A11y Docs: PDF and Document Accessibility for Statamic

Every university, hospital and agency has thousands of PDFs and Office documents in its asset library, and no record of which of them are accessible. They are the largest accessibility liability on most sites, and the first thing an external auditor counts - because they are the easiest thing to count.

A11y Docs inventories them.

1,240 PDFs | 214 DOCXs | 890 untagged | 210 image-only scans

36 checks across four formats. PDFs that have no tags at all, scans that are pictures of words, documents with no title or language, figures with no alternative text, forms with unlabelled fields, encryption that locks out a screen reader. Word, PowerPoint and Excel rules are grounded in Microsoft's own Accessibility Checker, so a finding matches something the author can see and fix in the tool they wrote it in.

Everything is written for the person doing the work. Findings, filters and the dashboard say Word - Alt text is filename, not docx.alt_text_is_filename. The exported report carries both, because an auditor needs to cite the rule as well as read it.

Installing it does not break your site. The backlog you already have is reported but never blocks publishing. Only new documents are gated, only on critical problems, and anything can be exempted with a reason. Installing this changes nothing about what you can publish today.

It re-checks only what changed. A library of 1,240 documents is not reprocessed nightly.

Reports say what they are. Every result records which engine produced it, so nothing claims formal PDF/UA validation it did not perform. The exported report is itself a tagged PDF that passes PDF/UA validation.

Optional: install veraPDF for authoritative PDF/UA-1 validation. Most sites should not. The built-in checks need nothing installed and find the problems that are actually in your library.

What it does not do

It inventories and triages. It does not remediate. Knowing you have 890 untagged PDFs and exactly which ones is the hard part. Fixing them is a separate job, done in Acrobat or in the tool the document was written in.

What you get

• 36 checks across PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX
• A status column in the asset browser: green for No problems found, amber and red for what needs work, grey for Format not checked and for files that could not be read
• Dashboard and remediation queue, filterable by rule, severity, format and container - rules named in plain English throughout, so a filter reads Word - Alt text is filename rather than an id
• Publish gate - critical only, existing library grandfathered, exemptions with reasons. A blocked entry is told which document is at fault, what is wrong with it, and ends "Fix it, or exempt it with a reason, then publish."
• docs:check, docs:report, docs:prune, with a CI exit code
• Accessible HTML and tagged PDF exports
• Queued scanning with concurrency limits
• Optional PDF/UA validation via veraPDF
• Feeds A11y Report's conformance report as its own appendix

Documentation

• Installing and configuring - including the asset-browser badge
• What it checks - all 36 rules, generated from the code
• Commands - docs:check, docs:report, docs:prune
• The publish gate - grandfathering, thresholds, exemptions
• Reports and exports - HTML and tagged PDF
• Do I need veraPDF? - short answer: no

Requirements

Statamic 6, PHP 8.2+, a database.

The rest of the line

Third of three. Same vocabulary, same voice, same four severities.

• A11y Gate - free. Blocks entries with accessibility problems.
• A11y Report - proves the site, with a conformance report.
• A11y Docs - covers the asset library.