Manually retagging large collections is not a scalable approach.
The solution: automated reconstruction
Elk Solutions analyses, groups and reconstructs PDFs through a controlled pipeline:
- Analysis: determine what is actually present — tags, fonts and reading order.
- Grouping: divide documents into document families and templates.
- Reconstruction: restore logical structure such as headings, lists and tables.
- Regeneration: create a new PDF designed to meet PDF/UA.
- Validation: automatically check the result with veraPDF.
Read more about PDF/UA automation →
Results
- Demonstrable accessibility using PDF/UA as a concrete standard.
- Lower recovery costs than manual retagging.
- Scalable processing: define rules once per document family and apply them consistently.