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PDF accessibility for law firms and knowledge teams
Client deliverables, court filings and a knowledge manager who inherited this. What matters, what does not, and where the risk actually sits.
Where the work actually is
Legal documents are mostly running text, which is the easiest case in this field. Three things account for nearly all the failures.
Clause numbering that is typed rather than structured. A deeply nested clause hierarchy — 1, 1.1, 1.1(a) — typed as text produces a flat wall of paragraphs. Built with real list styles it produces a navigable structure that a reader can move through by level. This is worth fixing in the firm’s template, once.
Tables of authorities and schedules. Long tables with stub columns and merged cells, where /Scope is not sufficient and explicit /Headers references are needed. Why →
Scanned exhibits. An image-only PDF has no text at all. It needs OCR before anything else is possible, and OCR errors in a legal document are a substantive risk rather than a cosmetic one — a misread figure or date is invisible to a sighted reviewer. What that failure looks like →
The contractual route
Most firms encounter this through client requirements rather than statute. A public-sector client subject to ADA Title II or EN 301 549 will increasingly pass the obligation down through engagement terms, and the request usually arrives as “provide accessible deliverables” with no further detail.
That is worth getting ahead of, because the answer is largely a template question. A firm house style that uses real heading styles, real list numbering and correctly built tables produces accessible PDFs by default.
Where Taggart fits
The free validator answers the immediate question — is this deliverable acceptable — at no cost and in about a second.
For the documents that need work, the remediation report is the deliverable a client asking for evidence actually wants: what was checked, what was fixed, what was accepted with a justification, and who decided. It is also, from a firm’s perspective, the record of what you told the client and when.
Frequently asked questions
Are law firms actually covered?
Directly, sometimes: a firm's own website is subject to the same duties as any other business, and in the EU the EAA reaches private-sector services. Indirectly, more often: public-sector clients increasingly pass accessibility requirements down through engagement terms, which makes it a contractual obligation regardless of statute.
What about documents filed with a court?
Court filing systems have their own requirements and they vary by jurisdiction. Accessibility duties generally attach to what you publish and what you deliver to clients rather than to the filing itself, but check the local rules before assuming either way.
Our documents are mostly text. Is this simpler for us?
Usually yes, and that is worth knowing. A well-styled Word document exports as an accessible PDF with almost no extra work. The problems in legal documents are concentrated in three places: numbered clause hierarchies that were typed rather than styled, tables of authorities, and scanned exhibits.
Check your own file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, no account.
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