PDFAccess PDF to accessible web content
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About PDFAccess

PDFAccess is a free, browser-based tool that converts PDF files to accessible HTML — without sending data to any server.

What is PDFAccess?

PDFAccess converts PDF files to clean, accessible HTML directly in your browser. The output meets the WCAG 2.1 AAA standard and is ready to publish on a website or share as structured text.

It supports both digital PDF files and scanned documents. Scanned pages are automatically processed using OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) with support for Danish and English text. All errors and accessibility warnings are clearly listed so you can fix them before publishing.

No data leaves your browser. PDFAccess requires no login, registration, or payment — it is completely free to use.

Who is it for?

PDFAccess is built for anyone who regularly works with PDF documents and needs to make them accessible on the web. This includes:

  • Public institutions and government bodies that must comply with web accessibility legislation
  • Libraries and archives making older documents searchable and readable for everyone
  • Web consultants and editors converting client material for web use
  • Educators and students working with accessible digital content
  • Anyone who needs to quickly extract text and structure from a PDF

Why PDFAccess was built

The idea came from my day-to-day work as a web consultant. Again and again I needed a simple, free tool to pull text and structure out of a PDF — without sending the content to an external server, and without requiring a login or payment.

Existing solutions were either cloud-based (unsuitable for confidential documents), too complex for quick tasks, or too expensive for projects with limited budgets. So I built PDFAccess myself — as a free, open browser tool anyone can use.

Throughout development the focus has been on privacy, accessibility, and simplicity. No data leaves your machine, and the output is validated against WCAG 2.1 AAA from the start.

Technologies

PDFAccess is built with modern, open web technologies that all run directly in the browser:

  • PDF.js (Mozilla) — reads and parses the PDF structure, including text, images, and layout
  • Tesseract.js — OCR engine for scanned pages, running in a separate Web Worker so the browser stays responsive
  • WebAssembly — enables high-performance processing directly in the browser without server calls
  • Astro + React — frontend framework providing fast static loading with interactive islands

All processing happens locally on your machine. No files are uploaded, and no data about you or your documents is stored.

Contact and feedback

Have a question, suggestion, or bug report? I'd love to hear from you. Visit the contact page for email and other ways to get in touch.