The regulatory landscape for public documents

It depends on what you are. US state and local governments fall under ADA Title II; US federal agencies under Section 508; recipients of HHS funding under the HHS Section 504 rule; Ontario's public sector and larger Ontario organizations under the AODA; businesses selling covered products and services in the EU under the European Accessibility Act. More than one can apply. The table at the top of this page and the deadline finder take it a step further.

Neither: both apply. Every law here names WCAG at Level AA, directly or through EN 301 549, so meeting the stricter technical target meets both, and remediating to WCAG 2.1 AA satisfies a rule written against 2.0. What differs is the date, the exceptions and the filings, so plan to the earliest date and keep the evidence each regime asks for.

Documents explicitly. The ADA Title II rule and the HHS Section 504 rule both name documents, PDFs included, as web content that must conform. Section 508 covers the electronic documents an agency develops, procures, maintains or uses. The AODA reaches posted documents as web content, and the EAA reaches the documents a covered service delivers. Each guide sets out the exceptions.

No. There is no such certificate and no body that issues one. What a document can have is conformance to a technical standard, WCAG 2.1 AA or PDF/UA-1, and evidence of it, such as a validator's report. Whether your organization's obligation is met is a legal determination for your counsel.

WCAG 2.1 AA says what accessible means for any content, and it is what the laws cite. PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1) says what that means inside a PDF file: a complete tag tree in reading order, artifacts for decoration, alternative text, mapped text and metadata. A PDF can tick a WCAG checklist and still fail PDF/UA, and PDF/UA is the standard an automated validator such as veraPDF tests against.

For the AODA and the EAA the obligation is already in force. For ADA Title II the dates are April 26, 2027 and April 26, 2028, and for the HHS Section 504 rule May 11, 2027 and May 10, 2028; the timeline above shows where today falls. Being past a date does not make enforcement automatic, and it does not excuse the obligation either. What matters is what you can show: an inventory of what you publish, remediation under way with the most-used documents first, and a verification report for every file you have fixed.

No. Documents are one part of what the rules cover. DocoMatic remediates the documents your pages link to and does not test or fix the pages themselves, so if the site needs work you need a web accessibility tool alongside it. The product page lists what the platform does not do.

Not as guides. Our regulatory guidance, deadline catalog and entity registry cover the United States and Canada, plus the EAA explainer; Quebec's provincial requirements, US state-level statutes and EN 301 549 outside the EAA are not covered here. The product is not limited by that: WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA are the standards those regimes reference too, so you bring your own reading of the rule and we bring the remediation and the verification report.