Quality Checks

PAC 2024 not only checks compliance with the official PDF/UA and WCAG standards. There is now a set of quality checks that point out possible errors.

This can be illustrated with an example: Headings that are recognizable as such for sighted users in the PDF must also be recognizable as such for software (like assistive technologies). If this is not the case, the PDF cannot be considered accessible.

The quality check helps to find such places. However, a human must decide whether it really is a heading and what level of structure it should have. Finding such places was previously left entirely to the visual inspection of a human and was therefore time-consuming. The quality checks help to find such potential problem areas more quickly.

In this sense, the new quality checks are not official technical criteria and they do not all have to be green to identify your PDF as accessible. They are intended to serve as an indication of possible errors.