Published documents
ADA compliance for PDFs and files.
Many services end in a document. Applications, intake forms, permits, agendas, notices, and policies: this is where people actually get something done. Each was posted by someone who needed it, and many stay published long after.
PDF is the most common format, and many PDFs are fillable forms. Others are Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets. Each format can carry barriers of its own.
For state and local government, the ADA rule covers documents posted on websites and in apps, with a short list of exceptions.
For a private organization, no regulation sets a web standard. A form someone cannot finish still shuts them out, as a page can, and claims under the ADA treat shutting someone out because of an impairment as discrimination.
Passing a check and finishing a form are different tests.
Some barriers in a PDF are easy to find. A page scanned in as a picture holds no actual text, so software that reads a page aloud has nothing to read. A long document with no headings or bookmarks gives the reader no way to move through it. An automated check flags both.
Other barriers pass the check and still stop someone from finishing. They show up on forms frequently. For someone using a screen reader, the software that reads a page aloud, the fields may be read out of order. A signature box may be out of reach without a mouse. A field marked as required may never be announced as one.
Any one of these can stop the person the form was written for.
Eighteen months
A university agreed, in a decree the court entered, to bring the web content it had published since January 2012 to WCAG 2.0 Level AA within eighteen months. Documents posted on its sites were covered, and each exception had to be requested and meet strict conditions. Systems run by others were covered too, for "campus housing, campus dining, registering for classes, paying bills, obtaining transcripts."
The documents were held to the same standard as the pages.
The forms people need to finish come first.
Document libraries build up over decades, often to thousands of files, and not every file matters equally.
A form someone has to finish to get a service ranks ahead of a report kept for reference. Ranked by what each one stops someone from doing, the work has a size and an order before anyone is asked to fund it.
Every finding is dated. When a document's issues are resolved, it leaves the list, and the record keeps the date.
$100,000
Tax filers who are blind brought a claim over a tax-preparation company's website and online filing product, and the Department of Justice joined it. The consent decree required both to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA by January 2015, and the company's mobile apps by January 2016. It paid a $55,000 civil penalty and $22,500 to each of two people who brought the claim, and an independent consultant reviewed the work every year.
The barrier was in the form people had to finish.
The rule for state and local government lists exceptions for some documents, each with conditions. Whether one of your documents qualifies is your counsel's call.
Four questions about your documents.
- Which of your documents do people need to apply, sign up, or pay?
- Which departments or teams publish them?
- Were they checked by a person, or only by an automated tool?
- When did someone outside your team last check your most important documents?
Where the answer is "not sure," that is where the work starts.
Everything Esther delivers as a document meets PDF/UA, the international standard for accessible PDFs.
Where do your documents stand?
Thirty minutes. Your situation, and where to begin.