Archiving and universal accessibility: PDF/A and PDF/UA

To most people, PDF is just a “digital printout”. However, PDF comes in a variety of subtypes and standards that may be arcane to the everyday user, but could be crucial to a professional. For instance, the PDF/A format is specifically optimized to serve an archiving and documentation platform, by allowing users to embed various types of data and rich content that may be necessary for a company to have. iText libraries can handle this with ease where most common PDF programmers have no real way of dealing with this.

Alternatively, many governmental organizations are required by law (e.g. Section 508 in the United States) to make their documents accessible to people with visual impairments. PDF/UA (“Universal Accessibility”) was set up as a PDF standard that can help people convert PDF text data to braille writing or to explain to them what a certain image depicts if they can’t actually see the image. iText can let you add the right structural elements to your PDFs to achieve this type of compliance and expand the reach of your organization to people who are regularly underserved in this type of documentation.