Accessible Document Formats
A document isn't really published until everyone can read it — including people using screen readers.
Accessible document formats are file formats — and, just as importantly, the way content is structured within them — that assistive technologies can interpret and present to users with disabilities. A visually flawless PDF can be a blank wall to a screen reader if it is merely an image of text with no underlying structure. Accessibility requires machine-readable semantics: real text rather than pictures of text, a tagged structure that marks headings, lists, and tables, a defined reading order, alternative text for images, and metadata like document language and title.
The most common accessible formats include tagged PDF (PDF/UA being the formal standard), properly structured HTML, EPUB, and word-processing formats with correct style usage. What makes them accessible is discipline in authoring: a heading styled by enlarging the font is visually identical to a real heading but semantically invisible; a data table drawn with tab characters reads as gibberish to assistive technology. The same structural information that helps a screen reader — headings, table semantics, reading order — is exactly what document AI systems rely on, which is why accessibility and machine-readability tend to improve together.
For organizations, accessible formats are increasingly a legal obligation rather than a courtesy — driven by regulations such as the ADA and Section 508 in the United States, the European Accessibility Act, and WCAG-derived standards worldwide. Document AI plays a growing role in remediation: OCR converts scanned archives into real text, layout analysis reconstructs structure, and automated tagging pipelines apply semantics at a scale manual remediation could never reach.
PDF/UA and WCAG walk into an audit — making the world's default document format usable by everyone, provably.
Teaching a million old PDFs to speak to screen readers — semantics applied at a scale no manual team could reach.
Not just readable — navigable: the structural test every accessible document must actually pass.
Proof Perimeter runs document AI inside your own perimeter — with a provenance record on every field.
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