Introduction
Accessible Employers, operated by Open Door Group, offers a self-assessment tool for creating a deeper understanding of your workplace’s current accessibility practices.
What was needed
Accessible Employers needed to ensure that their dynamically generated PDF reports were accessible for people with disabilities and usable across a wide range of assistive technologies. They were seeking a solution that didn’t require manual remediation.
Why was it needed
Accessible Employers wants to lead by example to improve accessible digital communication. That meant ensuring their website, forms, and report outputs were accessible so people using any assistive technology could access the same information. They wanted the work to provide a roadmap that other employers could follow when generating documents.
What we did
Easy Surf supported this by implementing an accessibility-led PDF generation tool, DocRaptor. This ensured each report was generated with correct structure, reading order, and semantics every time – meeting PDF/UA standards.
How? Keep reading to find out.
Accessible PDF generation
Semantic source content
The foundation of accessible PDF generation is accessible source content. Easy Surf worked with Accessible Employers to ensure that the HTML used to generate reports was fully semantic and meaningful before conversion.
As the website is hosted on WordPress and reliant on multiple plugins, this required careful coordination and consideration.
This included:
- Correct heading structure
- Proper use of lists and links
- Clear labelling of data and results
- Logical reading order independent of visual layout
By resolving accessibility issues at the source, we prevented them rather than patching later.
Controlled HTML to PDF conversion
Easy Surf implemented a controlled HTML-to-PDF workflow using DocRaptor, ensuring accurate preservation of document structure during conversion.
This approach allowed:
- Headings to map correctly to PDF structure tags
- Content to follow a predictable reading order
- Consistent output across every generated report
- Correct labelling of non-text content, such as images
This allowed every PDF to be generated with unique content. Importantly, this removed reliance on manual fixes in PDF editors, which are time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale.
Accessibility verification
Generated PDFs were reviewed to confirm that accessibility expectations were met in practice, not just in theory. Verification was completed through automated testing, manual code inspections, and, most importantly, testing by users with disabilities.
Verification focused on:
- Document structure and tagging
- Logical reading order
- Compatibility with assistive technologies
- Predictable navigation through report content
Any identified issues were traced to the source HTML or generation logic, ensuring fixes automatically improved all future reports.
A confident outcome
Because accessibility was addressed at the system level, Accessible Employers can now generate unlimited PDF reports with confidence that accessibility is built in and verified. This allows screen reader users, users with low vision, and users with cognitive disabilities to benefit most and improves outcomes for all users (including computers parsing the data!).
Accessible PDF generation is not just a formatting exercise but also an engineering decision. When accessibility is embedded upstream, organizations gain reliability, scalability, and confidence in their digital documents.
If you’re solving problems with PDFs or need your documents verified, please reach out!