Guide
What a PDF remediation deliverable should contain
A fixed file is not a deliverable. What a compliance buyer needs in the record, why a green tick is not evidence, and a structure that survives review.
About 11 minutes · moderate
Why the file is not the deliverable
A client sends you forty PDFs. You remediate them and send back forty PDFs.
Six months later a complaint arrives about one of them. The question is not “is this file accessible” — it is “what was done to this file, by whom, when, and on what basis”. The file cannot answer any of that. A PDF carries no history of its own remediation, and the person asking was not in the original conversation.
This is why the report is the product. The corrected file is what the document’s readers get. The report is what the organisation paying for the work actually needs, and it is the part that retains value.
What a green tick is not
The most common deliverable in this market is a checker’s PDF export with a row of passes. It is worth understanding exactly what that document says and does not say.
The Matterhorn Protocol enumerates 136 failure conditions across 31 checkpoints. Roughly 87 can be decided by software. 47 require human judgement. Two have no test at all.
A checker export covers the 87. It is silent on the 47, which include:
- Whether the reading order is the intended order
- Whether the alt text describes the image
- Whether a grid is a data table or a layout table
- Whether a heading is a heading
- Whether
/Langnames the language the document is in
Those five are the ones a screen-reader user notices first, and they are the ones a reviewer asks about. A report that covers only the machine-decidable conditions has documented the half that was never in dispute.
The structure that survives review
1. Identity
What file, exactly. Name, page count, and the SHA-256 of both the source and the output.
The hash is not ceremony. It is what lets anyone — the client, an auditor, a court — confirm that the file they are holding is the file the report describes. Without it, a report is about a filename, and filenames are not identities.
2. Scope and standard
Which standard, at which level, in which profile. “PDF/UA-1” and “WCAG 2.1 Level AA” are different claims with different contents. If a national standard applies — IS 5568, EN 301 549 — name it and name what it points at.
State the tool and its version. A finding produced by version 1.2 of anything needs to be reproducible, and engines change.
3. Findings, before
Every condition that failed, with the page, the structure path and the object id. Not a count — a list. “14 errors” is not a finding; “09-001 at page 4, /Document[0]/Sect[2]/P[7], object 412” is.
Group by severity, and say what the severity model is. A reviewer needs to know whether your “warning” means “probably fine” or “needs a decision”.
4. Fixes applied
For each fix: which condition it addressed, what it changed, and whether it was mechanical or required a decision.
This distinction carries most of the report’s weight. A mechanical fix — setting /Lang, setting /DisplayDocTitle, wrapping a link in a /Link element — has one correct answer and needs no defence. A fix that changes what the document means — reordering content, writing alt text, declaring a table’s headers — is a judgement, and a judgement needs an author.
5. Human decisions
The section that makes the report worth more than its automated half. For each judgement call:
- The condition and the location
- What was decided: accepted, repaired, deferred
- The justification, in words
- Who decided it
- When
“Accepted: the decorative border on each page is marked as an artifact because it carries no information — RL, 2026-09-08” is a sentence that answers a question three years from now. A checkbox is not.
This section is also where an honest report is visibly different from a generated one. It cannot be produced by a tool, which is exactly why it is evidence.
6. What remains
Every condition still failing, and why. Three legitimate reasons:
- Requires the source document — a scanned table that cannot be reconstructed reliably from the image.
- Out of scope — the client declined, or it is a third-party insert.
- Not technically achievable — complex mathematics with no MathML route, for instance.
A report with nothing in this section is usually a report that stopped looking. Reviewers read this section first, and an empty one reads as a claim rather than a record.
7. Appearance integrity
State that the rendered output is unchanged from the source, and state how you know. If your tool compares rendered pages, give the metric and the threshold. If it does not, say that you compared them by eye, and on how many pages.
This matters because the most damaging remediation failure is not an unfixed condition — it is a document that now looks different. A reflowed annual report is a new document, and nobody asked for one.
8. The limitation, stated plainly
The report should contain, in its own words, a sentence to the effect that this is not a legal determination of compliance.
This is not a disclaimer to hide behind. It is the accurate description of what a remediation report is, and a report that claims more is a liability for both parties. The US Department of Justice extended the ADA Title II deadlines by a year on the stated grounds that it had overestimated what technology and staffing could deliver. A vendor claiming certainty the regulator declines to claim is not being helpful.
Machine-readable as well as human-readable
Deliver both forms. A PDF for the file and the auditor; JSON for the client’s own systems.
The JSON matters more than it sounds. An organisation with two thousand documents needs to query its own remediation history — which files were done, under which tool version, which decisions were deferred and never revisited. A folder of PDFs cannot be queried. A directory of JSON can.
Keep the two generated from one source so they cannot disagree.
Store it with the file
The most common failure of an otherwise good report is that it was emailed once and then existed only in somebody’s sent folder.
The report should live beside the document, in whatever system the document lives in, named so the connection is obvious. When the question arrives — and for any published document it eventually does — the answer should be one directory away, not one former employee away.
Frequently asked questions
Is a checker's PDF export enough as a report?
No, and it is the most common mistake in this field. A checker export says which machine-decidable conditions passed. It is silent on the 47 conditions that require judgement, which means it is silent on precisely the items a reviewer will ask about. A report that does not record the judgement calls has recorded the easy half.
Should the report claim the document is compliant?
No. A compliance determination is made by a qualified person against a specific obligation, not by a tool and not by a remediation vendor. What the report should state is what was checked, what was fixed, what was decided by a human and on what basis, and what remains. That is both more honest and more useful in a dispute.
What is a VPAT and do documents need one?
A VPAT — now published as an Accessibility Conformance Report — is a structured statement of how a product conforms to a standard. It is designed for software and web content rather than individual documents. For a document set, a remediation report with a per-file record is the better instrument, and some procurement processes will accept it in place of an ACR.
How long should the report be kept?
As long as the document is published, plus your jurisdiction's limitation period for a complaint. In practice this means the report should be stored with the file rather than emailed once, because the question 'what was done to this document and when' arrives years later and from someone who was not in the original conversation.
Related failure conditions
- 09-001 Tags are not in logical reading order The order of elements in the structure tree does not match the order a human would read the page. This is the single most common substantive defect in tagged PDFs and the one Acrobat's own tooling handles worst.
- 13-004 Figure tag alternative or replacement text missing A Figure element has neither /Alt nor /ActualText. Every Figure must have one or the other; if the image is decorative it should be an artifact instead of a Figure.
- 11-001 Natural language for text in page content cannot be determined No /Lang is in effect for some text: neither on the catalog, nor on an enclosing structure element, nor on a marked-content sequence.
- 27-001 No tests specific to navigation are required PDF/UA-1 sets no machine test here, but a long document without bookmarks fails WCAG 2.4.5 in practice and is the single most common procurement complaint.
Check your own file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, and no account at all up to 60 pages.
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