Ask anyone who has audited a city website: the pages are rarely the biggest problem. The PDFs are. Agendas scanned on a copier, rate schedules exported without tags, fillable forms with unlabeled fields — each one is a barrier for someone using a screen reader, and under the ADA Title II web rule many of them must meet WCAG 2.1 AA.
Start with triage, not remediation
Remediating every PDF by hand is slow and expensive. Sort them first:
| Group | What to do |
|---|---|
| Nobody uses it | Remove it, or move it to a clearly marked archive |
| Short and changes often (rates, hours, notices) | Turn it into a web page |
| Long, official or must stay a PDF (budgets, ordinances, reports) | Remediate it |
| Scanned image with no text | Re-create it from the source file if you can; otherwise OCR and remediate |
Web pages beat PDFs for most short content: they reflow on phones, are easier to search and are easier to keep accessible.
What an accessible PDF needs
The Section508.gov guidance on PDFs and the W3C’s PDF techniques for WCAG cover the details. The essentials:
- Tags that describe the structure: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables
- A logical reading order that matches the visual order
- Alternative text for meaningful images, and decorative images marked as artifacts
- A document title and the document language set in the properties
- Table headers marked so screen readers can announce them
- Labeled form fields with a sensible tab order
- Real text, not a picture of text
Fix at the source
The best accessible PDF is exported from an accessible source document. In Word, use the built-in heading styles, add alt text to images, use real tables with a header row, and run the Accessibility Checker before saving as PDF. Fixing a source file once is faster than fixing every PDF made from it.
Check your work
Use more than one check: Adobe Acrobat Pro’s accessibility checker and the free PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC) catch different things. Then open the file with a screen reader and listen to the first page — you’ll hear reading-order problems quickly.
Stop new problems
Remediation is wasted if next month’s uploads break the rules again. Check every upload before it goes live. In Sentra CMS, PDFs are checked on upload; failing files stay in draft, and staff can send them to SentraCheck for remediation or convert them to a web page in one click. Residents who follow an old link to a held document see a page offering an accessible copy on request.