FAQ
Questions buyers ask before signing.
Regulatory deadlines, what veraPDF catches and what it does not, what is delivered with each remediated PDF, how pricing maps to buyer mode, and how automated remediation compares to manual. Evidence-led; we link out to the standards, the validator, and the regulations rather than paraphrasing them.
Regulatory and deadline
- When does the DOJ Title II web accessibility rule require PDFs to be compliant?
- April 26, 2027 for state and local government entities with populations of 50,000 or more. April 26, 2028 for entities under 50,000 and special districts. The DOJ extended these dates once in April 2026; verify the current schedule in the Federal Register before scoping a timeline.
- Does the Title II rule apply to PDFs already posted, or only new ones?
- Both. The narrow archive exemption covers content that was uploaded before the compliance date, is retained for reference, and lives in a clearly identified archive section. Operational and current PDFs are in scope regardless of upload date.
- What is the difference between Section 508 and ADA Title II PDF requirements?
- Section 508 governs federal agencies and references WCAG 2.0 AA. ADA Title II governs state and local government and references WCAG 2.1 AA. The pipeline validates against WCAG 2.2 (which subsumes 2.0 and 2.1) and PDF/UA-1, so the output passes both regimes from the same artifact.
- What is the enforcement risk for a non-compliant PDF on a .gov site?
- DOJ enforcement under Title II (settlements and consent decrees, with PDF remediation a frequent remedial obligation); Section 504 private right of action for federally-funded entities; state civil-rights statutes. See the liability page for documented receipts.
Standards and validation
- What is the difference between WCAG 2.2 AA and PDF/UA-1?
- WCAG governs the user-facing experience. PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1:2014) governs the tag-tree machine-readability assistive technology consumes. A PDF can pass one and fail the other. Procurement contracts ask for WCAG; screen readers use PDF/UA. Pass both.
- What does veraPDF not catch?
- Human-judgment items. Alt-text accuracy (the description may be present but wrong). Reading-order semantics in ambiguous layouts. Color-contrast in cases where the rendered appearance matters. Every deterministic Matterhorn checkpoint is caught; the non-deterministic ones are surfaced for coordinator review.
- Can a PDF pass automated validation and still fail a screen-reader test?
- Yes. Validation confirms the machine-readable structure exists and conforms to the standard. Whether the structure is useful — alt text accurate, reading order semantically right, table headers matching the visual table — is a coordinator-pass question. Both checks are necessary for high-stakes documents.
Scope and deliverables
- What is delivered with each remediated PDF?
- Three artifacts. (a) The remediated PDF. (b) The veraPDF validation report against PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2 Complete profiles. (c) A per-file rule-level before / after diff. All three download from the customer portal. The diff is the audit-trail artifact procurement attaches to contract deliverables.
- Which PDF features cannot be auto-remediated?
- Image-only PDFs without OCR require a separate OCR step. Complex nested tables with merged cells in unusual patterns may need coordinator review for header-cell association. Math notation: highest-quality output requires source-document availability. Alt-text accuracy on diagrams: the pipeline generates draft text; the coordinator reviews before publication.
- Does TrueSection generate alt text?
- Draft alt text, yes — generated for every image element and flagged in the per-file diff. Alt-text accuracy is a Matterhorn human-judgment checkpoint; the customer accessibility coordinator reviews and approves before publication.
Procurement and contracting
- Why offer both a subscription and a per-PDF path?
- Same engine, same output, same veraPDF report on every run. Two purchase shapes for two buyer modes — subscription for ongoing volume, multi-year compliance programs, and the all-prior-PDFs differentiator; per-PDF for one-off work without commitment. The per-PDF path is not a smaller subscription. The subscription path is not a larger per-PDF order. Pick by buyer mode, not by volume threshold.
- How do you handle data residency and confidentiality?
- U.S. region during processing. Single-region; no cross-border movement of customer corpora without explicit customer consent. AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit. 30-day retention from upload with on-demand delete enforced end-to-end. Subprocessor list named in the customer agreement.
- Do you provide a VPAT / ACR for the remediation service itself?
- A VPAT for the customer portal is in progress. The remediated PDFs themselves carry their own per-file veraPDF report against PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2 — that is the document-level conformance evidence procurement attaches to a contract deliverable.
Comparison and alternatives
- How does automated remediation compare to manual on accuracy?
- Manual remediation is the historical gold standard but does not scale: per-document costs of $50 – $500 make ten-thousand-document corpora financially impossible. Automated against a deterministic pipeline plus veraPDF validation produces every machine-checkable PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.2 criterion deterministically; human review is reserved for items that require it (alt-text accuracy, complex-table semantics). Cost ratio is roughly 25× to 50× in favor of automation; accuracy ratio depends on what fraction of the corpus involves human-judgment items.
- How is TrueSection different from Adobe Acrobat Pro or manual-remediation vendors?
- Adobe Acrobat Pro is a desktop authoring tool; it can check accessibility on one document at a time and help an author write tags by hand. Manual-vendor services (CommonLook, Equidox, Grackle, Allyant) charge per document or per page for human remediation. TrueSection runs the same standards-based pipeline (PDF/UA-1, WCAG 2.2, Matterhorn Protocol, veraPDF) at corpus scale, automatically, with the per-file diff as the audit trail.
Question not answered here?
Onboarding is invite-only; every corpus is reviewed by an engineer before it ships. The fastest way to get a specific answer is to start the conversation with corpus size, the validation target (WCAG 2.2, PDF/UA-1, or both), and your deadline.