Announcement: CAAT Study on PDF Documents in the Public Sector
published on
How accessible are PDF documents in the public sector, really?
axes4 and mindscreen set out to answer this question together and conducted one of the largest analyses in this field to date.
For the study, we analyzed around 70,000 PDF documents from 63 public sector websites. In total, about 750,000 URLs were examined. The analysis covers the period from 2018 to the end of 2025, making it possible for the first time to observe developments over several years.
Fewer than ten percent of the documents analyzed meet the automatically testable accessibility requirements. This means that more than nine out of ten PDF documents are not accessible or only partially accessible for people with disabilities, despite legal requirements having been in place for years.
CAAT and axesSense: Large-Scale Analysis of PDF Documents
The analysis is based on CAAT in combination with axesSense.
This made it possible not only to test individual documents, but to automatically discover and analyze entire document landscapes. It is precisely this breadth of data that enables robust insights for the first time.
At the same time, the study also shows what is possible with CAAT at scale. The analyses and dashboards developed for this study will be integrated directly into the platform. This makes it possible to run PDF analyses not just as a one-off exercise, but continuously and across entire organizations.
Study Presentation on April 16, 2026
We will present the full study on April 16, 2026, in an online event.
In this session, we will cover:
- how the analysis is structured in detail
- which error patterns occur most frequently
- which factors influence the accessibility of documents
- and what organizations can concretely take away from the results