My Superuser Features: axesPDF

The Competence Network for Information Technology to Promote the Integration of People with Disabilities (KI-I) focuses on research in both technical and social sciences, as well as services related to digital accessibility.

For example, KI-I supported the state of Upper Austria in publishing its Equal Opportunities Act in a way that is both technically accessible and easy to understand. Official notices were translated into plain language and made accessible. The motivation was clear: “It cannot be that a person with a disability receives an official notice and cannot read or understand it.”

Gerhard Nussbaum is Technical Director and Deputy Managing Director at KI-I. He is responsible for technology and technical accessibility. axesPDF plays a central role in his daily work: “axesPDF is invaluable and saves a tremendous amount of time — especially when dealing with untagged or poorly tagged PDFs without a source document.”

It quickly becomes clear: Gerhard Nussbaum is a strong advocate of axesPDF and relies on many of its features.

With the “Fix Placement” feature, he regularly saves two to three hours per document. With a single click, around 90% of placement attribute errors are resolved. The alternative would be fixing each issue manually in tools like Adobe Acrobat.

He describes the table editor as the “gold standard”, as it allows complex tables to be corrected within minutes.

Another highly valued feature is the ability to automatically link tables of contents. It ensures that entries lead directly to the correct sections in the document — without losing the zoom level. This is an important aspect of accessibility that is often implemented incorrectly.

When documents are created in Word with automatic language detection enabled, PDFs can end up with inconsistent language assignments. The “Remove language assignments” feature clears all detected languages, making it faster to manually assign only the relevant ones.

When converting from PowerPoint, PDFs often contain redundant original text layers. With “Remove original text”, these can be deleted in one click.

Gerhard Nussbaum’s absolute favorite feature is “Create destinations.”

According to him, linking footnotes precisely to their position in the document works better here than in any other tool. When reading a document, users can jump directly to a footnote and then return to the exact original position in the text.