Blog
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.
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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.
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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.