The Standard
What is WCAG?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and define how to make digital content accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG is organized around four principles — perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust — with testable success criteria at three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA.
WCAG 2.1 was published as a W3C Recommendation in June 2018. WCAG 2.2 was published on October 5, 2023, adding 9 new success criteria. WCAG 2.2 is backward compatible — content that conforms to 2.2 also conforms to 2.1 and 2.0.
The DOJ's ADA Title II final rule requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for all web content of state and local government entities, including PDFs.
WCAG for PDFs
How WCAG applies to PDF documents.
WCAG was written for web content, but its principles apply to any digital document. Here are the success criteria most relevant to PDFs and what conformance looks like.
Perceivable
All meaningful images have alt text. Decorative images are marked as artifacts in the tag tree.
Headings, lists, tables, and other structures are conveyed through PDF tags — not just visual styling.
Tag order matches the logical reading sequence. Multi-column layouts are linearized correctly.
Text rendered as images (scanned headers, logo text) must have text alternatives or actual text equivalents.
Operable
Bookmarks (PDF outlines) provide navigation equivalent to heading-based skip links.
The document title is set in metadata and marked to display in the title bar.
Heading tags (H1–H6) describe topic or purpose. Form fields have associated labels.
Understandable
The document language is declared in the Catalog dictionary's Lang entry.
Passages in a different language are marked with a Lang attribute on their structure element.
Robust
Every structure element has a role mapped to a standard PDF tag type. Interactive elements expose their state.
PDF/UA
PDF/UA maps WCAG to the PDF format.
WCAG defines what accessible content looks like. The PDF/UA standard (ISO 14289) defines how to achieve it in PDF. PDF/UA specifies which tags to use, how to structure the tag tree, how to handle fonts, and what metadata must be present — the concrete implementation of WCAG's abstract requirements.
We validate every document against both the WCAG-derived rules and the PDF/UA specification using veraPDF. This means you get conformance at two levels: the document meets the abstract WCAG success criteria and the concrete PDF/UA technical requirements.
14 days until the ADA Title II deadline
By April 24, 2026, entities serving 50,000+ residents must make all digital content WCAG 2.1 AA compliant — including every PDF.