An interactive
PDF validator for
digital accessibility

Motivation

Every day, countless PDF documents are published: forms, statutes, annual reports, study materials, user manuals or information brochures. To make these documents accessible to everyone, they need to be created in an accessible way.

For people who use screen readers or other assistive technologies, a document that simply looks well designed is not enough. A correct semantic structure is needed so that a PDF document can be interpreted in a meaningful way. This includes i.e. a clear heading structure, alternative texts for images, structured tables, labels for formulas and a clear reading order.

Validating these requirements is challenging and needs specialised tools. At the same time, the importance of accessible documents is continuously increasing driven by legal requirements and the growing use of digital processes in public administration and business.

Paicha aims to make this type of validation more easily accessible. A high quality validation tool should work independent of the operating system being used and should also be easy to use for all users.

The project is looking for support

Digital accessibility is a task for the whole society.

Paicha is being developed as a tool to help companies, administrations and educational institutions check PDF documents for accessibility more easily and therefore improve their quality.

The project is currently being developed independently. To continue development towards a complete solution, I am looking for partners who would like to support the project.

Funding would help me to make this possible:

• expand the amount of accessibility checks
• extensive testing
• ensure quality across different operating systems
• develop an intuitive user interface
• create a documentation
• provide long-term maintenance

Legal framework

Digital accessibility is no longer just an optional quality feature. It is already part of legal requirements within the European Union.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) introduced common accessibility requirements across Europe for many products and services.
The requirements are based on the European standard EN 301 549, which refers to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in many topics.

For PDF documents, PDF/UA (ISO 14289) is the internationally accepted standard for accessible digital documents. Meeting these requirements is becoming increasingly important for both public institutions and businesses.

This results in a growing need for reliable tools for ensuring the quality of accessible PDF documents.

Why a new validator?

There are already tools for validating the accessibility of PDF documents. However, there is still room for improvement, especially when it comes to software that works across different operating systems.

The PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC) and veraPDF are already established solutions. Both handle important tasks, but each of them with a different focus.

PAC provides a user-friendly interface with visual support for analysing the structure of a document. This is especially helpful for the manual validation. However, PAC is only available for Windows. Organisations that use Linux or macOS do not have a solution with a similar set of features.

veraPDF, on the other hand, is an open-source project that works across all the different operating systems. Its main focus is the technical validation of requirements defined by standards. Compared with PAC, it provides less visual support for analysing document structure, reading order and tagging. It is therefore designed for more technically experienced users.

This leaves a gap: There is currently no tool that combines the cross-platform availability of veraPDF with the user-friendly visual support of PAC. This is where I want Paicha to make a difference.
Checks that can only be performed manually should also be integrated into the validator and supported by interactive controls. That means that not only a automated test report is being generated, but also the user is actively taking part in the validation process.

Project status

Paicha is still under development. A functional software architecture already exists, as well as an implementation of the first validation rules.

About me

Paicha is not a company. It is an independent software project that is currently under development.

Moin,
I am a software developer from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Since a few years I am working professionally on the software for wind turbines, which is more complex than you might think. This field is a good fit for me, because I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology.
However, since beginning of this year I have also been thinking about a completely different topic: how digital documents can be made easier to use for people with disabilities.

It all started with a comment from my best friend. Because of an illness, he will increasingly depend on accessible documents in the future. He had already looked into the topic himself and made me realise how important digital accessibility is for many people in their everyday lives - and how much work still needs to be done in this area.

Accessibility should not be a barrier - neihter for people nor for organisations that provide digital information.
With Paicha, my goal is not simply to develop a tool, I want to contribute to making sure that everyone has equal access to digitalization.

Contact

You are representing a public institution, a company or a funding organisation and would like to support the development of a platform-independent tool for digital accessibility?
I'd be happy to connect and discuss this with you.