Comparison
Free PDF accessibility tools: what they do, and where they stop
| The free options | Taggart | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Various | Codama |
| Platforms | Varies | Any modern browser; macOS, Windows and Linux |
| Price | Free PAC, PDFix Desktop Lite, veraPDF, ocrmypdf, LibreOffice | USD 29/mo or 290/yr Solo, single seat; validation free and unlimited |
| Free checking | Yes | Yes — unlimited, no page cap, no account |
| Hebrew / Arabic reading order | Not handled | 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 | No | PDF and JSON, with a timestamped log of every human decision |
What The free options does well
- Checking is genuinely solved and genuinely free — PAC, veraPDF and PDFix Lite are all good
- ocrmypdf handles scanned input better than most paid tools
- Exporting an accessible PDF from a well-structured source document costs nothing
Where it leaves you
- None of them repair reading order
- None of them produce a remediation report with an audit trail
- None of them detect visual-order Hebrew
Start here, genuinely
This page exists because the honest answer to “do I need to buy something” is often no, and a comparison site that will not say so is not worth reading.
Check for free. PAC on Windows, veraPDF anywhere, PDFix Desktop Lite anywhere, or Taggart’s own free validator in a browser. All of them will tell you what is wrong. Run two.
Fix the source. This is the big one. Word and InDesign both export tagged PDFs with correct reading order, real lists, table headers, alt text and a document language — if the source document is correctly structured. Fixing heading styles in Word takes minutes and fixes every future export. Fixing the same problem in the PDF takes an hour and has to be redone next revision.
Fix metadata in Acrobat. Title, language and DisplayDocTitle are three dialogs and about ninety seconds. How →
Artifact running content in Acrobat. The Reading Order tool’s Background/Artifact button applies to a page range, so headers and footers across a whole document are a two-minute job. How →
Add alt text in Acrobat. Accessibility → Set Alternate Text walks every Figure and has a “decorative” checkbox that artifacts properly. How →
OCR with ocrmypdf. ocrmypdf --language heb+eng in.pdf out.pdf. Free, and better than most paid OCR.
If that clears your backlog, you are done. Close this tab.
Where free stops
Reading order at scale. Acrobat can reorder tags. It has no multi-select, no batch undo, and no way to see the order without holding the tree in your head. On a two-column academic paper that is forty minutes a document, and it is where the time in this profession actually goes. Why →
Visual-order Hebrew and Arabic. No free tool detects it, and no free tool repairs it. Neither does any paid one except Taggart. A Hebrew PDF stored backwards passes PAC, passes veraPDF, passes Acrobat’s checker, and reads as nonsense. What that failure is →
The audit trail. None of the free tools produce a remediation report recording what was found, what was fixed, what was accepted and by whom. If somebody asks you in eighteen months why a particular decision was made, that document is what answers them.
The appearance guarantee. Nothing free re-renders your output and proves it matches the input.
The honest summary
Most people who run the free tools find they clear about half the work. The half that remains is reading order, right-to-left, and the evidence — which is exactly what Taggart charges for, and exactly why it does not charge for checking.
The honest summary
Start free. Genuinely: run PAC or veraPDF, fix the source document, re-export. If that clears your backlog, you do not need Taggart. Most people find it clears about half.
Frequently asked questions
Can I do all of this for free?
Checking, yes, completely. Fixing, partly: you can set a title and language in Acrobat, artifact headers and footers in bulk, add alt text through the Set Alternate Text panel, and re-export from a corrected source. What you cannot do free is repair reading order at scale, or repair visual-order Hebrew at all.
What is the single highest-value free step?
Fix the source document and re-export. A correctly structured Word or InDesign file exports with a correct reading order, real list structure, table headers, alt text and a document language — all of the things that are expensive to add afterwards. If you still have the source, start there.
Is veraPDF as good as PAC?
For PDF/UA-1 clause checking they are comparable, and both are worth running. veraPDF is open source and cross-platform, which makes it the better choice on macOS and in CI. PAC has the screen-reader preview and is what more auditors quote.
What about OCR?
ocrmypdf, which wraps Tesseract, is free and better at scanned documents than most paid tools. Taggart deliberately does not do OCR — it detects that a document needs it and points you there rather than building a worse one.
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 Various.