Run a PDF through veraPDF with the PDF/UA-1 profile and you get a list of failed rules. Some of them are a two-line change in the document catalog. Others mean the file has no tags at all and has to be exported again from its source. The report does not tell you which is which.

We measured it on real documents: 1,212 PDFs published by public bodies in 12 countries (Canada, the US, Finland, France, Spain, Norway, the UK, Australia, Ireland, Sweden, Belgium and Portugal) — councils, agencies, universities and ministries that are under some web accessibility obligation. This is not legal advice and says nothing about any organisation's compliance; it only shows which PDF/UA failures are cheap to fix and which are not.

The measurement

Corpus: PDFs linked from home pages, publication lists and accessibility statements of public bodies, at most a few per organisation, robots.txt respected.…