PDFs for AI and People
Why PDF Accessibility Matters More than ever
Your website, sustainability reports, annual reports, investor materials, and supplier communications contain your most important strategic narratives. You invested significant resources creating them. But, if they’re not accessible AI systems can’t properly understand them, and increasingly AI is how people discover and evaluate your organization.
Most organizations have made progress on web accessibility. But PDFs? These documents are often overlooked, which means they may be essentially invisible to the AI systems that are rapidly becoming a primary audience for corporate communications.
Making PDFs accessible to meet ADA and WCAG requirements also makes documents easier for AI to understand.
AT-A-GLANCE
- Without accessibility, PDFs can disappear or be misunderstood in AI-powered search
- AI needs the same structure that assistive technologies require
- Accessibility has shifted from a from compliance requirement to a discoverability essential
The PDF Blind Spot
You’ve likely optimized your website, ensured mobile responsiveness, and followed WCAG guidelines. That work matters and is probably already helping with AI discovery.
But what about your PDFs? Your sustainability report may be the only place that detailed sustainability information lives. Where do you articulate your business model? How about the investor presentation detailing your material risks? Even supplier information can live in PDFs.
These documents contain your most carefully crafted strategies and narratives. Yet without accessibility features, they may be functionally invisible to AI systems. This is a problem because AI—whether powering search results or acting as agents gathering information—is now a critical audience.
What AI Actually Needs: Accessibility
Standard PDFs are often just flat files—text placed on a page based on X and Y coordinates. Without proper structure, a PDF with two columns might be read straight across the page by AI systems, jumbling sentences from both columns together. Not good. What makes a PDF accessible to screen readers is exactly what makes it comprehensible to AI:
Structure and tags create the map both screen readers and AI need to navigate content logically. Headings, paragraphs, and lists are semantic elements that tell systems how information is organized and related.
Reading order ensures content flows logically rather than randomly. In a complex layout with sidebars, callouts, and graphics, proper reading order tells both assistive technology and AI which content comes first, second, third.
Alt text for images serves dual purposes. ADA compliance requires alternative text descriptions. While modern AI can “look” at images, it’s far more accurate when provided with human-written descriptions. Alt text provides high-quality, human-verified metadata that helps AI models understand the specific context of an image, whether that’s a graph showing emissions reductions or a photo illustrating community impact.
For AI Search and Agents, Structure Matters
Whether AI is powering search results today or agents are navigating documents tomorrow, the requirement is the same: structure and accessibility. Today web crawlers from ESG raters and rankers evaluate your disclosures. If your content isn’t properly structured, those systems miss critical information or misinterpret your progress. AI systems face the same challenge (see AI Search Changes Everything).
When someone asks an AI system about your company’s sustainability strategy, climate commitments, or governance practices, that system needs to accurately understand your official documents. Without accessibility, you’re either invisible in those results or, potentially worse, misrepresented.
Protect Your Investment
You invest in creating these documents. Teams spend months developing messaging and crafting layouts that reflect your brand. Subject matter experts contribute data and validate claims. Leadership reviews and approves strategic narratives.
If AI systems can’t properly understand these documents, that investment is partially wasted. You’ll widen your digital credibility gap. You’ll be answering more questions from investors and raters, not fewer.
This isn’t about future-proofing for some distant AI-dominated world. This is present-day relevance. People are already using AI to research companies, evaluate commitments, and make decisions. If your key documents aren’t accessible, you’re not part of that conversation. And this will only accelerate. Just as web accessibility has become table stakes over the past decade, PDF accessibility is headed in the same direction.
Build Accessibility In
This isn’t a call to remediate every PDF you’ve ever created. That’s neither practical nor necessary. Instead, make accessibility standard practice for everything you create going forward. At Ideas On Purpose, we build accessibility into the foundation from the start. Even when working within platforms like Workiva, we design for accessibility from the outset and ensure it carries through to the final PDF.
The Takeaway
Accessibility is foundational to comprehension.
What was once primarily about serving people with disabilities is now also about ensuring AI systems can understand and accurately represent your content. In an age where AI increasingly mediates how people encounter information, you can’t afford to be invisible.
Ideas On Purpose Can Help
Whether you’re creating a sustainability report or supplier communications, we can help you build accessibility in at the outset, for human readers and AI systems alike. Our approach builds accessibility into the foundation of document creation, ensuring your strategic narratives reach everyone, human or robot, who needs to understand them.
Email us to discuss how we can help.
Photo by tokyo rattus on Unsplash
