From fighting fires and protecting drinking water to maintaining utilities and keeping parks open, special districts provide some of the community’s most essential services. Their mandates may be specialized, but their responsibilities are broad. Despite tight timelines and competing demands, districts devote significant time and attention to making information available online so residents can stay informed and engaged with the services that shape their lives.
Water and utility districts share rate studies and water-quality reports, fire districts publish inspection forms and safety information, and parks and recreation districts post facility rental forms and program schedules. That transparency helps residents understand not only what their district does, but also the value it provides.
But there’s an irony: The same documents, often PDFs, that special districts publish in the name of transparency can become barriers to accessing information, particularly for people with disabilities. This can damage public trust for oftentimes hyper-local entities that often depend on that trust to succeed.
As years of these records accumulate, the risk compounds: this basic tool of government transparency becomes one of the district’s biggest accessibility barriers.
A district may have already invested significant time and effort into making its website ADA accessible, while overlooking years of PDF board packets, reports, forms, maps and scanned records. But document accessibility is more than compliance. It determines whether residents can actually use the public information their district has worked so hard to provide.
Inaccessible Documents Create Barriers, Compounding Risks
Imagine a resident hearing that their local fire district is considering a new wildfire-prevention program and wants to learn more. The district has done its part to keep the community informed, posting meeting minutes, staff reports, maps and other supporting materials online. But if the PDFs aren’t properly structured, they can be difficult or impossible to navigate with a screen reader. Scanned documents can be even more challenging to search, translate or view on a mobile device.
And the challenge grows with every upload.
The document libraries of special districts are constantly growing. Annual reports accumulate year after year; board packets accumulate after every meeting, and new projects add engineering reports and maps that need to be shared with the public. All of these documents get added to years, sometimes decades, of older PDFs and scanned records already online.
Understandably, it can feel overwhelming to think about how to make every online document accessible, especially when new, incoming documents need to be published online at the same time, on deadline. The good news: Fixing this doesn’t require stopping publication, pulling documents offline or asking already-busy staff to spend their days remediating thousands of PDFs one at a time. Special districts can address accessibility by changing how they handle documents in the first place, all without adding budget or extra staff time.
A More Sustainable Approach to Accessible Special District Documents
With a modern document accessibility strategy, special districts can balance the need for public transparency with the need to meet evolving digital accessibility requirements for documents.
First, assess the scale of the challenge. Accessibility testing tools can help districts identify problems across their websites and document libraries and determine which files need attention. Free tools such as PAC 2024 / PAC can help evaluate PDF accessibility. From there, districts can prioritize documents that are required, current or frequently accessed. Older documents can be archived under exceptions for unused documents and still remain online; just be sure they are subject to inclusion.
Second, make accessibility part of the standard way documents are published. New tools can scan documents, identify accessibility issues and, in some cases, automatically remediate content or provide an accessible alternative, potentially reducing the cost and staff time associated with traditional manual remediation. This can help districts move away from treating every new PDF as a one-off remediation task.
Finally, ask whether a PDF is always the right format in the first place. If residents are applying for something, making a payment or providing public input, web-based forms or HTML-based surveys are easier to make accessible and use on a mobile phone.
This doesn’t mean PDFs are going away. They’re still useful for things like finalized records and archives, but they don’t have to be the primary way residents get information or interact with their local government.
Accessibility Should Support Transparency, Not Stand in Its Way
Special districts shouldn’t have to choose between keeping their communities informed and making that information accessible. The goal is to build accessibility into the way districts deliver information to residents, all without overrunning budgets or adding more work for staff. With the right processes and tools in place, and a willingness to move beyond PDFs when there’s a better option, districts can make transparency and accessibility work together so everyone in their community can stay informed and engaged.
Mac Clemmens is the CivicPlus® Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Innovation and the Co-Founder of DocAccess and Streamline. He is a proud advocate of website accessibility and local government, having presented on the subject at conferences nationwide. He received the prestigious “Vision Award” from Disability Rights California — the nation’s largest disability rights advocacy organization — in recognition of his commitment to creating accessible website experiences for all users. Mac is passionate about helping local governments tell their stories and engage with their communities, ensuring that the fear of ADA noncompliance doesn’t stand in the way.
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