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The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is set to take effect on June 28, 2025. This regulation introduces new requirements to improve the accessibility of a wide range of digital products and services, including PDF documents.
Until now, standard PDFs or PDF/A (archive format) have been widely used in communication. However, starting from June 28, 2025, businesses that provide digital documents to consumers must ensure those documents are accessible. Following the PDF/UA standard (PDF/Universal Accessibility) is the recommended way to meet these new accessibility requirements.
If your organization uses PDFs in customer communication, now is the time to start preparing for PDF/UA to ensure compliance and deliver accessible documents to all users.
PDF/UA stands for PDF Universal Accessibility and is defined by the ISO 14289 standard. It is a specialized version of the PDF format designed to ensure that digital documents are usable by people who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
A PDF/UA-compliant document includes:
Creating and maintaining accessible PDFs ensures that information is inclusive and usable by everyone, regardless of ability.
If your organization operates in the EU and provides PDFs to customers or the public, those PDFs will increasingly need to meet accessibility standards under laws like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and following the PDF/UA standard is the best way to ensure compliance.
The same applies if your company operates in the U.S. Here, accessibility requirements come from Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (for federal agencies and their vendors) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (for businesses serving the public). Whether Section 508 or the ADA applies depends on your sector, but creating PDF/UA-compliant documents helps you meet the accessibility requirements of both.
The EAA focuses on accessibility and usability, and though PDF/A is designed for long-term preservation and archiving of documents. It does not guarantee that a document is accessible to users with disabilities. PDF/UA, on the other hand, specifically focuses on accessibility features such as correct reading order, tagging, and alternative text for images.
As mentioned earlier PDF/UA must have logical reading order, alternative text for images, searchable and selectable text, and proper tagging of content structure – all things that PDF/A not necessarily lives up to or are required to.
No. The EAA applies to websites (e-commerce included), mobile apps, digital documents (PDFs, Word files, etc.), banking, telecom, and transport services and lastly eBooks, ticketing systems and similar services.
Yes, initially. From June 28, 2025, the law applies to new products and services. However, starting June 28, 2030, all in-scope products and services (including those launched before 2025) must also be compliant.
Penalties will be issued for not following and complying, ranging from €1000 EUR to €500,000. There are various factors that determine the fee, starting from; the country that your business operates, and how many offences your business is convicted of and whether this is a repeated offence. , Another penalty that is also used is public notices about non-compliance, once again this is not used in every country.
There are though some businesses who are exempt from the EAA and fines, but the rules for these differ from country to country.
Yes, with the new InterFormNG2 4.0-update and our Advanced PDF-module, you can generate PDF/UA and our team can guide you on how to become PDF/UA-compliant. Download a trial and see how easy it is:
Or fill out the form and become complient ASAP
