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University of Houston thesis accessibility requirement: what it checks and how to pass

Not affiliated with or endorsed by University of Houston. This guide quotes the school's public pages; if anything here differs from them, the school's pages win.

In short: In force now. You submit Acrobat's Accessibility Checker report (10 checks) with your thesis.

The rule, in the school's words

To ensure full accessibility compliance, students must submit the Adobe Acrobat Pro Accessibility Checker report (10 checks required) along with the thesis/dissertation to the college ETD coordinator and as a supplemental document when the final version is uploaded to Vireo.

Adobe Acrobat Pro’s full accessibility checker includes 32 options, but for Spring 2026, only 10 checks are required.

What it checks

The 10 required Acrobat checks, as the guide lists them:

• Accessibility permission flag is set
• Document is not image-only PDF
• Document is tagged PDF
• Text language is specified
• Document title is showing in title bar
• All page content is tagged
• All form fields have description
• Tables must have headers
• Tables must have a summary
• Figures require alternate text

The guide says title and language can usually be fixed in Acrobat, but figure alt text and tables need to be fixed in the original Word document.

Deadlines we know

• College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Fall 2026: submit to the dean’s office by Tuesday, December 1, and upload to the library (Vireo) by Wednesday, December 16. (source, checked 2026-10-29)

Those dates are one college's. The Graduate School's page says all phases of submission and approval must be finished by the faculty grading deadline at the end of the term. Check your own college's ETD coordinator.

Dates change; confirm them with your graduate school.

How to pass it for free

Help University of Houston offers

• Students can request an Acrobat Pro license from UH IT (steps in the guide), or use Acrobat Pro on three computers in the Writing Center (CBB 226) or on the Graduate School office computer.
• The Graduate School page links a workshop recording, the UH Word template and a Word accessibility checklist.

Do it yourself

In Word

1. Start from your school's Word template if it has one.
2. Make every heading with Word's built-in styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3), not with bold or bigger text. Use Word's own list buttons and Insert, Table of Contents.
3. Make tables with Insert, Table. Give each a header row: select the first row, then Table Properties, Row, “Repeat as header row at the top of each page”. Don't use tabs or spaces to line things up, and don't paste tables as pictures.
4. Add alt text to every figure: right-click it, then View Alt Text (or Edit Alt Text). Describe what the figure shows and why it matters. Mark purely decorative images as decorative.
5. Set the document title (File, Info, Properties, Title) and the language (Review, Language).
6. Run Review, Check Accessibility and fix what it lists.
7. Save as PDF, not Print to PDF, because printing drops the tags. On Windows: File, Save As, PDF, Options, and keep “Document structure tags for accessibility” ticked. On a Mac: File, Save As, PDF, and choose “Best for electronic distribution and accessibility”.

In LaTeX

1. Use a recent TeX Live (2025 or later; we used 2026) and compile with LuaLaTeX.
2. Put this before \documentclass. It is what we used on the LaTeX example below:

   \DocumentMetadata{
     lang=en-US,
     pdfversion=1.7,
     pdfstandard=ua-1,
     tagging=on,
     testphase={phase-III,math,title,table,firstaid}
   }

3. Give the PDF a title: \hypersetup{pdftitle={Your title}, pdfdisplaydoctitle=true}.
4. Add alt text to each figure: \includegraphics[alt={What the figure shows}]{file}.
5. Mark table header rows, for example \tagpdfsetup{table/header-rows={1}} before a table whose first row is its header.
6. Check that your packages work with tagging on the LaTeX Project's tagging status page. Some (TikZ wrappers, custom floats) need workarounds.

Check the result

• Adobe Acrobat Pro: Accessibility, Accessibility Check. Many schools check with this, and campus labs often have it.
• PAC (PDF Accessibility Checker): free, Windows only. NDSU treats it as authoritative.
• veraPDF: free and open source on every platform. It checks PDF/UA.
• Word's Check Accessibility only checks the .docx. Always check the final PDF too.

Or we fix it for you

If you'd rather not do it yourself, we fix the structure of your thesis without changing a word you wrote, and send a validator report with every order.

If University of Houston's checker rejects your thesis for an item we fixed, we refund you in full. Our checks are veraPDF (PDF/UA) plus our own implementation of Acrobat's published rules, not Acrobat itself. We report what checkers say; that isn't legal advice. Guarantee details.

Some schools have rules on third-party help or AI use. Check with your advisor or graduate school first.

Checkout isn't open yet, so you pay nothing now. The first 3 requests get the fix free, in exchange for honest feedback. We won't ask for a testimonial.

Request a fix for a University of Houston thesis

Sources

Checked 2026-10-29:

• Thesis/Dissertation Information (UH Graduate School)
• PDF Accessible Check in Adobe Acrobat Pro (UH Graduate School guide, version 1, 2/25/26)
• Thesis and Dissertation (UH College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences)