Six years of obligation, one quarter done: key facts on the PDFs of five Austrian federal ministries
11,864 PDFs, 504,259 pages, checked with veraPDF: 24.9% of the documents from five Austrian federal ministries meet PDF/UA-1. The numbers at a glance.
Since 23 September 2020, Austrian federal websites must be accessible. Under the Web Accessibility Act (Web-Zugänglichkeits-Gesetz, WZG) this also covers PDFs published from 23 September 2018, and older documents needed for ongoing administrative processes.
In August 2026 we looked at where implementation stands. We collected every PDF on the websites of five federal ministries and checked each one.
The headline number
24.9% of the PDFs are accessible. 2,925 of 11,757 documents checked pass the PDF/UA-1 test.
The check was done with veraPDF, the established open-source validator for PDF/UA.
Key facts
| PDFs found | 11,864 |
| Pages in total | 504,259 |
| PDFs checked | 11,757 |
| PDF/UA-1 conformant | 2,925 (24.9%) |
| Not yet meeting the standard | 8,832 |
| No structure information at all | 4,360 |
| Claiming conformance the check does not confirm | 1,151 |
| Range across ministries | 5% to 63%, a factor of 12 |
Behind the numbers
4,360 documents have no structure at all. A screen reader cannot make sense of them: no headings, no tables, no reading order.
Structure alone is not enough. Even among documents that are already tagged, most do not yet meet the standard. Depending on the ministry, between 8% and 67% of tagged PDFs pass.
1,151 PDFs declare themselves conformant and are not. They carry the PDF/UA identifier in their metadata but fail the check. The identifier is set by an export program; it says nothing about whether the document actually meets the requirements.
The gap between ministries is large. The best ministry reaches 63%, the weakest 5%. This shows that a high rate is achievable with the right workflow.
Where the levers are
- Two rules are the most common open point in every ministry. Both concern metadata, such as whether the document title is displayed. This can be fixed without re-tagging the document.
- 1,284 documents have five or fewer open checkpoints. They are often only a few settings away from conformance.
- 4,360 documents need full tagging: headings, paragraphs, tables, alt text, reading order. That is the work doclarity automates.
What manual work would cost
Making the 504,259 pages accessible by hand is hardly realistic:
- around 45 minutes of expert work per page (our assumption)
- adds up to around 378,000 hours
- that is about 236 full-time years (at 1,600 working hours a year)
- at around €20 per page from a DACH service provider (our assumption): about €10 million
And that is for five ministries.
Who this helps
- around 300,000 blind and visually impaired people in Austria (WKO, order of magnitude)
- around 1.2 million in Germany (DBSV)
- around 30 million in Europe (European Blind Union)
Tagged PDFs also help with dyslexia, motor impairments, declining eyesight in old age, and reading on a phone.
The bigger picture
A rough extrapolation of the measured values (around 2,400 PDFs per ministry, applied to states, municipalities, universities and social insurance) gives around 560,000 PDFs in the Austrian public sector, of which around 420,000 are not yet accessible. On top come around 15,000 companies in Austria covered by the Accessibility Act (Barrierefreiheitsgesetz). These figures are orders of magnitude.
In October 2026 we extended the survey to 382 public institutions across Austria. Read the results here.
Method
- Sitemap crawl of all PDFs on the websites of five federal ministries, as of 7 August 2026
- Checked with veraPDF 1.28.0, PDF/UA-1 profile enforced
- The legal benchmark is WCAG 2.1 AA via the standard EN 301 549 (clause 10 for documents). PDF/UA-1 is the established test standard for it.
- veraPDF only checks the machine-checkable rules, so "conformant" is an upper bound.
Sources
- Klartext AI / doclarity survey, August 2026
- Austrian Web Accessibility Act (WZG), BGBl. I No. 59/2019: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=20010727
- veraPDF: https://verapdf.org
- WKO, accessible payment: https://www.wko.at/oe/handel/barrierefreies-bezahlen-zahlungsloesungen
- DBSV, facts and figures: https://www.dbsv.org/zahlen-fakten.html
- European Blind Union, facts and figures: https://www.euroblind.org/about-blindness-and-partial-sight/facts-and-figures
- ETSI EN 301 549: https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/301500_301599/301549/03.02.01_60/en_301549v030201p.pdf