Course materials and campus documents, accessible before April 26, 2027.
Public institutions: April 26, 2027, under the state-population rule
Public colleges and universities hold some of the largest document backlogs in the public sector — decades of syllabi, scanned readings, catalogs and forms across every department.
DocoMatic inventories them, remediates them to WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA, and gives your accessibility office verification it can stand behind.
Free scan, no account. The trial is 100 credits, 14 days, up to 10 documents, no card.
Why state institutions are on the 2027 date
The 2024 ADA Title II rule requires public entities' web content, PDFs included, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA (28 CFR 35.200(opens in new tab)), and public colleges and universities are covered as instrumentalities of their states.
For deadline purposes, a public university that is an instrumentality of its state takes the population of the state, not its enrollment or its campus town (28 CFR 35.104(opens in new tab)). Since every state exceeds 50,000 residents, those institutions fall in the large-entity cohort with a compliance date of April 26, 2027. The two community-college cases are in the table.
Course content is in scope. Resolution agreements between OCR and universities over inaccessible course materials predate the rule by a decade — the rule adds a date.
Not every old PDF has to be fixed
Five exceptions, at 28 CFR 35.201(opens in new tab). Preexisting conventional electronic documents are excepted unless they are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in your services, programs or activities; so is archived content kept only for reference, research or record-keeping and clearly identified as archived (35.104(opens in new tab)), and a password-protected document about one individual — a student's own transcript behind a login. None of the five is for course content behind a login: the Department proposed that exception and did not adopt it.
The three cases, by date
| Compliance date | Applies to | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| April 26, 2027 | State universities and colleges | State population — every state exceeds 50,000 |
| April 26, 2027 or April 26, 2028 | Community colleges run by a county | County population — 50,000 or more means April 26, 2027 |
| Confirm with counsel | Self-governing community college districts | No published Census figure for the district |
Both dates are from the Department of Justice's interim final rule of April 20, 2026(opens in new tab), 91 FR 20902 (April 20, 2026), amending 28 CFR 35.200(b), which also plans further rulemaking on the 2024 rule.
Sources
Every regulatory claim on this page is cited to one of these primary sources.
- ADA Title II compliance-date extension, Federal Register, April 20, 2026 (91 FR 20902)
- ADA Title II final rule, Federal Register, April 24, 2024 (dates since extended)
- DOJ fact sheet: ADA Title II rule on web and mobile accessibility (ada.gov)
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
- ADA.gov — DOJ information and technical assistance
The campus document backlog
Course readings and scanned materials
Scanned chapters, article PDFs and archived readings have no text layer — they are pictures of pages, and nothing can be tagged until the text exists. We run OCR at Levels 2 and 3, then tag the result.
These are your most expensive pages. We inventory them and flag which of your files are scans, so you can see the size of that problem before you commit to it, and what they would cost. You decide which ones are worth it. A reading list from 2009 that nobody has opened in five years may not be.
OCR is English-only today; handwriting is not read reliably.
Syllabi and course outlines — Thousands refreshed every term; remediation at the level you choose keeps each term clean.
Catalogs, bulletins and handbooks — Long documents where heading and table tagging decide navigability.
Admissions and financial aid forms — Fillable forms with labeled fields, logical tab order and human review.
Reports and public research — Reports and research with figures that need meaningful alt text.
What to do about Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle
We do not have LMS connectors, and we are not giving a date. Files that live only inside the LMS have to reach us another way — three routes, in order of setup effort. Whichever you use, importing a document costs nothing: credits are reserved only when you request a remediation.
| Route | How | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk export to a bucket | Export course files to S3 or any S3-compatible store; we sync one bucket and prefix, read-only. Half an hour. | A term or a whole department |
| Watch folder | Export to a network share; an agent uploads new files over an outbound-only connection — no firewall rule, no open port, no VPN. An hour. | File-server workflows |
| Push from your own systems | Push files to a signed endpoint (HMAC-SHA256) from your LMS integration. An afternoon of developer time. | Developer capacity |
What this does not solve
Content behind a login is not crawled. Monitoring finds what your public domains publish; LMS material has to be sent. If most of your backlog is inside the LMS, the inventory step is yours.
How it fits campus workflows
Four steps around the people a campus already has.
Step 1
Connect your domains
We crawl your public domains and build one inventory across every department that publishes on its own. We do not have Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle connectors, so files that live only inside the LMS have to be sent to us — three routes, above.
Step 2
Remediation at scale
Your backlog and newly published documents are remediated to WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA, with OCR for scanned materials and per-file verification scores.
Step 3
Disability services sets priorities
Accommodation-driven requests jump the queue; flagged files go to human review with a full record of changes.
Step 4
Verified documents, department by department
Documents are organised per workspace, so each department's backlog is counted separately from the others, and every monitored domain has its own report you can take to the dean who owns it.
Where to start on a million pages
Nobody clears a million pages first. The order document monitoring ranks by, applied to a campus:
Anything a student must complete
— Admissions, financial aid and accommodation request forms. Highest stakes, smallest volume.Anything linked from a main navigation page
— Catalog, bulletin, key policies. Highest traffic.The current term's materials
— Then keep each term clean as it publishes, so the backlog stops growing.The archive, by department, in whatever order the deans agree to
— The long tail, and the part you can schedule.
Sizing it first is free. Scan a domain for the count and the failing share. Start with one department's subdomain if a whole institution feels like too much.
See your institution's backlog
Where we have crawled an institution, its page shows what we found; scan your own domain free.
A surveyed institution
We are surveying institutions state by state.
No college or university in the launch states has a published survey yet. Scan your own domain now and you will have the number in minutes — we do not need to have crawled you first.
Pricing for university volume
A worked example: a 412,000-page backlog, 15 percent scanned
| Level | Pages | Credits per page | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1 — text, headings and lists | 300,000 | 1 | 300,000 |
| Level 2 — tables, columns, images | 50,000 | 4 | 200,000 |
| Level 2 — scanned pages, with OCR | 60,000 | 4 + 2 OCR = 6 | 360,000 |
| Level 3 — fillable forms | 2,000 | 30 | 60,000 |
| Total | 412,000 | 920,000 |
Scanned pages cost more: 15 percent of the pages here and 39 percent of the credits — which is why the scan flag in your inventory matters.
The 1,000,000-credit backlog pack is $120,000.00 — $0.12 a credit, with 24 months to use it — and covers this backlog. Ongoing publishing runs on a plan: Scale is $2,999.00 a month for 15,000 credits; larger institutions are sized on Enterprise.
An estimate, not a quote: the level is assessed per page before anything is charged. Human review adds 10 credits a page.
You are not charged for a document that fails verification. How the no-charge rule works.
How institutions buy
Card payment opens with our billing launch. Today, plans and credits are arranged by quote and paid by purchase order. Purchase orders with net-30 to net-60 invoicing, paid by ACH; tax-exempt certificates accepted; a W-9 is available on request. We do not hold a cooperative purchasing contract yet.
Higher education questions
Why is our deadline 2027 when our town has 20,000 people?
Because a public university that is an instrumentality of its state takes the state's population, not the campus town's, and every state exceeds 50,000 residents — so the date is April 26, 2027. A community college run by a county is sized by the county instead, which can mean a later date.
Are course materials covered, or just the public website?
The rule covers content the institution provides or makes available on the web, course content included, with narrow exceptions for certain individualized, password-protected documents. Treat syllabi and readings as in scope and confirm specific cases with counsel.
Can you remediate documents inside our LMS?
Not from inside the LMS: we do not have a Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle connector. Files that live only there reach us by bucket export, watch folder or signed webhook, and anything on your public domains is covered by monitoring.
Does password-protected content get an exception?
Only a narrow one, for certain documents individualized to one person and password-protected. General course materials behind a login do not become exempt because a login exists.
How do we budget for a million-page backlog?
Sequence it before you price it — forms students must complete, then main-navigation documents, then the current term, then the archive by department. Backlog packs are priced for large one-time volumes, down to $0.12 per credit, and can be used over 24 months; the cost calculator models the rest.
Can we send you copyrighted course readings?
Whether a scanned chapter or article may be reproduced for an accommodation is a rights determination your library or disability services office makes under your own policies and licences; we do not make it for you. We process the file only to produce the remediated version and its report, we never use your documents to train AI models, and files are kept for your plan's retention period and deleted when you ask — automatic deletion at the end of the period is not switched on yet.
How many domains does a plan cover?
Monitored domains are counted per plan — 1 on Starter, 3 on Growth, 10 on Scale, Enterprise by contract — so count the departmental sites you would register before choosing. Forty of them is past Scale.
Can one department start without the whole institution?
Yes: scan one department's domain, remediate what it publishes, and expand from there. Workspaces keep each department's inventory and budget separate — 1 on Starter, 5 on Growth, 20 on Scale.
Start with one department, prove it, scale it
Start with 100 free credits — around 100 simple pages or 25 complex ones, across up to 10 documents in 14 days — or scan one department's domain first and size the backlog.