What is layout analysis in accessibility?

Layout analysis is the step that turns an image of a page into an addressable document. It identifies which text is a heading rather than merely large, where a table's boundaries and header cells are, how multiple columns should be sequenced, and what belongs in a caption rather than in the body. Without it, remediation is impossible: reading order cannot be corrected in content that has no declared order, and a table cannot be given header associations if nothing knows it is a table. This is why accessibility work on scanned estates stalls — the defects are structural and the structure does not exist. Centralpoint performs this conversion during ingestion, producing addressable elements that serve remediation, metadata enrichment and full-text indexing from a single pass rather than requiring the estate to be processed three times for three purposes.