At InText, one of the services we specialize in is desktop publishing — preparing files for translation and recreating the layout after translation. As part of desktop publishing, we are often asked to ensure that PDF files meet accessibility requirements.
What is accessibility compliance?
It’s a set of principles and technologies that ensure PDF documents can be accessed and understood by people with disabilities. This includes:
Accessibility is about inclusion — and in many industries, especially in the public sector and education, it’s also a requirement for publishing, receiving grants, and meeting procurement standards.
We follow two key international standards for accessibility: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) and PDF for Universal Access (PDF/UA).
Recent PDF accessibility case
One of our regular clients, a nonprofit education administration program, required accessibility compliance for all translated PDFs. To support them, we developed a custom workflow and trained our desktop publishing team to implement accessibility features from the very beginning, starting with the source files.
Today, accessibility is integrated into our entire workflow. Linguists, designers, and QA specialists work together to make sure all requested PDFs we produce are not only linguistically accurate but accessible to everyone.
If you want to check whether your PDFs comply with accessibility requirements, contact us at localize@intext.com. We can run a quick audit or talk about your needs.
