Preparing for EAA: Streamline Compliance with PDF Accessibility Checker by Fueled+10up

Hugo Solar on March 25

The European Accessibility Act (EAA), set to take effect on June 28, 2025, is a significant step toward digital inclusivity, requiring websites and digital documents—including PDFs—to meet strict accessibility standards. However, auditing PDFs for compliance at scale is no small feat, especially for enterprises and other organizations managing hundreds or thousands of files across multiple domains.

To help our clients address this challenge, we developed the PDF Accessibility Checker—a handful of scripts that integrate with the WordPress command line interface (CLI), Adobe’s PDF Accessibility Checker API, and Google Sheets to automate PDF accessibility audits. I’m pleased to share that we’ve now open sourced this tool.

The Challenge of Auditing PDFs

PDFs are often static, dispersed across various locations, and difficult to audit. Some key challenges for our clients using WordPress as their website CMS included:

• Dispersed Locations – PDFs may reside in the WordPress media libraries or reside in outside locations linked to within the website’s content.
• Redirect Complexities – Some PDFs are behind internal redirects that mask the file name.
• Duplicate Management – The same PDF may be linked across multiple client sites, requiring deduplication in reports.
• Comprehensive Reporting – Accessibility evaluations must be site-specific and provide clear, actionable insights.

Manually finding and auditing hundreds of PDFs across a large digital ecosystem is impractical. Automation is key to scalable, affordable compliance strategies.

Automating PDF Accessibility Audits with our PDF Accessibility Checker Scripts

To streamline accessibility checks, we created a handful of scripts which we collectively refer to as our PDF Accessibility Checker. Here’s how it works:

1. Extracting PDF URLs – A custom WordPress CLI command retrieves all PDF links, including those hidden behind redirects, and puts them in a CSV file.
2. Downloading PDFs – A Bash script (wget) fetches the PDFs efficiently, handling redirects automatically.
3. Performing Accessibility Checks – A Node.js script audits each file using the Adobe PDF Accessibility Checker API, generating JSON reports on compliance status. (Note that the free version of this API is limited to 500 requests per month.)
4. Merging and Analyzing Reports – Using our next script, the JSON reports are combined with the original PDF list, creating a structured dataset.
5. Automating Insights in Google Sheets – A Google Apps Script cross-checks PDFs across multiple sites and organizes accessibility results into a clear, actionable report.

The Outcome

By leveraging this workflow, organizations can efficiently audit PDFs for compliance with the EAA, PDF/UA, and WCAG 2.0 standards. The resulting reports provide granular insights, highlighting areas that need improvement.

Each report includes:

• A summary of 30+ accessibility tests, with pass/fail results.
• Clear descriptions for each accessibility issue found.
• A structured format that integrates with content management workflows, making it easier for teams to take action.

And of course, because it’s completely open source and free, you can modify the scripts to fit your own business and process workflows and software.

Take Action Toward Compliance

With the EAA enforcement deadline approaching, now is the time to ensure your PDFs meet accessibility standards. By integrating automated accessibility checks with the PDF Accessibility Checker by Fueled+10up, organizations can proactively improve digital inclusivity while staying compliant.

If you’re looking for help with web and digital accessibility, or want to build powerful scripts and tools like these, we’d love to explore working with you.