About poofPDF

More than a billion people worldwide live with a disability that can affect how they read a document — low vision or blindness, motor impairments that rule out a mouse, cognitive differences that make a wall of unstructured text hard to follow. The World Health Organization puts that at roughly 16% of the global population — about 1 in 6 people — and the CDC estimates 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. alone has some type of disability. PDFs are one of the most common ways information gets shared online — forms, syllabi, invoices, government notices, medical instructions — and most of them were never built with any of those readers in mind.

That's the actual problem poofPDF exists to chip away at — not a checkbox on a compliance form (though it can help with that too), but a genuinely large number of real people who hit a wall every time they open a document that wasn't built for them.

Why we built it

We care about making the internet accessible for everyone. That's the honest reason this exists. It's also true that making a PDF genuinely accessible is a real pain — digging through structure-tag XML by hand, or relying on specialist software — and we wanted a tool that strips out as much of that friction as possible. But the friction was never the point. A document is only actually useful if the person who needs it can read it, and right now, too many people can't. poofPDF's heuristics automate the tedious 80% (finding untagged images, guessing heading levels from font size, detecting tables from raw text position data) so a human reviewer can spend their time on the judgment calls that actually need a person — writing good alt text, confirming reading order, and deciding what's decorative.

How it works

As currently provided, analysis runs using pdf.js and pdf-lib in your browser — when you drop a PDF onto the page, it's parsed and processed locally rather than uploaded to a server first. You get a plain-language checklist of what's likely to trip up a screen reader or fail an accessibility audit, plus tools to patch the original PDF or export a rebuilt, fully-tagged version. See our Privacy Policy for what happens with any optional, server-involved features.

What it isn't

poofPDF's checks are automated and heuristic. They're a strong first pass, not a substitute for a full manual accessibility audit, assistive-technology testing, or a legal conformance claim. Always spot-check the results, especially for anything flagged "medium" or "low" confidence.

Other tools

poofPDF is part of a small family of straightforward, no-nonsense web tools. See the footer below for what else is available today.