Microsoft announces forthcoming major product support for PDF/UA

Microsoft took to its Power BI blog today to announce forthcoming support for PDF/UA, the ISO standard for accessible PDF, in its core SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services product.

The office desktop and server company responsible for Office 365, SharePoint and a wide variety of leading enterprise-class document creation, distribution and handling tools is investing in PDF technology because PDF remains indispensable in a wide variety of business workflows requiring stable, self-contained documents independent of server applications.

Accessibility requirements continue to grow, not only in the public sector, but also for many more large-scale businesses, including customers of Microsoft’s broadly-adopted SQL server products. PDF/UA is a critical element in ensuring PDF files meet the highest standards for accessibility.

Some wonder how a reporting engine might be used when accessibility requires human validation to ensure accessible results. With a reporting engine designed to accommodate accessibility needs in PDF output, users can perform all necessary validation in the template development phase. Once output from templates has been rigorously tested for accessibility the server can generate large volumes of fully accessible output documents in a completely automated fashion.

Microsoft’s SQL server application is not the first enterprise-class report generator to support PDF/UA, but it is one of the most visible.