Documenta11y vs. Ockem Proof: an honest comparison
Both get your PDFs to WCAG 2.1 AA. The differences are who does the work, how you’re charged, how long it takes — and what you’re holding when it’s done.
The short version
Documenta11y (a division of Apex CoVantage) is a remediation service: you upload through their portal, their experts — using automated tools plus expert review — assess and quote, you pay, their team remediates. It now also sells ADAPT AI, an AI-assisted remediation tool with self-serve, guided and managed options. Ockem Proof is an automated remediation platform: the machine does the mechanical work and re-verifies every fix, you make the judgment calls — or opt into Assured and our experts make them — and every document leaves with a criterion-by-criterion certificate.
Side by side
Compared as of . Vendors change their offers; our sources are listed at the end of this page.
| Documenta11y | Ockem Proof | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | “Pricing starts at $4 per page” — the actual price is quoted after their experts review each document; volume pricing on request. | A published price per document. You see the total before you commit. |
| Time to a price | Upload → expert assessment → personalized quote. | Published prices, so you can price your library yourself; a free assessment counts it for you, usually within 3 business days. |
| Turnaround | Standard delivery of 3 to 5 business days, or 1–2 business days expedited; “a simple PDF may take a few hours,” complex ones several days. | Most documents are usually done within the hour, larger ones typically the same day; certification follows your team’s decisions, at your own pace. |
| Who does the work | Their team of 100+ accessibility experts. | The machine, plus your judgment calls — or Assured, where Ockem’s experts finish the human lanes, quoted per document. |
| Deliverable | A remediated PDF, “expert verified,” with a compliance report. Documenta11y says its services “guarantee 100% compliance.” | A remediated PDF plus a certificate: per-criterion outcomes, the attester of record, and every saved version kept by default. |
| Data handling | Remediation is done by their staff; files are kept 60 days on their portal. ADAPT AI can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise. | Inference runs on hardware Ockem operates, with self-hosted open models; no customer document content goes to a third-party model. |
| Ongoing compliance | Per project, or volume quotes for ongoing work. | Optional scheduled checks of your sources for new or changed PDFs; a managed-compliance service is planned, with a waitlist open. |
Choose Documenta11y if…
- You want zero involvement of any kind — including judgment calls — and the certificate isn’t worth a premium to you.
- You have heavily scanned, multilingual, EPUB or InDesign work that goes beyond PDF remediation.
- You’re already a Documenta11y or Apex CoVantage customer with agreed rates.
Choose Ockem Proof if…
- You need to budget the whole corpus today — published per-document pricing, no quote cycle.
- Deadline pressure means days per document doesn’t scale across hundreds of files.
- You need to prove compliance later: a certificate and attestation trail, not just a returned file.
- Your documents can’t go to a third-party AI model — healthcare, government, legal.
Fair questions
Is Documenta11y cheaper?
Sometimes, for very short simple documents — if they quote at their advertised floor. At $4 per page, a 20-page document is $80 or more, and complex documents quote higher after expert review. Ockem Proof publishes its per-document price before you upload. For a typical library, the difference isn’t just the rate — it’s that you can compute your total cost today.
Doesn’t full service mean less work for me?
Less than you’d think. With a service vendor you still wait for a quote, answer their questions about your content, and check their output — and when it’s done, you’re the only name attached to the compliance claim. Proof’s machine does the remediation and re-verification; what’s left for you is a short queue of judgment calls — the decisions that require knowing your own content — each recorded in the attestation trail behind your certificate. If you’d rather not touch even that, Assured completes the human lanes for you, quoted per document.
Can Proof handle everything their experts handle?
Not everything, and we’d rather say so here: exotic source formats and re-authoring-grade problems can exceed what automation plus a decision queue should decide. Proof flags those documents as “needs re-authoring” instead of pretending, and the Assured lane exists for work that genuinely needs expert hands — with the same certificate at the end.
Comparison written by Ockem. Competitor details are taken from documenta11y.com public pages (home, FAQ, PDF remediation, InDesign and ADAPT AI) as of October 2026 and 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.