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What we find when we open real documents

The a11yfy technical blog. Every number here comes from a measurement we ran ourselves, on real files, in a way you can check. We show what the accessibility standards actually require, where people most often trip up, and what good practice looks like. PDF-focused, but not only about PDFs.

  1. Practice 9 min read

    PowerPoint's accessibility checker asks whether your slide has a title. Excel's doesn't ask that at all.

    Microsoft runs a different rule set in every Office app. We mapped exactly what PowerPoint and Excel check that Word doesn't — and measured what Hungarian public bodies actually publish from each. Real Excel exports had table structure nobody checks; PowerPoint barely appeared at all.

  2. Practice 10 min read

    Alt text best practice says every image needs a description. We opened 540 real ones to see what's there.

    Alt text is the accessibility rule everyone's heard of. We walked the structure tree of 111 real public-sector PDFs and read every /Alt value on every figure — 540 of them — to see how many actually describe anything.

  3. Practice 10 min read

    A PDF form you can't fill in isn't an inconvenience. It's an application you can't submit.

    We went looking for real, fillable PDF forms in public-sector documents and found four. We ran them through veraPDF: the best-labelled one still failed on every single field. What /TU gives a screen reader that /T never will.

  4. Practice 11 min read

    How to make a PDF accessible: the honest workflow

    Most guides for making a PDF accessible assume every step goes right. This one prices each step — what a machine can do, what needs a person, and, computed from 59 real validated documents, the actual split between them.

  5. Practice 8 min read

    Embed fonts in your PDF. It isn't a printing setting — it's an accessibility one.

    64% of the Word-exported public-sector PDFs we validated ship with fonts not embedded — the most common PDF/UA failure that has an actual one-click fix. What a missing font does to a screen reader, and where in Word to fix it for good.

  6. Practice 9 min read

    Your Word accessibility check passes. The PDF still fails. Here's why.

    Word's Accessibility Checker has seven rules. PDF/UA has thirty-one checkpoints. We validated 59 Word-exported public-sector PDFs to see exactly where the gap falls — and it falls in the same three places nearly every time.

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