Many organizations have already started preparing for upcoming ADA Title II deadlines. The challenge they're still trying to solve is what to do about years of PDF documents already sitting in their archives.
It's a Tuesday afternoon. You're in a planning meeting about your organization's ADA Title II readiness. Someone's gone through the website. Someone else has covered public meetings: The livestream setup, captions and transcripts. There's a checklist on the table. Progress is being made.
Then someone asks: "What about all the PDFs?"
The room goes quiet.
Everyone knows what that question actually means. It means thousands of agenda packets. Years of supporting documents. Policy files. Budget reports. Public records going back a decade or more. It means a document archive that keeps growing with every meeting cycle.
That's often the moment accessibility stops feeling like a project and starts feeling like a much bigger challenge.
The DOJ's final rule on digital accessibility under Title II of the ADA set specific deadlines for state and local government organizations: April 26, 2027 for organizations serving populations of fewer than 50,000 and special districts. For most organizations in public sector governance, those dates have been on your radar for a while.
What's less clear is how to address the document side of the challenge.
Your website can be audited and updated. New content can be created to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards from the start. But your document archive is different. Every board meeting, every public hearing, every budget cycle adds more PDFs. The archive doesn't stop growing. And it didn't start yesterday.
Addressing those documents one by one isn't a realistic plan. And yet, those documents are public records. They're part of the accessibility picture. Under Title II, they matter.
There are a few reasons why your document archive tends to be the place where accessibility planning stalls.
The first is volume. A single meeting cycle might generate dozens of supporting documents. Multiply that across years of agenda publishing and the scale becomes difficult to manage manually, even with a dedicated team.
The second is format. PDFs are notoriously challenging from an accessibility standpoint. Unlike a web page, a PDF doesn't automatically adapt to screen readers or assistive technologies. Making a PDF accessible typically requires remediation work on each individual file, including tagging, structure, alt text and reading order, and that work doesn't carry forward automatically to new documents.
The third is continuity. Even if you start working through your archive, new documents are published with every meeting cycle. The gap keeps growing unless there's a systematic way to address both historical and future content at the same time.
The organizations making the most progress aren't trying to remediate every file individually. They're finding ways to address accessibility at scale, automatically generating accessible alternatives for current and future documents without disrupting how their teams already work.
That's what the DocAccess Integration with Diligent Community is designed to do. Rather than requiring document-by-document remediation, it automatically generates accessible HTML alternatives for supporting PDFs published through Diligent Community, covering existing archives and every new document going forward.
But before you can build a plan, you need a clear picture of where you currently stand: which documents are on your site, where the biggest gaps are likely to be and what a realistic roadmap looks like for your organization.
You already understand that accessibility matters. You know the deadlines are real. The question isn't whether to act. It's how to make meaningful progress on the part of the challenge that's hardest to address.
For many K-12 districts and community colleges, that part is the document archive.
If you're in the middle of accessibility planning and haven't yet worked out what to do about your PDFs, you're not alone. And there are practical ways to get started.
Our guide and checklist helps you understand your current readiness, identify your biggest gaps and build a roadmap your leadership team can act on, whether you're just beginning or already well into your planning.
Title II‑ready meeting video, all in one place in Diligent Community
Discover how Livestream Manager for Diligent Community revolutionizes public meeting recordings by ensuring compliance with ADA Title II and WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. With a single, accessible platform that seamlessly links agendas, livestreams, and transcripts, teams can enhance transparency while simplifying the management of meeting content. Experience a streamlined, governed approach to public records that ensures accuracy and accessibility for all.
