DocVerify Pro › “Document not legible”
Rejected for “document not legible”
It is the most frustrating rejection to receive, because the document in your hand is perfectly readable. The problem is not your document — it is what survived the trip from paper to screen.
What it means. A human opened your file, could not read a field they needed, and stopped. It is a statement about the image, not about your paperwork, and it costs weeks.
The four causes, in the order they happen
1. Shadow across the page
The most common by far. You leaned over the page and blocked the light. The text is still there, just dark, and rebuilding the tone across the page normally recovers it completely.
2. Glare over a data field
Flash or a ceiling light reflecting off the paper puts a white patch exactly where the number is. Unlike a shadow, a blown-out area holds no detail at all — it cannot be recovered and the page has to be rephotographed without flash.
3. Photographed at an angle
Shooting from the side makes the far edge of the page smaller and blurrier than the near edge. On a form with fine print, half the page ends up below readable resolution even though the photo looks fine.
4. Over-compressed
Someone squeezed the file to fit a size cap by dropping the JPEG quality. That eats fine detail first, which is precisely the punctuation and the digits. A 3 becomes an 8 and a decimal point disappears.
Before you resubmit
- Open the file at 100% and read the smallest print on it. If you cannot, neither can the reviewer.
- Check every field the form actually asks about — a date, a number, a signature, a seal.
- Confirm the whole page is in the frame, including the edges. Cropped corners get rejected too.
- Check it is still within the size cap after correcting it.
Never retype, redraw or "clean up" what a field says. Correcting the lighting on a photograph is image processing. Changing what the document states is falsification, with consequences far worse than a rejection. A tool should only ever change the file — never the content.
Make the page readable before you resubmit
Runs in your browser. Your document is never uploaded. First one is free.
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