A PDF That Passed PAC and Still Had Six Problems
A four-page PDF/UA document, audited beyond the validator, corrected in the InDesign source and finished in a documented pass. The file is available to download, so every claim on this page can be checked.
PAC failures or warnings, PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2
issues found after an earlier clean report
language attributes: Turkish, German, Arabic, Japanese
Self-made sample, not client work.
Six issues behind a clean report
The first version of this document passed PAC with zero failures. A review of the tag tree and a screen reader pass still found six problems. None of them counted as a failure. Each one changed what a screen reader user actually hears.
| Issue | What a screen reader user got | Found by | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Four subheadings exported as H2 | What a screen reader user gotA flat heading list with no subsections | Found byTag tree review | Fixed inInDesign source |
| A heading exported as body text | What a screen reader user got"Talk to the Person Doing the Work" missing from heading navigation | Found byTag tree review | Fixed inInDesign source |
| Section labels tagged inconsistently | What a screen reader user gotThree labels read aloud, one silent | Found byTag tree review | Fixed inInDesign source |
| A footnote placed inside its sentence | What a screen reader user gotThe note read between "28 June 2025" and the rest of the sentence | Found byPAC quality hint, confirmed in the tag tree | Fixed inFinishing pass |
| Footnote links described but missing | What a screen reader user gotA promised link to the note and back that did not exist | Found byPAC quality hint, confirmed in the tag tree | Fixed inFinishing pass |
| All-caps "IT" in two headings | What a screen reader user got"I T", spelled out as an abbreviation | Found byScreen reader pass | Fixed inFinishing pass |
The heading structure in the tag tree
Heading levels are how screen reader users skim a document. The first version looked correct on the page, but its tag tree told a different story. Highlighted rows changed.
Before first export
- H1Don't Take It On Trust
- H2Why Remediated PDFs Come Back Broken
- H2The File Was Patched, Not Built (wrong level)
- H2The Structure Was Never Multilingual (wrong level)
- H2The Work and What It Costs
- SpanTalk to the Person Doing the Work (not a heading)
After current file
- H1Don't Take It On Trust
- H2Why Remediated PDFs Come Back Broken
- H3The File Was Patched, Not Built (corrected)
- H3The Structure Was Never Multilingual (corrected)
- H2The Work and What It Costs
- H2Talk to the Person Doing the Work (corrected)
Excerpt of the heading tags. The full tree also covers the table, lists, figures, footnotes and links.
The finishing pass
InDesign builds the structure: heading levels, reading order, alt text, table headers, language attributes and artifacts all come from the source file. A few things it cannot export are added after every export, in the same order, scripted where possible. A later correction costs a re-export and this pass, not a new remediation.
Tagged export
From the corrected InDesign source
Footnote IDs
Required by PDF/UA, not written by InDesign
Header scope
Set on the one table header cell exported without it
Block quote
The pull quote retagged from paragraph
Footnotes
Linked both ways, numbers labelled, notes moved out of sentences
Actual Text
Added where all-caps words are misread
PAC
PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2 checks
Screen reader
Listening to the file, including every language change
Validated, then listened to
PAC 2026, PDF/UA-1: 0 failures, 0 warnings
PAC 2026, WCAG 2.2: 0 failures, 0 warnings
Screen reader pass: language switching checked in Turkish, German, Arabic and Japanese
Judgement call: margin labels are silent by design
Each grey label names the tag of the element beside it. A screen reader already announces that tag, so reading the labels would say everything twice. They are marked as artifacts, and PAC lists them as quality hints.
Judgement call: one Arabic vowel mark, checked and kept
Text extraction tools report one vowel mark in the Arabic line twice. This is known InDesign behaviour with marked Arabic text. The line maps to readable Unicode with no replacement characters, so it stays unchanged.
Check every claim on this page
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Open the Tags panel
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Compare the report with the results on this page
Listen to page 3
The voice changes with each language attribute
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