PDFs are DOA as new web standards approach

Key Takeaways

Nearly one-third of all counties are rushing toward an April deadline to meet new standards for website and social media accessibility.

The 973 counties with at least 50,000 residents have until April 24 to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA, while the remaining 2,096 smaller counties have until April 26, 2027. The guidelines were set by the World Wide Web Consortium, and those deadlines were set two years ago, when the Department of Justice published a final rule for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Chesterfield County, Va. combined the early deadline with the process of redesigning its website to rethink how its content is presented to residents. 

“It was evident that it was a better experience,” said Chris Coleman, Chesterfield County’s eGovernment Services manager. “It’s a perfect example of a solution that was better for the organization and was just as good, if not better, for our end users, especially those with disabilities.

“The reality is, there is a significant portion of the population that has visual disabilities and hearing disabilities and cognitive disabilities that we need to provide services for, not create barriers to accessing those services.”

Throughout the last few years, accessibility compliance has dominated the DuPage County, Ill. IT department’s agenda, and Web Services Manager Debra Deacy said she hears the same from peers around the country.

“It’s a part of everything we’re doing,” she said. “It’s been that way for the last few years.” 

The final rule has not been accompanied by any federal funding to help meet the $1 billion estimated cost of compliance by all counties. County IT departments are taking on the added tasks of updating their web content and often contracting with vendors to help meet those needs, all while managing their daily IT workload.

“What we’re hearing from our members is a lot of confusion and a lot of gray areas,” said Jennifer Chapman, president of the National Association of Government Web Professionals and senior communications manager for Johns Creek, Ga. “Governments are facing challenges with their staffing, their funding and some of our third-party providers.”

Streamlined content

Coleman estimates that Chesterfield County is 99.7% compliant with the new standards, and he attributes that to the progress his county has made in reducing the use of PDF files on its site. Starting at 18,000 files several years ago, that library is closer to 2,000 documents today.

The PDF format is unwieldy, often static and generally ill-adapted for mobile devices. The solution, Coleman said, has been converting those files to a web form or HTML, which not only is more readable by accessibility devices, but can update the information users input to a county database for immediate feedback. 

“A PDF is essentially a paper record, and that doesn’t serve the same purpose online,” Coleman said.

DuPage County has taken a similar approach, but IT leadership has had to sell that policy to other employees.

“We tried to explain to our departments and elected officials that the website is not a file cabinet where you keep everything,” Deacy said. “If you need to put a PDF online, you have to have a good reason. Otherwise, we’re going to put everything in HTML.”

Coleman and Deacy both serve on the National Association of Government Web Professionals’ Board of Directors.

The counties that are in the best position as the deadline nears have looked at the process as more than a mandate. 

“I haven’t met a member who is not extremely passionate about this,” Chapman said. “We all want to do this; we want to help people with disabilities access government services.” 

Counties that were already in the process of transitioning to a new website when the final rule was issued have had a head start, because their web content audits have served dual purposes, giving those county IT departments a head start.

DuPage County took the opportunity to debut a new website to reorganize how it presented webpages, pivoting to a more user-centric approach. Its previous website was in service for 12 years.

“We used to organize our website by department, and now it’s based on task,” Deasy said. “When people come to our website, they probably don’t know that they need to go to the clerk’s office or the recorder’s office, they just know what they need to accomplish and we help guide them that way.” 

Impetus for action

When the final rule was published in April 2024, Coleman used it to pick up momentum internally.

“It gave us some teeth to take back to our county attorney’s office and say ‘This thing we’ve been trying to do —  accessibility or digital equity — it’s real now. And now there are consequences if we don’t do it,’” he said.

Counties that are not in compliance could open themselves up to civil rights complaints, investigation and enforcement by the Department of Justice, litigation or reputational harm. Those counties could also incur greater remediation costs as time goes on.

Coleman added that as his county sees an increase in access by mobile devices, approaching web design with that in mind, joined with accessibility standards, can go a long way to “future-proofing” a county’s website. And it shows up in other ways.

“A lot of these measures that make our content more accessible to people with disabilities also makes it more readable for AI large language models,” he said. “We’re a verified source of information, and now we’re a place models will go for easily read content.”

Final stretch

With less than a month to go until the largest counties hit their deadline, an extension from the Department of Justice seems unlikely, though the department has signaled that it will release an interim final rule seeking to reduce the cost of implementation to counties. 

For counties that are in a good position regarding the deadline, their work will not stop there. Deacy maintains a county-wide accessibility task force that meets regularly to stay focused on each department sharing responsibility to making advances in accessibility.

“This is an ongoing effort because we have 100 web editors throughout the county who update that content every day,” she said.

Almost two-thirds of counties nationwide have a little more than a year, and likely fewer IT staff, to meet the same standards by April 26, 2027.

For staff like Deacy, getting county elected officials on board helped galvanize county staff toward working to meet the deadline.

“I think having county leadership buy-in is crucial so they can be supportive and give that authority to what you’re doing,” she said. “I have talked to other organizations where the leadership wasn’t even aware or just became aware in the last month.”