this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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I've been tasked with ensuring accessibility of various PDFs my org puts out. Acrobat has some accessibility checks, but I don't want to have to boot into Windows every time I need to check that staff correctly put in alt text and labeled their sections.

Is there a PDF viewer/editor for Linux that will let me run these kinds of checks or at least see various document properties?

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[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

What are these checks that you need to do?

My perhaps unknown hero of pdf processing is https://mupdf.com/

If it's in the data somewhere it should be detectable. They're an open source project, maybe bring your issue to them and they can make something?

[–] rehydrate@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am not sure how complete the accessibility checks 9f Libreoffice are, but they do have the capability to check for it.

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Unfortunately, that seems to only work when exporting from a LibreOffice doc. What I'm having to deal with are PDFs generated by various staff already in PDF format.

[–] rehydrate@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 week ago

Welp I guess I cant read, sorry

[–] rehydrate@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Actually I do have something else, Verapdf. This is also licensed under opensource licenses (dual license) GPL v3 or MPLv2+ and is actually designed to do the accessibility check

Looks promising, thanks. Gonna download and play around with it now.

You'd think the standard PDF viewers in Linux (Okular, etc) would at least show you alt text but nope. Seems like a huge omission.