3. PDF estate review

  • The crawl identified 1,233 PDFs and 13,377 pages—slightly more than 10 pages per document on average.
  • After applying the pre-23 September 2018 date filter, the initial working estate is approximately 13,094 pages, subject to service relevance and further archiving decisions.
  • The 2026 spike reflects a change in publishing practice: supporting papers that were previously combined are now uploaded as individual documents.
  • The platform can group quick wins, current documents, high-use material and potential archive candidates so effort can be prioritised.

4. Live sample assessment

During the meeting, a recent Property and Services draft minutes PDF was selected from the website. It had already been through the council's checking process. Recite Me's assessment and remediation identified the following items:

FindingWhy it matters
BookmarksThe original had no bookmarks, making navigation through longer documents less efficient for assistive-technology users.
Language metadataThe document language was missing and was set during remediation so assistive technology can interpret content correctly.
Reading/tab orderStructural order issues can affect the sequence in which content is read or navigated.
WCAG coverageThe result showed that a Word-plus-Adobe process can still leave issues outside the checks staff are currently seeing.

ASSESSMENT LIMIT The demonstration was a targeted automated assessment and remediation of selected PDFs, not a full manual audit of every document or webpage.

t: +44 (0) 191 432 8092 e: info@reciteme.com w: www.reciteme.com UK Office: Recite Me Limited, 0.0.4 Baltimore House, Baltic Business Quarter, Gateshead NE8 3DF Recite Me\circledR is a registered trademark of Recite Me Ltd.

Recite Me circledR is a registered trademark of Recite Me Ltd