By industry
Document accessibility, sector by sector
The technical standard is the same everywhere, but the documents, the deadlines, and the stakes differ by industry. Pick a sector to see which of its documents fall in scope and where they typically fail accessibility.
Why does the sector change what you have to do?
Under the European Accessibility Act, the obligation attaches to the products and services a sector actually offers. So a bank's statements and a retailer's invoices are in scope for different reasons, on different timelines, under different supervisors. The underlying technical bar (PDF/UA and the parts of WCAG that apply to PDFs) does not change; what changes is which documents you must make conformant, and by when. See also document accessibility by country and by document type.
- banking & financial servicesConsumer banking is explicitly in scope of the European Accessibility Act. Why statements, contracts and terms are the accessibility pressure point, and how evidence helps.
- insuranceInsurance runs on long-form documents: policies, schedules, claims correspondence. Why their structure fails accessibility, and how per-document evidence helps insurers.
- e-commerceE-commerce is named in the European Accessibility Act. Beyond the storefront, the PDFs it generates (invoices, receipts, order confirmations) carry accessibility obligations too.
- the public sectorPublic bodies have had document-accessibility duties since the Web Accessibility Directive, predating the EAA. What that means for the PDFs they publish, and how evidence helps.
- educationWhich accessibility rules reach schools, colleges and universities, why their PDFs fall short, and how signed evidence of each check helps.
- healthcareThe NHS Accessible Information Standard, public sector web rules and patient letters: where PDF accessibility fits in healthcare, and what evidence shows.
- enterprise & legalHR, legal and compliance PDFs inside large organisations: the employment equality duties that reach them, where they fail, and how evidence helps.
- software platformsPlatforms that generate PDFs for their customers: who the EU Accessibility Act binds, and how an API check with a signed record per document shows the output.