Comparison
Adobe Acrobat accessibility alternative
| Adobe Acrobat Pro | Taggart | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Adobe | Codama |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS | Any modern browser; macOS, Windows and Linux |
| Price | From USD 239.88 / year Acrobat Pro individual plan, billed annually | USD 29/mo or 290/yr Solo, single seat; validation free and unlimited |
| Free checking | No | Yes — unlimited, no page cap, no account |
| Hebrew / Arabic reading order | Renders it; does not repair order | Detects visual-order storage and repairs it to logical order |
| Appearance guarantee | Not published | Every fix re-rendered and compared at SSIM ≥ 0.999 |
| Remediation report | Basic | PDF and JSON, with a timestamped log of every human decision |
What Adobe Acrobat Pro does well
- Everyone already has it, and it does everything else a PDF needs
- The Accessibility Checker catches the obvious cases
- Autotag is a reasonable starting point for simple documents
Where it leaves you
- The Reading Order tool is the single most complained-about piece of software in this profession
- The Order panel and the Tags panel disagree, and neither shows you the real structure
- No visual-order detection: Hebrew documents that read backwards look fine to it
The specific complaint
Ask anyone who remediates PDFs for a living what they would change about Acrobat and you will get the same answer. It is not the checker, which is fine. It is the Reading Order tool.
Three things about it, concretely.
You cannot see the order. The Order panel shows numbered boxes on the page, but they are a different data structure from the tags — so a document can look correctly ordered in the Order panel and read wrong, and vice versa. The only trustworthy view is the Tags panel, which shows the order as a tree you have to hold in your head.
Selection does not link. Clicking a tag can highlight content if you have turned on Highlight Content. Clicking content does not reliably select the tag. So you navigate a tree by expanding it and guessing.
Reordering is one drag at a time, with no multi-select and no reliable batch undo. On a two-column page you will move roughly half the elements individually, and if you get one wrong there is no clean way back.
None of this is a bug. It is a tool built in the mid-2000s for a task nobody expected to become a legal requirement, and it has not been rethought since.
What Taggart does instead
Numbered badges drawn on the rendered page, from the real structure tree — so the order is visible without holding it in your head. Selection linked in both directions. Alt plus arrow keys to move an element from the keyboard. An undo stack that spans a batch. A screen-reader preview beside it, so you can confirm the result without leaving the editor.
And a guarantee Acrobat does not offer: every remediated file is re-rendered and compared to the original at structural similarity ≥ 0.999 before you get it back.
Keep using Acrobat for
Editing text and images, redaction, combining and splitting, preflight, form field creation, digital signatures, comparing versions, and the accessibility check as a second opinion. Taggart does none of those and is not trying to.
The honest summary
Keep Acrobat — you need it for everything else. Taggart replaces the twenty minutes you spend fighting the Reading Order tool, not the other 90% of what Acrobat does.
Frequently asked questions
Should I cancel Acrobat?
No. You need it for editing, redaction, combining, forms, preflight and a dozen other things. Taggart replaces the twenty minutes you spend fighting one panel, not the rest of the product.
Why do the Order panel and the Tags panel disagree?
Because they show different data. The Tags panel shows the structure tree, which is what a screen reader follows. The Order panel shows a per-page ordering Acrobat maintains for its own tooling. Editing one does not reliably update the other, and this is the single biggest source of wasted time in Acrobat-based remediation.
Is Acrobat's Accessibility Checker any good?
It catches the obvious cases and it is free with the product, so run it. It is less complete than PAC or veraPDF against PDF/UA, it reports in the language of the standard rather than the language of the fix, and it cannot see visual-order Hebrew at all.
What about Autotag Document?
It is a reasonable starting point on a simple single-column document and reliably wrong on two columns, because it orders elements by a geometric sweep. Treat its output as a draft that needs its reading order checked, which is exactly what Taggart's editor is for.
Try it against the same file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited, so you can run your own document through both and compare the findings before deciding anything.
Prices are as published by each vendor and were last checked on . Where a vendor does not publish a price we say so rather than guess. Taggart is not affiliated with Adobe.