Best practices for creating accessibility compliant PDFs?

Hi all,

I have been using FM for five years to develop textbooks. Every six months or so, I look into this issue and come up empty, even though I have submitted bug reports and talked to user support.

Long story short, I cannot get FM to reliably create accessibility-compliant PDFs. The approaches described under “Tagged PDF output” and the accessibility items in the FM documentation do not consistently produce PDFs that meet post-2020 standards in many countries. As a result, the files are rejected by a growing number of publishers and distributors because they cannot pass basic automated tests.

This experience seems to match several other posts over the past few years, and I have not seen any recent posts or breakthroughs. I am using the most recent (Sept 2026) version, unstructured.

I am always happy to experiment with specifics, but my question is: can anyone point to a guide or best practices document? The most recent posts I can find point to using Acrobat to remediate the FM-generated PDFs, but that doesn’t scale very well.

Thanks,

Steve