Background

...skip to the questions if you don't care to read this part

I'm relatively new to the accessibility world (in the grand scheme of the movement). The moment I became aware of our lack of accessibility regulations I became very passionate about using my skills to change this, or help is probably the better word. I have been working on accessible conversion specifically of complex uniform documents for the past three years. Originally it was to create an accessible alternative from the source (meaning taking a Word/Word Perfect/XML version and creating an accessible PDF from it), but I always had a goal of creating the actual PDF, I just found a lot of barriers when doing so until just recently.

Professionally, my strengths are Math and Computer Science. Teaching as well which might be a little relevant because I've been using it a lot when I worked for the State as I gained technical knowledge of accessibility and started passing it along to my team members in various dev meetings.

I really want to make a change in this field. From what I've learned, there seem to be many companies out there that have a primary goal of making money without actually wanting to help. I need to make a disclaimer immediately and say that I just created a startup that would provide the service I described above (where I would take templated PDF documents and make them accessible - or even source documents like the ones I originally worked on). I say this because I know it can read as though I have an ulterior motive in this post. And while I do hope to do this work full time and make a living off of it, my only motive is not profit. I am excited to finally see a way to use software development in an altruistic manner (I haven't found a way to do that yet- actually help people). I have a good friend who is also legally blind with whom I've had plenty of conversations with before I even got into the accessiblity realm. I've helped them on many occasions with computer settings, or creating alternate formats for projects she's working on.

Wow, what an aside. I am tempted to use AI b/c I clearly can be wordy here! These are the questions I have and am hoping to get advice on:

##Questions

What are your current gaps/needs when it specifically comes to PDF documents? From what I've seen, even source formats won't produce fully accessible PDF/UA compliant PDF documents. Even consider documents like Utility bill that are generated as PDFs straight from the utility company's software. Also, I'm thinking of nuanced documents that can be unique to an agency or company - the first example that comes to mind would be legislative documents that have amendment language which varies by state, but I'm sure there are more.

What resources would you recommend I add to my toolbelt if my goal is to truly move into this realm full time and hopefully use my computer skills to help bridge the gap for PDFs? Here's what I've done: taken the courses offered by Deque University, became a member of the PDF Association, became a member of IAAP and am signing up for their certifications next week, signed up for various news letters around the topics described above, listened to state and local government podcasts on this topic, started following StateScoop and reddit threads like this one, and independent research as far as legislation, testing with NVDA, reading linkedIn posts and initiating connections with experts in this field on there.

Thanks in advance for any info you can offer.

TL;DR: Worked as a government programmer, discovered 90% of web content is inaccessible, spent years figuring out PDF accessibility specifically, here's what surprised me most.

I've worked in tech for about 10 years — graph theory, C++, and eventually Ruby on Rails. Math and computer science have always been my focus and passion, and I did not predict that accessibility would become the thing I care most about professionally. And I definitely didn't predict I'd end up founding a company around it (the impostor syndrome is real over here)

Here's how it happened.

The Bill That Changed Everything

About three years ago I was a programmer for a State Legislature. A bill came through — HB21-1110 — that required all local government agencies' web content to be fully accessible by July 2025. To say this bill was aggressive is an understatement. Not only that, but we were the first State to pass this requirement. We had no template to go off of.

My first reaction was: surely most web content is accessible by now? We've been building the web for decades. How bad could it be?

Turns out roughly 90% of web content is not accessible. I was completely wrong, and the scale of it floored me.

What I didn't know then was that the rest of the country was about to face the same reckoning. The DOJ's Title II rule now requires state and local governments to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards — including PDFs — by April 2027.

The Guilt Hit First

I immediately felt a wave of guilt come over me about how much our industry had failed its users. How many limitations had I personally put in place without ever thinking about it?

I felt obligated to do whatever I could to fix it. So I spent months finding ways to make completely inaccessible government PDF documents readable by a screen reader.

What I Actually Learned

A few things surprised me.

Accessibility is much bigger than screen readers

It includes color contrast for people who are color blind, proper line spacing and letter width for people with dyslexia, labels on charts instead of colors only, descriptions for images. Close your eyes and try to describe a web page you just read. If there's a table, you'd need to announce it. Same for lists. Most of us have never thought about this.

PDFs are uniquely hard

Ideally you make the source document accessible before generating the PDF. But even then, the exported PDF will still have gaps — dropped tags, scrambled reading order, missing metadata. This is the part that most tools and vendors still haven't solved correctly. And there's a reason -- it's not easy or intuitive. AI auto-tagging gets you partway there. Overlays don't help at all. After all of the reading and testing I've done with accessibility - I now cringe when writing about accessibility being "solved" by an overlay or AI alone. It's a bandaid on a much bigger problem. And it's frankly insulting to provide as a "solution". To me, it's like cheating on a test and hoping you'll get away with it.

Retrofitting accessibility is brutal

It's significantly easier to build accessibility in from the start. I'd conservatively estimate that doing accessibility work after the fact triples your effort. At least it did mine.

The Curb Cut Effect

There's a phrase in the accessibility world that I keep coming back to — the Curb Cut Effect.

In the 1970s, disability advocates fought to have curbs cut into ramps so wheelchair users could safely cross the street. What happened next surprised everyone. Those ramps ended up making sidewalks better for delivery workers with arms full of packages, movers with dollies, travelers with rolling luggage, parents pushing strollers, pedestrians with depth perception issues — people nobody designed the ramp for.

That's the thing about accessibility. When you build something to be accessible for some of us, you're actually building something better for all of us.

Full disclosure — this experience led me to start a company focused on this specific problem. Not here to pitch anything, just sharing what I learned. Happy to answer questions about the technical side of PDF accessibility specifically.

What's been your experience with PDF accessibility — in government, enterprise, or anywhere else? Curious whether others have hit the same walls.

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