About PacketReady
A free, private PDF accessibility checker for the people who publish public-meeting documents, and a remediation service for those who would rather have the fixing done for them.
Why it exists
Clerks and administrative staff post agendas, minutes and board packets every week, often late in the day before a meeting. Under the Justice Department's ADA Title II web rule, documents that state and local governments post after their compliance date need to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and the current dates are April 26, 2027 for larger public entities and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts (Federal Register).
Good checkers already exist. PAC is a free Windows app, axesCheck works in the browser after you upload a file, veraPDF is an open-source validator, and Adobe Acrobat Pro includes a checker in a paid product. We wanted something a clerk could open on any computer, drop a whole packet folder onto without uploading anything, and read without a background in PDF internals. That is PacketReady.
Who builds it
PacketReady is built by Mahir Patel, an electrical-engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with his co-founder Sukh. We are a two-person team, and we are starting with Illinois public bodies.
How the checker works
When you add PDFs, the page loads two open-source libraries from this site: PDF.js (version 6.3.289, Apache License 2.0, from Mozilla) to read text, metadata and the tag tree, and pdf-lib (version 1.17.1, MIT License) to read low-level structure such as tab order and page resources. Both run inside your browser tab. The files are never sent to our servers or anyone else's.
The sixteen checks are based on WCAG 2.1 success criteria, the W3C's PDF techniques, and the machine-checkable failure conditions in the PDF Association's Matterhorn Protocol. Every result names the rule it is based on. We test the checks against a library of sample PDFs made with LibreOffice, reportlab and pikepdf: tagged and untagged exports, scans, encrypted files, forms, and files with specific defects.
What we promise, and what we do not
- Private by design. Your documents stay on your device. Our analytics are cookieless and never include file names or contents; the privacy page lists exactly what is collected.
- Honest results. "Looks good (automated checks)" means the software found no problems. It is not a certification that a document meets WCAG, PDF/UA or the ADA, because some requirements can only be judged by a person.
- Plain English. Each problem comes with steps for Word, Google Docs, Acrobat and InDesign.
- Not legal advice. We are not lawyers. Our guides summarize public sources and link to them so you can read the originals.
Known limitations
- The checker does not measure color contrast, judge reading order, or read the words in alternate text for meaning. The manual checklist shown with every result covers those.
- It reads the tags that exist; it cannot tell whether a paragraph that looks like a heading should have been tagged as one.
- Files that need a password to open cannot be checked. Damaged files may be reported as unreadable.
- Encrypted files are read through PDF.js only, so the tab-order check is skipped for them.
- Very large packets are limited by your computer's memory; files over 300 MB are skipped.
- We test in Chromium-based browsers. The libraries support current Firefox and Safari, but we have not tested every browser.
Accessibility of this website
We aim for this site to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Every page is tested with the axe-core accessibility engine in light and dark mode, at phone and desktop sizes, and the checker can be used entirely with a keyboard: the file buttons are an alternative to drag and drop, the start and end of each check are announced to screen readers, and focus moves to the results when a check finishes. If something on this site is hard to use with your setup, please tell us on the contact page.
How PacketReady is paid for
The checker is free. We earn money from remediation: for public bodies, a pilot at $950 for 60 days and then $300 a month, in which we return accessible, tagged PDFs of each packet; for other organizations, per-document quotes. You never need the service to use the checker.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports and results that look wrong are welcome on the contact page. If you report a result, describe what you saw rather than sending the document, unless it is already public.