Accessibility Compliance Services
Pubrica provides accessibility audits, conformance reports and remediation for publishers, educational organisations and other content providers that must evidence accessibility to institutional buyers. Institutional buyers increasingly ask for an accessibility conformance report before purchase. Our accessibility specialists audit your content against WCAG 2.2, EN 301 549 and Section 508, prepare the VPAT or conformance report, and remediate PDFs, EPUBs, equations and figures. Scientific and mathematical content, including equations, complex figures and data tables, is handled by specialists rather than automated tools. Nine services are available, from the audit through to the remediated files and the conformance report.
- Evidence-based conformance reports that state what was tested, how, and what failed
- Specialist handling of scientific content: equations, complex figures, data tables and chemical structures, where automated tools are of limited use
- Audit and remediation priced separately, so you can establish where you stand before deciding what to remediate
- WCAG 2.2 and EN 301 549 both addressed, because US and European procurement apply different requirements to the same content
- Alt text written by subject specialists, describing the finding rather than the chart type
Missing alt attributesFound automatically
Contrast failuresFound automatically
Reading order and structurePartly
Whether alt text is meaningfulHuman only
Whether an equation is readableHuman only
Audit → report → remediate → verify → procurement evidence
- What was tested, how, and against which version
- Audit and remediation available separately
- Scientific and mathematical content handled by specialists
- Re-verified after remediation
- Partial conformance reported transparently
Our Services
Nine Accessibility Compliance Services
Most clients come to us after a customer requests a VPAT. The VPAT requires an audit, and the audit determines what remediation is needed.
What procurement asks forA VPAT that claims full support for every criterion is often treated as unexamined. Accurate reporting of partial support is more credible and more useful.
Prioritised by impactAddressing the easiest findings first improves the report without improving access for the people affected.
The format that most often failsPDFs produced from print workflows are usually the least accessible thing an organisation publishes, and the most widely distributed.
Including the metadataThe accessibility metadata is part of the requirement. A conformant file that does not declare it fails discovery.
Where images of equations failAn equation supplied as a PNG with the alt text “equation 3” is inaccessible in practice.
Describing the findingThis is the most common case in which compliance is technically met but the content remains inaccessible.
Readable in every modeColour-only encoding fails for roughly one in twelve men and in every photocopy.
Pre-release checksWithout this check, the next production run can undo completed remediation.
Preventing recurring issuesFixing a template once costs less than remediating its output repeatedly, which many organisations do for years.
Samples are illustrative and anonymised. Hover any one of them to play it again.
Compliance and Standards
Accessibility Standards and Where Each Applies
The applicable standard depends on where your buyers are, not where your organisation is based.
WCAG 2.2 (the underlying standard)
Level AA is the usual procurement target. The 2.2 criteria added in 2023 are the ones most older audits miss.
EN 301 549 (European public procurement)
The European harmonised standard, which incorporates WCAG and adds requirements of its own for documents and software.
Section 508 (US federal procurement)
The US federal procurement standard, which is what a VPAT is usually completed against for American institutional buyers.
Quality management (cert. H3CR9TCU20251212INDQM10N)
How the work is run, recorded and released.
Our Process
How Our Accessibility Compliance Process Works
We audit before remediating, so that the budget is directed to the problems that matter most.
Establish which standard applies
The location of your buyers determines whether WCAG, EN 301 549, Section 508 or a combination applies.
Audit a representative sample
We audit enough content to characterise the problems rather than the entire catalogue, because the pattern is usually visible in a fraction of it.
Report Conformance, Including Partial Support
Findings are prioritised by who is affected and how severely, not by remediation cost.
Remediate and re-verify
We remediate the content, re-verify it, and then adjust the workflow so the next release does not reintroduce the same issues.
FAQs
Accessibility Compliance FAQs
If your question is not answered here, ask an expert — no quote is required.
An audit, followed by the report. A VPAT completed without testing is an unsupported signed statement, and the signature is what creates the legal exposure.
Reporting partial support with specifics is both more honest and, in our experience, better received than blanket claims of full support.
Automated tools find a useful subset of issues, such as missing alt attributes, contrast failures and some structural problems. They cannot evaluate whether alt text is meaningful, whether the reading order makes sense or whether an equation is comprehensible.
For scientific content, most of the work falls outside what automated tools can assess.
A representative sample chosen across formats and content types. Failures are usually systematic, introduced by a template or production step, so they repeat across the catalogue.
The standards are the same and the specialists overlap. Education and assessment content has additional requirements, so it is offered as a separate service group.
Related services
Related Accessibility Services
Services commonly used alongside accessibility compliance.
1FOR PUBLISHERSone service group
Editorial and journal servicesProduction and metadata.2FOR EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENTone service group
Education and assessmentCurriculum, items and delivery.3FOR FIGURES AND VISUALSone service group
Research impactVisual and alternative formats.Request a Free Accessibility Assessment of a Representative File
We will send a written assessment of where the file stands before you commit to an audit, at no cost.