ADA PDF Checker - Test PDF Compliance for ADA Title II & III

Where PDFs fit into the ADA

In April 2024 the US Department of Justice published a rule under Title II of the ADA requiring state and local governments to make their web content meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The rule says in so many words that this includes documents, PDFs among them, posted on their websites. Title III, which covers businesses, has no equivalent technical rule, but lawsuits and settlements regularly use WCAG 2.1 AA as the benchmark.

PDFs tend to be the weakest content on a site. A council website can easily hold years of scanned notices, untagged meeting agendas and fill-in forms that cannot be completed without a mouse.

Where to start with a large backlog

If you have hundreds of files, do not work through them in upload order. Sort them first:

• Delete what is out of date or duplicated elsewhere. Removing a file is the cheapest fix there is.
• Fix first the documents people need in order to use a service: application forms, fee schedules, eligibility rules, public notices.
• Replace scanned PDFs with real text, or put the content on an ordinary web page instead.
• Give staff an accessible template for new documents so the backlog stops growing while you work through it.

What this check can and cannot tell you

It reliably finds the barriers software can detect: untagged files, missing alt text, missing titles and languages, unlabelled form fields and scanned pages. Each finding is labelled with its WCAG 2.1 criterion.

It cannot tell you whether you are legally compliant. That depends on things outside the file, such as which exceptions in the rule apply to you, and on the manual checks listed at the end of the report. A clean result is good evidence of care. It is not a certificate, and it is not legal advice.