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Check a PDF for tags, alt text, headings, table headers, and language against WCAG criteria.
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Among ToolsMonk's pdf tools, PDF Accessibility Checker covers a single everyday need: check a pdf for tags, alt text, headings, table headers, and language against wcag criteria. Open the page and start working, with no download or sign-up standing between you and the result.
People reach for it most often when they need checking a course pack, syllabus or handout before publishing it to students, screening a report or policy document for compliance before it goes on a public website, and triaging a backlog of documents to find the ones that genuinely need remediation. With nothing to install, an unexpected one-off job takes no longer to start than your regular routine.
The design goal is simple: practical output on the first try, with a privacy-friendly workflow and the rest of the ToolsMonk library one click away.
| Price | Free, no signup, no paywall, no watermark |
|---|---|
| Works on | Any modern browser: desktop, tablet, and mobile |
| Processing | In your browser, files never leave your device |
| Account required | None |
| Category | PDF Tools |
Choose a PDF from your device or import one from cloud storage
The document is parsed in your browser, and its structure, metadata, annotations and text are inspected page by page
Each WCAG criterion is reported as passing, failing, worth reviewing, not applicable, or not checked
Read the findings with the fix for each one, then download the report to share or attach to a ticket
Checks whether the PDF is tagged, which is what lets a screen reader follow headings, lists and tables
Detects scanned pages where the text is a picture and cannot be read aloud at all
Finds images and formulas that are missing alternative text
Checks heading levels for gaps, so an outline does not jump from H1 to H4
Checks tables for header cells, without which a value is announced with no idea what it measures
Checks the document title, the declared language, and labels on every fillable form field
Reports whether encryption withholds the permission assistive technology needs
Separates 'could not check' from 'failed', so a damaged page is never reported as a defect
Every finding cites its WCAG success criterion and says how to fix it
Downloadable plain-text report, and the file is read in your browser rather than uploaded
Checking a course pack, syllabus or handout before publishing it to students
Screening a report or policy document for compliance before it goes on a public website
Triaging a backlog of documents to find the ones that genuinely need remediation
Confirming that a PDF exported from Word, Google Docs or InDesign kept its tags
Showing a colleague or supplier exactly which accessibility criteria their file misses
PDF Accessibility Checker was built so that anyone, professional or first-time visitor, gets what the page promises (check a pdf for tags, alt text, headings, table headers, and language against wcag criteria) in seconds. Results are instant and accurate, and nothing needs to be installed or signed up for along the way.
All processing runs locally in your browser, so your files and data never leave your device. The interface adapts to any modern browser and screen size, so the PDF Tools workflow you rely on at a desk is the same one you get on a tablet or phone.
A PDF that looks perfect on screen can be completely unusable with a screen reader. The visual layout and the machine-readable structure are separate things in the format: a heading looks like a heading because it is large and bold, and it only IS a heading if the file says so. This checker reads that hidden structure and reports what assistive technology would actually find.
The single most important result is whether the document is tagged. Tags are the logical outline: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, figures and their reading order. Without them a screen reader gets one flat stream of text with no way to skim, no way to jump between sections, and no way to tell a table header from a table value. Most documents exported properly from a word processor are tagged; most documents produced by printing to PDF are not.
The second is whether the text is real text. A scanned page is an image, and no amount of structure helps if there are no characters to read. The report names the specific pages, so you can tell a fully scanned document from one where somebody pasted a screenshot onto page nine.
After that come the details that decide whether a tagged document is genuinely usable: images need alternative text, tables need header cells, headings need to nest without skipping levels, form fields need labels, and the document needs a title and a declared language so it is announced correctly and pronounced correctly. Each finding here cites its WCAG success criterion and explains the fix in plain terms.
Two design decisions are worth knowing about. Colour contrast is not checked, because measuring it reliably inside a PDF is not possible and a confidently wrong ratio is worse than no ratio. And 'could not check' is reported as its own result rather than folded into failures, so a damaged page never gets reported as an accessibility defect. Passing everything here is a strong signal, not a compliance certificate: reading order and the accuracy of alternative text still need human judgement.
Fix the failures in the order the report lists them: a scanned page makes every other criterion irrelevant, because there is no text to structure in the first place
If a document was printed to PDF rather than exported, re-export it from the source file instead of remediating the output, which is almost always faster
Alternative text should say what an image conveys, not what it looks like. A chart's alt text is the trend it shows, not 'bar chart'
A purely decorative image should be marked as an artifact so it is skipped, rather than given empty alternative text
Check one representative file from a batch before remediating all of them: documents from the same template usually fail in exactly the same way
Common questions about this tool, its workflow, and what to expect before you use it.
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Check a PDF for tags, alt text, headings, table headers, and language against WCAG criteria.
Use PDF Accessibility Checker free →Live tool (iframe)
Readers use the real, working tool right on your page, with a small credit line underneath.
Embed card (HTML)