From Unmanageable to Miracle: Tackling Accessibility Across 11,000+ Documents
Keys to Project:
Making all existing and future website-hosted PDFs accessible without breaking the budget or missing the federal deadline
School District:
Western Technical College (La Crosse, WI)Population:
8,495Products:
Challenge:
Western Technical College had neither the technical expertise to manually ensure ADA-compliance of existing and future PDFs, nor the budget to hire an external vendor for page-by-page remediation.
Solution:
The college implemented DocAccess to scan the website and automatically convert all PDFs to accessible HTML versions available in more than 250 languages.
Result:
College staff don’t have to delete charts, graphics, and images from documents and can focus on their day-to-day work rather than troubleshooting and fixing document accessibility issues.
Meeting Accessibility Requirements with Limited Resources
Julie Lemon recognized early on that meeting federal mandates for document accessibility would be unmanageable for her and her colleagues at Western Technical College.
As vice president of communications and legislative affairs, Lemon oversees all content on the college’s public-facing website, including PDFs submitted by admissions, financial aid, and the other 40-plus departments across campus.
And when she herself couldn’t make an agenda compliant with new accessibility standards under Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), she knew how difficult it would be to remediate hundreds of existing PDFs and make all future PDFs compliant.
We had very low confidence in our ability to actually make them compliant. I spent so much time on one simple page trying to get it to be compliant. It had a logo on it and a line, and I couldn’t get the line to pass. So how could I expect others to do it when they are sending more complex documents?
Julie Lemon
Vice President of Communications and Legislative Affairs
An Easy, Cost-Effective Solution
In April 2025, a year before the mandate’s original deadline, the college hired a consultant and assembled a staff-led Title II ADA compliance team to assess the scope of remediation, along with document-accessibility solutions for all future PDFs. (The Department of Justice has since extended the deadline from April 2026 to April 26, 2027 or 2028, depending on population size.)
Off-the-shelf solutions identified the number of accessibility errors in a document but were unable to fix or even suggest how to fix them.
That left school leaders with three equally untenable options for existing and future documents: 1) strip out all graphics, images, and other design elements, 2) ban PDFs altogether, or 3) send PDFs out for third-party remediation at a pricey cost per page.
“That was going to be very expensive if we were going to do that for the hundreds of PDFs on our website,” Lemon said.
Then she got an email highlighting the ease and functionality of CivicPlus® DocAccess. Given her difficulty trying to fix the board agenda, she had her doubts: “I thought, ‘There’s no way. They make it sound too easy.’”
Together with the consultant and her web team, they agreed to get a demo. They were especially keen to see how DocAccess would handle the school’s annual viewbook, an image- and design-heavy 50-page PDF that serves as the marquee marketing piece for student recruitment.
Even though the consultant advised the college to move forward with DocAccess, it wasn’t until the tool was implemented in April 2026 that Lemon believed all documents really would be accessible.
It’s a miracle. Even when it was live, we’re just like, ‘This can’t be all there is to it,’. It wasn’t a lift for us. We added it to the website, and we didn’t have to show it where the PDFs were. It crawled the website, found them, and did the remediation. Once it’s done, you just toggle a switch and it makes the document immediately accessible. It’s amazing.
Julie Lemon
Vice President of Communications and Legislative Affairs
Saving Staff Time and Anxiety while Maintaining PDF Quality and Accessibility
With over 22,000 existing PDFs, each with different degrees of complexity, it’s difficult for Lemon to estimate how much time or money it would have cost to remediate them manually. But here’s what she does know: She spent hours trying to fix a one-page agenda.
And as the department responsible for posting all departments’ PDFs to the public-facing website, it would have fallen to her and her staff to manage accessibility. Through DocAccess, the college has already enabled 11,635 documents, helping make accessible versions available without the burden of traditional, document-by-document remediation.
We would have had to test hundreds of PDFs to make sure they were accessible before putting them on the website, so this has saved us an enormous amount of time because we know there would have been issues and a lot of back and forth.
Julie Lemon
Vice President of Communications and Legislative Affairs
Beyond now having confidence in document compliance, Lemon credits DocAccess with other benefits, too:
- Intact workflow: Instead of learning new tools or how to remediate documents themselves, Lemon and her team manage content the way they always have.
- Document translation: Western needed a solution to translate documents into other languages. Lemon had been exploring a solution that was going to be a “huge cost,” but DocAccess now translates all documents into more than 250 languages, expanding access to diverse communities more effectively.
- Extra support: It doesn’t happen often, but if needed, DocAccess flags any accessibility issues that may need extra support. Lemon’s team simply calls the DocAccess support team for live assistance and resolution.
When the DOJ mandate came down in 2024, the anxiety across campus was palpable, Lemon said. But that’s now changed.
“There was panic across the college about how we were going to do all of this. It was overwhelming. Just the sense of relief that has been felt across the college because of this tool, you can’t put a price tag on that.”