Most agencies cannot answer the first question: how many documents are we actually on the hook for?

One real city, measured end to end

The only library we have measured completely: roughly 2,700 documents, more than 60,000 sheets, every one opened. Figures are rounded and the agency is not named until it chooses to be — nothing here is rounded in a direction that flatters us.

• 8%

  of sheets are pictures of text, not text

• 1 in 5

  documents holds at least one such sheet

• ~50%

  of budget documents contain a scanned page

• 0 of 2,691

  documents passed an automated check outright

Those scanned sheets are almost always the signed ones — resolutions, executed agreements — and a screen reader cannot read them at all. Text recognition helps, but it is not infallible: on this corpus it once misread a city's own motto while reporting full confidence. That is why a person checks recognised text before we call anything done. Read the full findings, with the method and every caveat beside it.

Read the specific answer

• When is the ADA Title II deadline for your agency? — both dates, and why a lot of published advice still has the old ones.
• Does the rule cover your old PDFs? — the two exceptions, and why the deadline being in the future means age currently discriminates nothing.
• Can an automated checker prove a PDF is accessible? — no, and on one real 2,691-document library, zero passed automatically.
• What does PDF accessibility remediation cost? — $2,000 for the Inventory, published because almost nobody else in this field publishes a price.
• How do I get a free ADA accessibility scan for my agency? — three fields, a confirmation from your own inbox, no login required.
• What one city's document library actually looks like — a full count of every document and every sheet a mid-sized American city has published.

The deadline, stated plainly

• 26 Apr 2027

  public entities of 50,000 people or more

• 26 Apr 2028

  smaller entities and special districts

The technical standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Those are the extended dates — DOJ pushed both back by a year, effective 20 April 2026. If a vendor quotes you the old dates, they have not read the rule since it changed. Which date applies to your agency, and where both come from.

The rule does not cover everything you have ever published — it excepts archived material and preexisting documents no longer used to reach a service. Which of your documents those exceptions remove is the single biggest factor in what this costs you. The two exceptions in full, and why being old does not help you.

We are not attorneys and this is not legal advice. We produce evidence and a recommendation you can hand to your counsel, who decides.

Every statement we make sits in one of three buckets

Any claim about any document is labelled as exactly one of these, and never blurred between them.

Measured

An instrument produced this — a named tool, at a named version, on a named date. Reproducible by you or by anyone else. It settles what is in the file, and nothing about whether that matters to someone trying to read it.

Judged

A person examined it, against a stated question, on a stated sample. We say how many, not just that we looked. No tool decides whether a failure is a real barrier or only bookkeeping.

Not assessed

Nobody looked, or no method could settle it. Stated as plainly as the other two.

Four questions that make your answer much better

When we inventory a library from outside, roughly three quarters of it comes back undetermined — not because the analysis is weak, but because whether a document is still used to reach a service is a fact about your organisation, not the file. A crawler cannot see it. You can.

None of these four is required, and each is usually a five-minute conversation with somebody who already knows.

1. Which parts of your website do you consider archived?

   Where you have labelled a section yourself, that is your evidence rather than our inference — this one usually settles the most. Ask: whoever maintains the website.

2. Can you share page-view figures for your documents?

   A file nobody has opened in two years is a strong candidate for the exception. Ask: whoever administers your analytics.

3. Does your records-retention schedule name these materials?

   An adopted document carries more weight with your own counsel than anything we could produce. Ask: the city recorder, clerk or records manager.

4. Which documents do residents actually ask for?

   A document people request is being used to reach a service, however old it is — the answer no crawler will ever find. Ask: front-counter and permit-desk staff.

What we will not do

• We will not tell you that you are covered by the law. That is a legal conclusion, we are not qualified to reach it, and a vendor in this category was fined $1,000,000 by the FTC in 2025 for making claims of that shape.
• We will not report a document as fine because a validator found nothing. Absence of a detected fault is not evidence of quality.
• We will not take on work a machine cannot finish and quietly do it badly. Where a document needs human hands, the report says so and prices it separately — or says we are not the right people for it.
• We will not pretend our own limits away. On the one library we have measured end to end, our automated pass refused 376 of 2,691 documents and said why: 359 were scanned images with no text to work from, 9 the tagger declined, and 8 were encrypted. We would rather you read that here than discover it after paying us.