Adobe Acrobat Pro vs. Ockem Proof: the tool you already have
Most teams already own Acrobat Pro, and it’s where most PDF accessibility work starts. The question is whether a person working document by document in Acrobat can clear your backlog — and what you can show for it afterward.
The short version
Acrobat Pro is the PDF editor most organizations already license. Its accessibility tools tag a document automatically, run a Full Check against PDF/UA and WCAG 2.0, and give a trained person the Tags panel, the Reading Order tool and the alt-text dialog to fix what the check finds — one document at a time, typing every alt text and confirming the items Adobe marks for manual check. Ockem Proof does the fixing as well as the finding: it repairs the mechanical majority automatically, re-verifies every fix, drafts alt text in the document’s language for a person to approve, and gives every document a criterion-by-criterion certificate against WCAG 2.1 AA.
Side by side
Compared as of . Vendors change their offers; our sources are listed at the end of this page.
| Adobe Acrobat Pro | Ockem Proof | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | A per-user subscription to Acrobat Pro (or a plan that includes it); the accessibility tools come with it. Adobe publishes current prices on adobe.com. | Certified documents at a published price: one document (a PDF of up to 50 pages) is $59 on its own, and less in packs. |
| Tagging | Automatically tag PDF “adequately tags most standard layouts” but “cannot always correctly interpret complex page elements’ structure and reading order,” in Adobe’s words. An optional cloud-based auto-tagging feature adds more detailed tags. | Repairs the document’s tags and re-verifies every fix automatically against the same rule profile. |
| Checking | Full Check against PDF/UA and WCAG 2.0. Logical reading order is a “Needs Manual Check” item, Adobe advises checking tables manually, and its own walkthrough shows the reviewer setting color contrast to pass by hand. | Checks against WCAG 2.1 AA, including contrast measured on the rendered page; reading order and other judgment calls go to a person in a decision queue. |
| Alt text | Typed by a person in the Set Alternate Text dialog. | Drafted in the document’s own language for a person to approve. |
| Volume | Guided actions can run on several documents or a folder; the Make Accessible action prompts a person for each file’s title and alt text. Dynamic (XFA) forms and portfolios are excluded. | Runs across a folder or your whole library; the judgment calls collect in one queue. |
| Evidence | An Accessibility Report that “summarizes the findings of the accessibility check”; the person running the check can mark items as passed. | A certificate per document: per-criterion outcomes, what was checked by machine and what was attested, the attester of record, and a public page to verify it. |
| Skill and time | Adobe calls cell-level table tagging “a labor-intensive procedure” and recommends fixing the source file in its authoring application whenever possible. | People make only the judgment calls — the decisions that need someone who knows the content. |
| Where processing happens | Cloud-based auto-tagging is optional; Adobe says it “doesn’t save your PDF on the cloud.” | Inference runs on hardware Ockem operates, with self-hosted open models; no customer document content goes to a third-party model. |
Choose Adobe Acrobat Pro if…
- You already license Acrobat Pro, you have a handful of documents, and someone on staff knows the Tags panel and the Reading Order tool.
- You control the source files. Adobe recommends adding accessibility in the authoring application, and Acrobat with Word or InDesign is the right pairing for documents you create from now on.
- You need to edit the PDF itself — its text, pages or forms — not only make it accessible.
Choose Ockem Proof if…
- Your backlog is hundreds or thousands of PDFs, not a handful.
- You need evidence someone else can check: a certificate per document, verifiable by anyone, rather than a report from the person who fixed the file.
- You don’t have staff trained in tag trees and reading order, or they have other work to do.
- You want contrast and the rest of WCAG 2.1 AA checked on the page, not left to a manual pass.
Fair questions
We already pay for Acrobat. Why pay for Proof too?
Keep Acrobat — Proof isn’t a PDF editor, and you’ll still want one. What you pay for with Proof is the remediation work and the evidence: the machine does the tagging, repair and re-checking that would otherwise be a trained person’s time in the Tags panel, and every document leaves with a certificate. For a few documents a year, Acrobat and a trained person may be all you need. For a backlog, the cost that matters is staff time, not licenses.
Doesn’t Acrobat’s Full Check tell me the file is compliant?
It tells you which of its rules pass. Adobe marks logical reading order “Needs Manual Check,” advises checking tables manually, and lets the person running the check mark items as passed — so the report records what the software could test and what the operator decided. Proof’s certificate makes that split explicit for every document: which criteria the machine checked, which a person decided, and who attested the result.
Can Acrobat’s auto-tagging do the job for us?
For simple layouts, often. Adobe says Automatically tag PDF can’t always interpret complex structure and reading order, and the documentation for its Auto-Tag API says the output “is not guaranteed to comply with accessibility standards such as WCAG and PDF/UA.” Auto-tagging is the start of the work; finding and fixing what it got wrong is the rest. Proof does that part too, and re-verifies each fix.
Comparison written by Ockem. Acrobat details are taken from Adobe’s own documentation as of October 2026: the Acrobat User Guide on helpx.adobe.com (creating accessible PDFs; creating and verifying PDF accessibility; editing tags; the Reading Order tool; guided actions; cloud-based auto-tagging), Adobe’s Make Accessible walkthrough on Experience League, and the PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API documentation on developer.adobe.com. They may change. If we’ve got something wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it.
See the difference on one of your own PDFs.
Free, no account. You get the remediated file and a verification record; certify it for $59 when you’re ready.