Foliowright

PDF accessibility remediation, for institutions that have to prove it

ADA Title II · April 2027

Two annual reports arrive with 17,557 and 25,099 accessibility failures. They leave with fourteen.

Foliowright re-tags an existing PDF in place — it never rebuilds the page, so the document still looks exactly like the document. What it cannot determine, it refuses to guess and hands you instead, with the page and the image attached.

Measured on the six hardest documents we could find

Real PDFs published by six US universities — four annual financial reports, a 155-page accessibility guide, a financial-aid form. No files we wrote ourselves. Checked in PAC 2024, the tool accessibility offices actually open, and in veraPDF, the ISO reference validator.

Before
46,699

machine failures across 419 pages, as published

After
624

331 images awaiting a human sentence, 293 source fonts

Structural defects
0

tag tree, reading order, tables, lists, language, metadata — and zero warnings

Failure counts are veraPDF PDF/UA-1; the warning column is PAC 2024. Four defects PAC catches and veraPDF does not were found and fixed during this run — including 721 warnings from inline elements not nested in a block.
Document Pages Before After PAC warnings
Stanford financial-aid form 26440
Alabama annual report FY24 7817,557140
Rutgers annual report 8625,099140
Michigan annual report 531,229350
California accessibility guide 1551,4282400
Pennsylvania annual report 451,3223170

PAC still shows a red banner. That is the honest answer.

Every one of those output files still says that, and will keep saying it until a person writes the alt text. PAC's verdict is binary — any unmet checkpoint turns the banner red — and an image with no description is an unmet checkpoint no matter how good the tag tree underneath it is.

Any vendor showing you a green banner on a chart-heavy annual report either wrote the alt text for you, or guessed. We do neither, on purpose. What we can tell you is exactly how many sentences are left and which pages they are on — for a 78-page annual report, nine.

What it refuses to do

The failure mode in this category is not a tool that misses things. It is a tool that produces confident, plausible, wrong output that still validates — so nobody catches it, least of all the person relying on the description.

It will not describe a chart

Asked to caption a bar chart of WCAG conformance, a general caption model told us about “the percentage of people diagnosed with cancer… 71% experienced an increase.” Fluent, specific, entirely invented, and a screen-reader user has no way to know. Data graphics go to a person.

It will not re-embed your fonts

A font the source never embedded cannot be fixed by re-tagging, whatever a product page claims. We report it as the source-document problem it is, and tell you which font on which page.

It will not send your documents anywhere

The default mode is fully local — no upload, no API call, nothing leaves the building. A cloud model is available per figure, chosen by a person, and never automatically.

We are looking for one accessibility office

Not a customer. A design partner. Everything above was measured against public documents we chose ourselves, which is the weakest kind of evidence there is — what it has never faced is a real backlog and a real coordinator's judgement.

  1. 20–50 PDFs from your backlog

    Syllabi, policies, board minutes, forms, financial tables, slide exports. De-identified is fine.

  2. Whatever reports you already have on them

    PAC, Acrobat, CommonLook — so we are measured against your benchmark, not ours.

  3. One hour, showing us how you remediate a document today

    Timed. The number that matters to us is minutes per document, and we do not have yours.

  4. Thirty minutes, later, reacting to our output on your files

    Is it correct? Is the review faster than what you do now? Where is it wrong?

In return: early access, your priorities shape what gets built, and a tool designed around your workflow rather than a generic one. Nothing to sign, nothing to buy, no tool to switch.

Start a conversation