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UC Berkeley thesis accessibility requirement: what it checks and how to pass

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

In short: In force since April 2026. Staff review with Acrobat Pro's Accessibility Checker.

The rule, in the school's words

As of April 2026, all electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA web accessibility requirements before submission to comply with nondiscrimination provisions outlined in Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Before uploading your manuscript, please use the resources above to ensure your dissertation passes the Accessibility Checker in Acrobat Pro.

What it checks

• PDF tags for headings, lists, links, tables, paragraphs and other elements.
• Table headers for columns and rows.
• Tags and headings in a logical reading order.
• Alt text for all images, figures and other visual elements.
• Enough colour contrast, and no information carried by colour alone.
• File properties: author, title and language.
• Graduate Division staff look for these with the Accessibility Checker in Acrobat Pro.

Deadlines we know

We haven't recorded Berkeley's filing dates. The Graduate Division's filing guide has them.

Dates change; confirm them with your graduate school.

How to pass it for free

Help UC Berkeley offers

• Active students can get Adobe and Microsoft software through Software @ Berkeley.
• The Graduate Division links its Manuscript Accessibility Guide, a “Guidance for Accessible Dissertations in LaTeX” document, and the Digital Accessibility Program's PDF guides.

Worth knowing

On LaTeX, the guide's FAQ says the Graduate Division is “unable to assist with the particulars in specific LaTeX typesetting formatting.”

This rule comes from the doctoral dissertation filing guide. Master's theses have their own filing page on the Graduate Division site.

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 UC Berkeley'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 UC Berkeley thesis

Sources

Checked 2026-10-29:

• Dissertation filing guide: Accessibility (UC Berkeley Graduate Division)