The truth about PDFs
The web is full of outdated and inaccessible PDFs. Validating your documents prior to posting is an important and necessary step in keeping your information accessible. In many cases, a document or PDF form can be turned into a standalone webpage or digital web form, which has a lot of benefits like accessibility, tracking entries, and findability.
Ideally, all PDFs should be converted into web pages with links to the necessary web forms for completing desired actions. But we understand that sometimes you’re given an 83-page handbook and it's not feasible to convert that to webpages.
That’s when you need Siteimprove's PDF Validation tool. The validation tool allows you to evaluate your PDFs before they appear in an accessibility report. Once you have confirmed a document truly needs to remain in PDF form, the next step is to evaluate its accessibility before publishing.
When should you use the Siteimprove PDF Validation tool?
Any time you find yourself having to post a PDF to your website, it is essential that you validate it for accessibility. The Siteimprove PDF Validation tool is a great place to validate your PDF.
Once you access the Siteimprove PDF Validation Tool, the tool allows you to upload up to 10 documents simultaneously, with each file having a maximum size limit of 20 MB. If your PDF is over the 20 MB limit, compress your PDF in a tool like Adobe Acrobat and try again.
The student handbook pictured above is a crucial resource for the College of Medicine website. With a length of 83 pages, it would be impractical to condense the content into just one or two webpages. The validation results presented three critical issues, including missing tags and insufficient heading structure. These findings give the PDF’s creator a clear checklist for correction before the document is published.
What to do with your results
Share the results with the document’s creator so they can correct the issues at the source rather than relying on post‑publish fixes.
We've discussed the importance of accessible documents and the various tools you can use to ensure compliance. You can guide the necessary stakeholders in creating PDFs to correct any flaws in the documents that may pose potential barriers to accessibility.