PDF Accessibility: Making Annual Reports and Regulatory Filings Inclusive
Guide to making financial documents, annual reports, and regulatory filings accessible under PDF/UA and WCAG standards.
Financial institutions produce thousands of PDF documents annually — annual reports, policy documents, regulatory filings, and customer communications. Making these accessible is a regulatory requirement.
PDF/UA Standard
PDF/UA (ISO 14289) defines the technical requirements for universally accessible PDF documents. This includes proper tag structures, reading order, and alternative text for images.
Common Issues in Financial PDFs
Data tables without proper header associations, charts and graphs without alternative text, scanned documents without OCR text layers, and form fields without labels are the most common issues we encounter.
Remediation Approach
Our document accessibility team uses Adobe Acrobat Pro, PAC 2024, and manual verification to ensure every PDF meets both PDF/UA and WCAG 2.2 requirements.