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PDF accessibility for government: forms, deadlines and evidence
Public bodies have the hardest deadlines and the least discretion. What the April 2027 and 2028 dates mean for a document backlog, and how to show your work.
Deadlines that are actually dates
26 April 2027 — state and local entities serving 50,000 or more. 26 April 2028 — smaller entities and special districts.
Both moved a year by the Department of Justice’s interim final rule of 20 April 2026. The stated reason was that the Department had overestimated the capabilities — staffing and technology — of covered entities.
That sentence is worth keeping. It is the regulator saying that this cannot be automated away, which is both a relief and a constraint: nobody expects you to have solved it with software, and nobody will accept software as the reason it is not done.
Forms are the priority
Everything else is a document someone reads. A form is a transaction someone has to complete. A benefits application, a permit request, a public-comment form — if a resident cannot complete it, they have been excluded from a public service.
Forms are also the most likely to be badly built, because they are usually produced by adding fields to a PDF in Acrobat rather than by a structured export. That combination — highest consequence, worst starting state — makes them the right place to start.
What an accessible form needs →
Templates over documents
Public bodies generate documents from templates: council reports, planning decisions, licence notices, statements. Each template produces hundreds of documents a year.
Fixing a template once fixes every future document from it. Fixing the documents fixes nothing, and next quarter you do it again. Any programme that starts with the backlog rather than the templates is choosing the more expensive path.
Where Taggart fits
The free validator makes the census affordable at any volume, and its JSON output makes triage a script rather than a project.
The remediation report is the piece that matters institutionally: it records the findings, the fixes, the accepted items with justifications, the human decisions with an actor and a timestamp, and the SHA-256 of both files. That is the document that answers “why is this one like this” long after the person who decided has moved on.
What Taggart will not do is tell you that you comply. That determination belongs to counsel.
Frequently asked questions
Which documents do we have to fix?
Read the rule's exceptions rather than relying on a summary — they are narrower than people assume, particularly the archived-content exception. In practice: anything required to access a service, anything with a legal effect, and anything currently linked from a live page.
Can we outsource this?
You can, and for a one-off backlog it is often right. At USD 4–25 per page it is not sustainable as a standing cost, and it does not fix the source of new documents. Most public bodies end up with a hybrid: outsource the archive, fix the templates, handle new documents in house.
What evidence should we keep?
For each document: what was checked, what was found, what was fixed, what was accepted and why, who decided, and when. Not because a regulator will demand it, but because staff turn over and the next person needs to know why the table on page 12 was left as it is.
Check your own file. Taggart's validator is free and unlimited — no page cap, no watermark, no account.
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