The site
The tools and pages are built to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 at level AA. That is the target and the standard the work is checked against, not a certificate: no outside body has audited the site, and nothing here claims one did.
What that means in practice, and what has been checked:
- Everything works from a keyboard. Redaction bars can be added, selected, moved, resized and removed without a mouse: Tab reaches each bar, the arrow keys move it, Shift with the arrows resizes it, and Delete removes it.
- Nothing requires dragging. Drawing a bar is a drag, so every drag has a single-click alternative: add a bar, cover the whole page, nudge and resize from buttons, or find text and mark every match at once.
- Color contrast is measured, not eyeballed. Every text and control color pair, in the light and dark themes, is checked against the WCAG formula each time the site is built, and the build fails if any falls short.
- Status is never shown by color alone. Every result in the verification report carries a symbol and a word.
- On touch screens, buttons, form controls and navigation links are at least 44 pixels tall, and a link inside a sentence is the size of the text around it. A redaction bar is as big as what it covers, so a thin one is easier to pick from the Marks list than on the page. Focus is always visible, and removing a bar from the keyboard moves focus to the next one rather than losing it.
- Progress and results are announced to screen readers as they happen, and the report moves focus to its result.
- Motion is kept to responses to what you do, and switched off entirely if your system asks for reduced motion.
- Pages reflow at 320 pixels wide and at 200% zoom without sideways scrolling.
Known gaps
Drawing a precise bar by hand is still easiest with a mouse or a finger. The keyboard and button routes work, but they move a bar in fixed steps, so placing one exactly over a line of small type takes a few presses. Find is the better route for text: it places the bars for you.
The page preview inside the editor is a picture of the page. A screen reader can tell you which page you are on and what bars are on it, but not read the page’s text aloud from the preview. Open the original PDF in your usual reader alongside if you need to hear it.
The PDF you export
This is the part that matters most, and it is a trade-off rather than a bug. To make redacted text unrecoverable, every page you mark is rebuilt as an image. An image has no text in it, so on those pages a screen reader has nothing to read, search finds nothing, and text cannot be selected or copied. That applies to the whole page, not only the area you covered.
Pages you do not mark keep their text exactly as it was, and stay as accessible as they were in the original. So the practical advice is to mark only the pages that need it. The export screen lists which pages will become images before anything is written, and the report afterwards shows which pages kept their text.
If the redacted document also needs to be accessible, keep the original, unredacted file for anyone entitled to see it, and send the redacted copy only where the removal is necessary. Tools that remove individual characters while keeping the rest of a page as text do exist, mostly in paid desktop software; they avoid this cost at the price of a much harder job getting every copy of the text out.
Tell us what does not work
If something on this site is hard or impossible to use with the way you browse, email hello@redactpdffree.com. Say which page, what you were trying to do, and what you use to browse, such as a screen reader, magnification or voice control. You will get a reply, and the fix will be described on this page when it ships.