ADA PDF Compliance
A Claude Code plugin that analyzes and fixes PDF accessibility for ADA/Section 508/PDF-UA compliance.
The Problem
Public institutions — universities, government agencies, courts — are required by law to make their digital documents accessible to people with disabilities. For PDFs, this means complying with:
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act — requires WCAG 2.0 Level AA conformance for all electronic documents published by federally funded organizations
- ADA Title II — requires state and local governments (including public universities) to make their services accessible, which courts have interpreted to include digital documents
- PDF/UA (ISO 14289) — the technical standard defining what an "accessible PDF" actually looks like at the file format level
In practice, most PDFs exported from Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Word are not compliant. They're missing critical accessibility metadata that screen readers need: no document language set, no structure tree (so headings and lists are invisible to assistive tech), no alt text on images, raw URLs instead of descriptive link text, no bookmarks for navigation.
Fixing these issues manually in Adobe Acrobat is tedious and error-prone — especially for course materials where faculty may need to remediate dozens of slide decks per semester.
What Compliance Requires
A fully ADA-compliant PDF needs all of the following:
| Requirement | Why It Matters | Status Without This Plugin |
|---|
Document language (/Lang) | Screen readers need to know which language to use for pronunciation | Usually missing |
| Tagged PDF with structure tree | Defines headings, paragraphs, lists, figures -- the semantic structure screen readers navigate by | Missing on most Google Slides/PPT exports |
| Meaningful document title | Displayed in browser tabs and announced by screen readers (instead of a filename) | Often just the filename |
| Display title enabled | PDF viewer shows the title bar, not the filename | Almost never set |
| Alt text on all images | Screen readers read this aloud to describe images to blind users | Almost never present |
| Embedded fonts | Ensures text renders correctly on all systems | Usually fine, but not always |
| Heading hierarchy (H1 > H2 > H3) | Screen reader users navigate by headings -- skipped levels are confusing | Requires structure tree first |
| Descriptive link text | "DHS AI use case inventory" instead of "https://www.dhs.gov/ai/..." | Almost never set |
| Bookmarks for long documents | Screen reader users use bookmarks to jump between sections | Missing on exports |
| PDF/UA identifier | Declares the PDF claims compliance with the PDF/UA standard | Never set on exports |
Table headers marked as <TH> | Screen readers announce column/row headers when navigating tables | Requires structure tree |
How This Plugin Solves It
Point it at a PDF (or folder of PDFs) and it audits every compliance requirement above, then auto-fixes everything it can:
/ada-pdf-compliance:ada-check path/to/slides.pdf
What gets auto-fixed (no human input needed)
- Document title (inferred from page 1 content)
- Document language (defaults to
en-US)
- Display title flag
- PDF/UA identifier in XMP metadata
- Tagged PDF flag
- Bookmarks generated from page titles (101 bookmarks for a 102-page slide deck)
What Claude generates (AI-assisted)
- Alt text for every image -- Claude reads each page visually and writes concise descriptions
- Link descriptions -- Claude reads the surrounding page context and the URL to generate meaningful text (e.g., "YouTube: Technical Due Process lecture" instead of a raw URL)
- Document subject -- inferred from the content
What requires Adobe Acrobat (manual step)
- Structure tree -- the most important accessibility feature. For untagged PDFs (most Google Slides exports), the structure tree defines all headings, lists, figures, and reading order. Acrobat Pro's Autotag does this well. The plugin can also generate one automatically via pikepdf (see Path B below).
Install
From the Claude Code Plugin Marketplace
/plugin install ada-pdf-compliance
Local Install (for development)
git clone https://github.com/anitasrinivasan/ada-pdf-compliance.git
claude --plugin-dir ./ada-pdf-compliance
Python Dependencies
pip install pypdf # Required
pip install pikepdf # Optional — enables full structure tree generation
Usage
Invoke the skill directly:
/ada-pdf-compliance:ada-check path/to/document.pdf
Batch-process a folder:
/ada-pdf-compliance:ada-check path/to/folder/
Or just describe what you want — Claude will invoke the skill automatically:
Community-Access
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