For school districts

PDF accessibility for school districts, before your Title II deadline

Districts with a SAIPE population of 50,000 or more: April 26, 2027 · All other districts: April 26, 2028

Websites get the attention, but the document backlog is where districts fail: board packets, IEP forms, newsletters, handbooks and menus pile up by the thousand.

DocoMatic finds every public document on your domains, remediates it to WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA, and proves it with a verification report your board can read.

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Free scan, no account. The trial is 100 credits, 14 days, up to 10 documents, no card.

SAIPE population 50,000 or more: 7 months to April 26, 2027
All other districts: 19 months to April 26, 2028

Counted from the day this page was generated. The Department plans further rulemaking; see the sources.

The rule and the two dates

ADA Title II now puts a date on your documents

The rule, the two dates, the exceptions, and where each is written down.

The Department of Justice's April 2024 ADA Title II rule requires state and local government web content — PDFs on public sites included — to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Public school districts are covered; the requirement is at 28 CFR 35.200(opens in new tab).

The compliance date depends on the population the district serves, not enrollment — for an independent school district, its Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) figure, as 28 CFR 35.104(opens in new tab) defines total population. A district enrolling 8,000 students in an area of 60,000 residents is on the earlier date, so edge cases are worth confirming with counsel.

The two dates

ADA Title II compliance dates for school districts, and who each applies to
Compliance date	Applies to
April 26, 2027	SAIPE population estimate of 50,000 or more — 1,442 of the 13,131 districts, about 11 percent
April 26, 2028	Under 50,000 — the other 11,689 districts, about 89 percent

Basis: the district's SAIPE figure, not enrollment. Counts are from the Census Bureau's 2024 SAIPE school district estimates(opens in new tab); your district's own figure is what the rule turns on. Both dates come from the interim final rule of April 20, 2026(opens in new tab), 91 FR 20902 (April 20, 2026), amending 28 CFR 35.200(b), which says the Department plans further rulemaking.

A city, county or special district? Same rule, different population basis: see cities and counties, special districts, or all solutions by organization type.

Not every old PDF has to be fixed

28 CFR 35.201(opens in new tab) excepts conventional electronic documents — PDFs, Word, presentation and spreadsheet files — posted before your compliance date, unless they are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in your services, programs or activities. A 2019 board packet is excepted; a 2019 enrollment form still in use is not.

Archived web content is excepted separately, on four conditions in 35.104(opens in new tab): created before your compliance date, kept only for reference, research or record-keeping, unchanged, and stored in an area clearly identified as archived.

Secured documents about one individual — a student's completed IEP behind a login — are excepted. The blank form on your public site is not.

April 20, 2026The current dates are set91 FR 20902 (April 20, 2026), amending 28 CFR 35.200(b)
April 26, 2027ADA Title II, population 50,000 or moreSAIPE population 50,000 or more
April 26, 2028ADA Title II, under 50,000, and every special districtAll other districts

Sources

Every regulatory claim on this page is cited to one of these primary sources.

What you publish

The documents districts actually publish

Five categories, and the treatment each one needs.

Five kinds of school documents stream from a schoolhouse; a form with an orange-ringed field sits under a lens

IEP and 504 forms

Fillable forms with labelled fields, a logical tab order and required-field flags — where a failure carries the most risk, because a parent who cannot complete the form cannot participate in the process. Forms are Level 3. The analyzer recommends the level per document and you choose it before any work runs.

Human review is recommended. A named reviewer checks what machines cannot settle and signs an attestation before delivery, for 10 credits a page. Turn it on when you request a fix, or arrange it with our team.

Board packets, agendas and minutes
Hundreds of pages per meeting cycle. Remediation on publish keeps every cycle compliant without adding work for your clerk.
Newsletters and family communications
Multi-column layouts and photos that need a correct reading order and meaningful alt text, in every language you publish.
Student and staff handbooks
Long documents with contents, headings and tables — tagged so screen reader users can navigate instead of listening from the top.
Menus, calendars and schedules
Small, frequently replaced files that quietly become a backlog. Continuous monitoring catches each new upload.

How it works

How it fits district workflows

Four steps, around the people a district already has. Nothing we run writes to your site.

The four steps: when, what happens and who is involved
Step	When	What happens	Who is involved
1Scan, then connect your domains	Day one	Scan the district, school and board domains — free, no account — for a document count and the failing share; then we crawl your public sites into a live inventory. No IT project: we read public pages, and we never write to your site.	Who is involved: Anyone. No IT ticket.
2Remediation runs at the level you chose	First weeks	Choose what clears first — enrollment and IEP/504 forms, then anything in main navigation — and the level for each. Files return remediated to WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA with a per-file verification score; a document that fails is not charged.	Who is involved: ADA/504 coordinator chooses; nobody sits with the run.
3Your ADA/504 coordinator approves	As files return	Flagged files — complex forms, ambiguous alt text — can go to human review; your coordinator sees what changed and why.	Who is involved: ADA/504 coordinator
4You replace the originals with verified files	Ongoing	Every document ships with a verification report and an audit trail your district can produce if OCR ever asks. Monitoring re-scans on your plan's schedule and queues what is new.	Who is involved: Communications, weekly

There is no accessibility specialist in this table. Extending the dates, the Department of Justice reported K-12 associations saying many school districts have limited financial and staff resources available for compliance with the 2024 final rule, and one association's survey of 60 members finding many school districts would likely need to hire staff to assist with compliance (91 FR 20902, at 20905)(opens in new tab).

From the registry

See your district's backlog

Where we have crawled a district, its page shows what we found. Scan your own domain for yours, or find your district's deadline below.

A surveyed district

We are surveying districts state by state.

No school district in the launch states has a published survey yet. Scan your own district now — we do not need to have crawled you first.

Look up a district

Search for your city, district or college

A civic building under a lantern beam beside a counted stack of documents and a calendar leaf with an orange ring

Per page, in credits

Pricing for district volume

Per page by level, at published credit rates: board packets and newsletters usually run at Level 1 or 2; fillable forms are Level 3; scanned records run at Level 2 with the OCR add-on. A backlog pack clears the archive; a monthly plan covers what follows.

A worked example, a 11,400-page backlog: pages by level, credits per page and total credits
Level	Pages	Credits per page	Credits
Level 1 — text and headings	8,000	1	8,000
Level 2 — tables, columns, images	3,000	4	12,000
Level 3 — fillable forms	400	30	12,000
Total	11,400		32,000

Scanned pages add 2 credits a page for OCR; human review adds 10 credits a page.

You are not charged for a document that fails verification. How the no-charge rule works.

The 50,000-credit backlog pack is $9,000.00 — $0.18 a credit, with 24 months to use it — so it covers this backlog with credits to spare.

For ongoing publishing, Starter is $299.00 a month for 1,000 credits and 1 monitored domain; Growth is $999.00 a month for 4,000 credits and 3 domains.

How districts buy

Purchase orders with net-30 to net-60 invoicing, paid by ACH; tax-exempt certificates accepted, a W-9 on request, and no cooperative purchasing contract yet. Card payment opens with our billing launch.

FAQ

School district questions

Buying for a larger organization?

Book a 20-minute demo

When is the ADA Title II deadline for school districts?

April 26, 2027 if the district's SAIPE population estimate is 50,000 or more; April 26, 2028 otherwise. It is population served, not enrollment — the deadline finder looks yours up.

Do IEP and 504 forms have to be accessible?

Yes, when they are posted on your public site; only a completed, secured form about one student is excepted. We treat forms as Level 3 and recommend human review.

We have one webmaster. How much staff time does this take?

Very little after setup: connect your domains once, remediation runs at the levels you chose, and only flagged files need a human decision.

What does this cost compared to manual remediation?

Manual services quote per page; ours is published: 1 credit a page at Level 1, 4 at Level 2, 30 at Level 3, and a credit costs $0.20–$0.30 on a monthly plan. Run the cost calculator with your own counts.

Do we need our IT department to set this up?

No. The scan reads public pages and the app takes uploads; S3, watch-folder and webhook connections are optional and read-only. You publish the verified file yourself.

What do we show the board?

A verification report per document — rules measured, DocoMatic Score, failing veraPDF rules from Level 2 up (the score is ours; the PDF/UA verdict is veraPDF's), what a machine could not check — and a monthly report per monitored domain, with the inventory as a CSV for the packet.

Does this cover our school websites too, or just the district site?

Every domain you register — usually the district, school and board sites. Monitored domains are per plan: 1 on Starter, 3 on Growth, 10 on Scale, so size the plan by domains before buying.

What about student records and FERPA?

Public website documents are not education records. If you upload documents that are, our Data Processing Agreement's FERPA terms apply: the district designates DocoMatic as a school official with a legitimate educational interest, solely to provide the service, never for advertising, profiling or training AI models. On request we sign the Student Data Privacy Consortium's National Data Privacy Agreement with your state's terms.

Start with a count

Be ready before your Title II date

Start with 100 free credits — enough for about 100 simple pages or 25 complex ones, across up to 10 documents in 14 days. Or scan your district's site first and see the size of the backlog before you sign up for anything.