Sedgwick County briefed on federal web-accessibility rules; PDFs flagged as noncompliant

Scott Wagner, Sedgwick County chief information officer, told the commission the Americans with Disabilities Act is moving into the web world and that a phased federal rollout focuses first on larger governments.

"April 24 is a big day," Wagner said, adding that federal law now requires accessible digital content and noted enforcement risk: "Non compliance is real, 75 ks fines." He said the new requirement covers websites and electronic documents, including PDFs, which are often not inherently accessible to screen readers.

Wagner described the county's decentralized web governance—departments own content while IT manages infrastructure—and the cross-department remediation steps under way: editor training, categorization of documents, remediation, and validation. He said staff are providing conversion tools and working with Communications to create a leadership team of web editors across about 45 departments to coordinate the effort.

Adrian Clark, assistant county counselor, said the technical standards are defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and that the rule applies broadly though the first compliance deadline targets larger units of government. Clark also outlined narrow exceptions staff are evaluating, such as archived or preexisting conventional documents, while noting those exceptions are tightly defined and will not cover interactive public-facing forms.

Communications staff described practical steps for making PDFs readable—using Office heading styles and inserting descriptive metadata for charts—and said the county uses Adobe Acrobat Pro scans and manual testing with common screen readers as part of quality assurance. The county also distributed a color-coded flowchart for web editors that defines remediation roles for IT, Communications and content owners.

The briefing did not include a vote. Commissioners asked for confirmation that county-facing systems managed by the state (such as the Orion property system) are on staff’s remediation list. Staff said they are engaging vendor and state partners to address those systems and will follow up with additional details.