In its February 2026 analysis of one million homepages, WebAIM found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of the pages it examined. That is an automated website study, not a finding about PDF files or FileStation. Automated tests also miss some accessibility barriers. WebAIM: The WebAIM Million: 2026 report
Why discuss that in a document-tool journal? Because there are two separate things to review: the interface someone uses to prepare a document and the document they eventually receive. Passing a check on one does not establish the quality of the other. This is our practical interpretation, not a causal conclusion from WebAIM’s study.
For the interface, our proposed review asks whether someone can choose a file without drag-and-drop, identify the controls, move through them using a keyboard and understand an error. For the output, our proposed review asks whether the words remain available as text, whether the reading order makes sense, and whether the document’s important structure survives.
W3C’s PDF guidance explains the value of actual text and describes checking OCR output and reading order. It also shows that tagging and accessibility review remain separate steps. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: PDF7: Performing OCR on a scanned PDF document to provide actual text
The useful conclusion is not that every PDF should pass one automatic score. It is that a file deserves to be checked for how people will actually use it.
At FileStation, we propose making those checks part of our public test method. Until results have been collected, this is a testing proposal, not an accessibility certification or claim of measured performance.