County and city officials say websites, PDFs remain major barrier to ADA compliance

Tim Clark, an appointed volunteer overseeing the Accessibility Coalition for Tippecanoe County, said county and municipal websites and document libraries remain a significant accessibility challenge for residents and businesses.

The county’s IT and communications staff told the coalition on July 29 that most web pages are “majority” compliant but the backlog of PDFs and other legacy documents remains large and time-consuming to fix. Kent, identified in the meeting as the county’s IT director/Chief Information official, said the county’s website “is coming along” but that “the PDFs remain the biggest challenge.”

Why it matters: inaccessible PDFs and websites can prevent people with vision, hearing or cognitive disabilities from accessing public notices, forms and maps that affect permits, benefits and local services.

County staff described a two-pronged approach: train departmental document authors to create accessible documents from the start and prioritize remediation of the most-used files. The county webmaster (name not specified) told the coalition the county has 47 departments producing documents and that “getting it right the first time is really critical,” adding that some remediations, especially for fillable forms, “can take hours.”

Kent said the county aims first to identify the top 50 documents to remediate and to increase in-house training, while the webmaster said departments must accept responsibility for producing accessible documents. Both said tools exist to identify accessibility issues but still require manual fixes. The webmaster described an existing workflow: prepare a document in Word with proper heading styles, then convert and remediate before publishing.

Speakers pressed on timelines and staffing. Multiple participants said federal enforcement timelines may be extended because IT groups and local governments lack the personnel to finish remediations quickly. Tim Clark said the Department of Justice has shifted many responsibilities to the Department of Transportation and to local governments, increasing expectations on contractors and municipalities.

The coalition discussed possible technology help, including tools that flag accessibility problems and nascent AI solutions that could assist remediation. County staff cautioned that most available AI tools remain imperfect: “Most AIs don't actually do anything. There's still search and suggest kind of options,” the webmaster said.

The county also highlighted an operational fix: a notification email that alerts staff when the public reports a website or document-access problem; staff said such complaints are routed for prompt remediation. The webmaster said in two years on the job he has received one accessibility complaint about a PDF and that it was “very quickly fixed.”

The coalition agreed to continue training, identify priority documents, and share findings with municipal partners to reduce duplicated remediation efforts.

The meeting included other accessibility topics but participants returned repeatedly to web and PDF remediation as a near-term operational barrier to ADA compliance.