← Use cases

Accessibility for accounting firms

Your exposure is not the website. It is the thousands of statements, returns, and reports you send clients every year, almost none of them tagged.

Client deliverables · Q4 close318 files · every page read
Not yet conformant
306
files with findings
of 318 read
4
root causes
template level
38
clients affected
3 public sector
1
fix clears 214
statement template
Financial statements
Tables not marked up, no document language
PDFFail214
Corporate tax returns
Untagged, reading order follows layout
PDFFail61
Engagement letters
Headings styled by hand, not with styles
DOCXAttention34
Working papers
Merged cells break row association
XLSXAttention9
Client onboarding pack
Tagged, language set, tables marked up
PDFPassclear

Why this is harder for a practice than a product team.

Complex financial tables are the hardest accessibility problem in documents, and they are what your practice produces all day.

Volume, not pages

A product team governs a handful of templates. A firm ships thousands of individual documents a year, each its own artifact.

Seasonal peaks

Output spikes hard at year end and through tax season. Whatever the process is, it has to survive the busiest six weeks.

Partner-owned work

Each partner owns their clients and their templates. There is rarely one person who can change a document standard firm-wide.

The obvious question

Doesn't Acrobat already check this?

Yes, and well. Acrobat's Full Check and PAC are thorough on a finished PDF, and Word's checker is good on a document you are still writing. limena aligns with those rule sets rather than inventing its own.

The gap is not detection on one file. It is everything that only becomes visible across three hundred of them.

A checker runs when someone clicks it

Nobody runs Full Check on 214 statements at quarter end. limena checks every file on a cadence, whether anyone remembered or not.

Word cannot see the export

Your source document can pass Word’s checker and still land as an untagged PDF, because the tags are lost at export. Only checking the finished file catches that.

One file cannot show you a pattern

Acrobat tells you this statement is untagged. It cannot tell you 214 are, and that they all came from one template.

A report is not a record

Full Check output lives on someone’s laptop. It does not route to the template owner, confirm the fix held, or attach to an RFP.

Keep using Acrobat on the file in front of you. limena tells you which template to change so the next three hundred come out right.

01 · One fix, not 214

Traced back to the template that made it.

Most findings in a firm are one problem repeated. limena groups identical barriers back to the export setting or template that produced them.

So the remediation is a template change, not a file-by-file retrofit of a thousand PDFs.

Grouped by source4 fixes · 306 files
Enable tagged export, mark header rows214 files
Statement template · practice ops owns it
Set document language on export275 files
Export preset, applies across templates
Use heading styles, not manual formatting34 files
Engagement letter template
Unmerge cells in the summary tab9 files
Working paper workbook

02 · In plain language

Written for the person who owns the template.

Not an error code. What a screen reader actually makes of the file, which clients it reaches, and the one setting that changes it.

Findings carry an owner, so a tagging issue goes to practice ops and a plain-language issue goes to the partner who writes the covering letter.

Fail

Statement tables have no structure

Error

The balance sheet is laid out visually but not marked up as a table. A screen reader reads it as one continuous stream of numbers, so a client cannot tell a revenue line from a footnote.

How to fix

Enable tagged export in the statement template and mark the header row. One change in the template, applied on next generation.

Business impact

Appears in 214 deliverables across 38 clients, including three public sector engagements whose contracts require conformance evidence.

DTDocument templates, practice opsOwner assigned · due before Q1 filingsOpen template

03 · Ready when they ask

The answer to the RFP question.

Pressure arrives from a client, not a regulator. Public sector and enterprise engagements increasingly require conformance evidence, and a firm that cannot produce it is off the shortlist before fees are discussed.

Conformance record · liveExport
  • WCAG 2.1 AA, Level A30 of 32
  • WCAG 2.1 AA, Level AA18 of 24
  • Documents evaluated in full318 of 318
  • Last generatedToday

Generated from current results, not a snapshot that went stale the week after it was signed.

You can answer the question in the RFP.

  • A conformance record you attach to a proposal, generated from live results rather than assembled the week the RFP lands.
  • Templates fixed at the source, so remediation is paid for once instead of per engagement.
  • A client portal your clients can actually use, including the ones using a screen reader.
  • Evidence the standard held through year end, not just on the day someone checked.

Bring us one statement template.

We will tell you what a screen reader makes of it, and how many of your deliverables carry the same issue.

Book a demoTest a document free