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193,198 PDFs checked: how accessible are the documents of Austria's public bodies?

We crawled the websites of 382 public institutions in Austria and checked every PDF we found against PDF/UA-1. 5.8% pass. The key findings.

By Anna Poledna, Klartext AI

6 min read

Diesen Beitrag auf Deutsch lesen

Public bodies in Austria have been required for years to make their websites and the documents published on them accessible. For federal websites the duty has applied since 23 September 2020, for documents published from 23 September 2018. We wanted to know how far PDFs have come.

In October 2026 we crawled the websites of 382 public institutions and checked 193,198 PDFs with a combined 4.26 million pages.

The results in numbers

MetricValue
PDFs checked193,198
PDF/UA-1 conformant11,147 (5.8%)
Median per institution (with at least 20 PDFs)0.2%
Institutions without a single conformant PDF148 of 324
Tagged at all (with structure)54.4%
Not tagged at all45.6% (88,093 PDFs)
No text on the first pages, mostly scans5.2% (10,133 PDFs)

Almost every second PDF has no structure at all. For a screen reader there are no headings, no lists and no tables in it, only an unordered stream of text, or for scans nothing at all.

Even where structure exists, it rarely suffices: of the tagged PDFs, only 10.6% pass.

Big differences between levels of government

GroupConformantTagged
Federal: ministries, supreme organs, judiciary17.4%63.2%
Federal agencies and authorities13.6%55.8%
Social insurance and health8.0%55.8%
Federal states (Länder)3.7%58.7%
Education and research2.3%55.2%
Chambers, state-owned companies, culture1.5%49.5%
Cities and municipalities0.4%45.6%

The closer the administration is to citizens, the less likely a PDF is to be accessible. Yet municipalities publish the documents people need in daily life: forms, public notices, fee notices, official gazettes.

Some institutions show it can be done: at the three best-performing federal institutions, between 48% and 74% of the PDFs checked are conformant.

Where the PDFs fail

A selection of the most common violations (share of all PDFs checked):

  1. Title not displayed (70%): the viewer shows the file name instead of the document title.
  2. No PDF/UA identifier (67%): the document does not state which standard it follows.
  3. Content neither tagged nor marked as decoration (54%): parts of the page are invisible to screen readers.
  4. Not marked as a tagged document (45%): for assistive technology the PDF has no structure.
  5. Fonts not embedded (39%)
  6. No language set for the text (36%): the screen reader does not know which language to read in.
  7. Images without alt text (23%)

A typical non-conformant PDF breaks six different rules.

Some of this is quick to fix: 4,441 tagged PDFs fail only on metadata such as the title or the PDF/UA identifier, which can be corrected without touching the content. Everything else needs real structure: headings, reading order, alt text, table headers.

The tool makes a difference

The software that created a PDF is recorded in its metadata, which shows which routes lead to accessible documents.

Created withPDFsConformantTagged
Microsoft Word62,86411.5%91.4%
Adobe InDesign32,39110.5%37.1%
Adobe Acrobat / Distiller34,8720.7%57.3%
Ghostscript10,2080.0%7.3%
Scanner / OCR5,1460%10.8%
Microsoft Print to PDF4,5880%2.7%
Online editors (Canva, Google, etc.)2,1830.3%19.6%

Three observations:

  • Word almost always produces structure, but rarely a fully correct one. With the standard export only a small share passes.
  • Specialised plugins make the difference. PDFs from Word plugins built for accessible export pass 83% of the time. They account for around 60% of all conformant PDFs in the study.
  • "Print to PDF" and scans never get there. Of more than 9,700 such files, not one passes.

No breakthrough over time

Year createdPDFsConformant
20189,1632.2%
202011,3195.6%
202214,0958.1%
202418,6609.5%
202523,9048.7%
202631,9337.3%

The rate has risen since the obligations came into force, but from a low base. Since 2024 it has been falling again, while the number of new PDFs grows fast. In 2026 alone almost 32,000 PDFs have been added so far, around 29,600 of them not conformant.

So this also affects new documents: PDFs that many people cannot read are created every day.

What this means

Around 300,000 people in Austria are blind or visually impaired. For them an untagged PDF is a locked door. Tagged PDFs also help people with dyslexia, motor impairments or declining eyesight, and anyone reading documents on a phone.

The numbers also show that more than half of the PDFs are tagged, so many bodies are already making an effort. What helps are tools and workflows that reliably deliver a correct result without every staff member having to become a PDF/UA expert.

Method and limits

  • Selection: 382 public institutions in twelve categories: ministries, supreme organs, courts, federal agencies, states, cities, social insurance and health, universities and research, chambers, state-owned companies and culture.
  • Crawl: all of the institution's domains, starting at the homepage and the sitemaps. robots.txt and Crawl-delay honoured, at most 2.5 requests per second per host.
  • Coverage: 202 institutions crawled completely, 156 stopped at a cap (at most 2,000 PDFs and 40 minutes per institution, so their figures are a sample), 24 blocked or unreachable.
  • Validation: veraPDF with the PDF/UA-1 profile (ISO 14289-1). PDFs over 60 MB were not checked.
  • Upper bound: veraPDF only checks the machine-checkable rules. It cannot judge whether the reading order is right or whether alt text really describes the image. "Conformant" therefore means: no machine-detectable error. The true share of accessible PDFs is likely lower.
  • Data protection: every PDF was deleted right after checking. Only results and metadata were kept.
  • Date: October 2026.

Explore the interactive study: charts by year, tool and institution type

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