PDFa11y Screens Uploaded PDFs for Accessibility Issues in Drupal

Drupal editors can review uploaded PDFs for selected accessibility issues before making the documents public. In PDFa11y: Review PDFs for Accessibility on Upload, published 27 July 2026, Joshua Mitchell, maintainer of PDFa11y, describes the module’s development for government and higher-education publishing workflows. It uses the smalot/pdfparser library to inspect PDF metadata and document structure on the Drupal host.

The post describes six checks covering document language, tagged structure, metadata titles, heading hierarchy, PDF version, and titles that appear to be inherited filenames. PDFa11y can be configured to warn editors or block uploads when enabled checks fail, while its reporting records passed, failed, and skipped scans. Joshua also describes safeguards for files the parser cannot process reliably, including missing, unreadable, encrypted, malformed, oversized, and unusually image-heavy PDFs.

PDFa11y 1.0.8 is a stable, security-covered release compatible with Drupal 10.2 and 11. The project states that its automated checks are not comprehensive and should be paired with editor training and further accessibility review, so a passing scan should not be treated as proof of WCAG or legal compliance. Joshua connects the work to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Title II web-accessibility rule; the Department extended its compliance date to 26 April 2027 for state and local government entities with populations of 50,000 or more, and to 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments.