ADA Title II document readiness checklist
A practical, self-scoring checklist for public institutions preparing their documents, forms, and PDFs for ADA Title II and WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance.
The Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule sets a technical standard — WCAG 2.1 Level AA — for the web content and mobile apps of state and local government entities, including public colleges, universities, K–12 districts, and agencies. For most institutions, the hardest part is not the website itself; it is the sprawl of documents attached to it.
This checklist gives leadership a shared view of where the organization stands today. Work through the five stages, mark what is genuinely complete, and use the gaps to build a prioritized plan you can defend.
Three ground rules
Review by department
Run the checklist per publishing unit, not once for the whole organization. Maturity varies widely between units.
Be honest about 'done'
Only check an item when there is a written policy, an owner, and evidence it is actually happening.
Turn gaps into a plan
Unchecked items become your backlog, sequenced by the impact ranking in stage two.
Five stages to document readiness
Inventory what you publish
You cannot remediate what you have never counted. Start with a full picture of the files your community actually opens.
Rank documents by real-world impact
Impact, not age or volume, should decide the order of work. Fix what blocks access to a service first.
Standardize how new documents are made
Remediation never ends if the intake pipeline keeps producing inaccessible files.
Remediate the backlog
Work the prioritized list with a repeatable method and a defensible record of what changed.
Sustain conformance and evidence
Accessibility holds only when it has an owner, a budget line, and a monitoring cadence.
Defensibility comes from process, not perfection
No institution remediates a decade of documents overnight. What holds up under scrutiny is a documented, organized effort: you identified the barriers, you ranked them by how much they affect access to services, you fixed the most consequential ones on a stated timeline, and you changed the process so the backlog stops growing.
Keep the artifacts. An inventory, a prioritization rubric, a remediation log, a training record, and a feedback channel with response times form the evidence base that a good-faith program actually exists.
TerraSecure accessibility services
Accessibility audit
Automated and manual WCAG 2.1 AA testing across your sites, portals, and document libraries, with a ranked findings report.
Remediation program
Document remediation at scale, plus template and workflow fixes that stop recurring defects at the source.
Governance and training
Policy, procurement language, author training, and monitoring cadence so conformance survives staff turnover.
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