For
PDF accessibility for publishers
Backlists, complex layouts and mathematics. Where PDF remediation is the right answer and where the honest answer is a different format.
The production template is the whole game
A publisher produces documents from a small number of templates and a defined workflow. That is an enormous advantage over most of the people on this site, and it changes where the effort belongs.
Fix the InDesign template and the export settings, and every new title is born accessible: real paragraph styles mapped to tags, alt text carried through from the layout, table headers marked as headers, articles ordered correctly, and a document language set.
The cost is a few days of setup. The return is every title from now on.
Where PDF is the wrong answer
Worth saying plainly. For reflowable text — novels, most non-fiction, textbooks without complex layout — EPUB 3 is a better accessible format than PDF can be. It reflows to the reader’s font size, supports MathML natively, and has a mature accessibility metadata story.
The EAA’s e-book provisions point the same way. If your list is mostly reflowable, the accessibility programme is largely an EPUB programme.
PDF remediation is the right answer where the page is the artifact: art and photography books, sheet music, technical drawings, historical facsimiles, and anything where the layout carries meaning.
The backlist question
Remediating a full backlist is rarely economic and rarely necessary. What works in practice:
On demand. Remediate when a title is requested in an accessible format. Most requests concentrate on a small fraction of the list.
By value. Course-adopted titles and anything with institutional sales first — those are the ones a university will ask about.
Never the whole thing. A publisher who commits to remediating twenty thousand backlist titles has committed to a programme that will not finish.
Where Taggart fits
The free validator lets you sample the backlist at no cost, which tells you whether your historical export settings were producing usable files or not. That single answer usually reshapes the plan.
For fixed-layout titles that need work, the reading-order editor handles the complex layouts — sidebars, captions, multi-column — that auto-tagging reliably gets wrong.
Frequently asked questions
Should we remediate PDFs or move to EPUB?
For anything reflowable, EPUB 3 is a better accessible format than PDF will ever be, and the EAA's e-book provisions push that way. For fixed-layout material — art books, sheet music, anything where the page is the point — PDF is the right container and PDF/UA is the target. Most publishers need both.
What about mathematics?
PDF/UA-1 handles equations as a Formula element with an /Alt string, which is a poor substitute for the structure. PDF/UA-2 allows MathML through namespaces, which is genuinely better. If your list is mathematics-heavy, that is the one place where waiting for UA-2 is a defensible position.
Is remediating a backlist realistic?
Selectively. A full backlist is rarely economic. What works is remediating on demand — when a title is requested in an accessible format — plus fixing the production template so everything new is born accessible.
Check your own file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, no account.
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