Your agenda and minutes PDFs, and the ADA Title II deadline

Every council, board or commission meeting leaves PDF files behind: the agenda, the packet and the minutes. Under the Justice Department's ADA Title II rule (28 CFR part 35, subpart H), the PDFs on your website are web content, and web content has to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA.

The dates

Governments serving 50,000 or more people have until April 26, 2027. Smaller governments and every special district have until April 26, 2028. The Justice Department moved both dates back one year in an interim final rule published on April 20, 2026. A lawsuit filed in May 2026 asks a federal court to undo that extension; there has been no ruling, and we will update this page if the dates change. More about the deadline.

Which PDFs are covered

The rule has two narrow exceptions (28 CFR 35.201):

  • Archived content: made before your deadline, kept only for reference, research or recordkeeping, not changed since it was archived, and kept in an area of your site clearly marked as an archive.
  • Older documents: PDFs already on your site before your deadline, unless people currently use them to apply for, get access to, or take part in your services, programs or activities.

So agendas, packets and minutes you post after your deadline are covered, and so is any older document people need to take part in a current meeting or service, such as the agenda for an upcoming meeting.

Why PDFs are the hard part

A screen reader can only read a PDF that has tags: headings, lists, tables and a reading order. A scanned page, or a PDF saved without tags, reads as silence or as a jumble. Agendas and packets are often put together from many sources, so one meeting can mix readable and unreadable files.

What EveryRamp does

We test your web pages and your PDFs automatically. When a PDF fails, we rebuild it as a tagged PDF with its headings, lists, tables and reading order, and we check that the rebuilt text still says exactly what the original said. Your web team gets a fix pack for the pages and the rebuilt files to upload in place of the old ones. Every package includes a year of monthly re-testing, so new agendas and minutes are checked each month. We work by email; there is nothing to install, and it does not matter which platform your website runs on.

Packages for local governments

  • Town, $4,900: up to 75 pages and 300 PDF pages.
  • City, $9,900: up to 250 pages and 1,000 PDF pages.

Each package covers one website. Invoices are payable within 30 days by check or purchase order. A larger site? Ask for a written quote. All packages.

What automated testing cannot do

Our tests find the problems a machine can find reliably, and our report says plainly which things need a person to judge. A document that passes our automated tests has had those problems found and fixed; it has not been reviewed by a person reading it with a screen reader. What automated testing checks, and what it cannot.

Start here

  1. Run a free scan of your website: a plain-English report at a private link, usually within a few minutes.
  2. Order a package, or request a formal quote for your procurement file.

This page is general information, not legal advice.