Every week, city clerks, municipal staff, and planning departments across the country receive documents from engineering firms, architects, contractors, and consultants. These documents are then added to public agendas, posted on government websites, and distributed to residents who request them. Under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the municipality is responsible for ensuring that any materials it publishes are accessible to people with disabilities. The issue is that a large portion of what they receive is inaccessible. The cost and effort of remediating the inaccessible files are borne entirely by the agency, not by the firm that produced them.
On the eve of the first Title II deadline, which may trigger an avalanche of accessibility litigation, that arrangement is worth re-examining. The organizations producing these documents are professionals being paid for their work. Accessibility is not a new requirement. Yet municipalities continue to bear the cost of remediating documents they did not create, written by vendors who face no direct consequences for delivering inaccessible material.
What Municipalities Are Required to Do
Title II of the ADA requires state and local government entities to make their programs, services, and activities accessible to people with disabilities. When a document is added to a public meeting agenda, posted on a city website, or provided in response to a public records request, the municipality is responsible for ensuring that the document meets accessibility standards, currently set at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Who actually created the original document does not affect this shift in responsibility. If a Title II agency publicly publishes a package of documents, the agency bears the compliance obligation even if it did not create the inaccessible components in the file.
The Department of Justice’s 2024 rule on web accessibility formalized this requirement for digital content, mandating that Title II entities comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Engineering reports, site plans, environmental assessments, construction documents, and contractor submissions that are published through public channels are all subject to this requirement.
What Inaccessible Documents Look Like in Practice
The documents that municipalities receive from outside firms often require substantial remediation. Common problems include:
- Scanned PDFs without an underlying text layer, so a screen reader picks up nothing.
- Large technical documents with no heading structure, making navigation impossible for someone using assistive technology.
- Images, charts, and diagrams with no alternative text.
- Tables created without proper markup, so the relationship between rows and columns is lost when read by a screen reader.
- Documents exported from design software in ways that completely scramble the reading order.
Fixing these issues is not a quick task. Remediating a complex engineering report or dozens of pages of construction diagrams can take hours of skilled work. That work typically falls to whoever on the municipal staff is responsible for the website or the agenda packet, often someone already managing a full workload, had no role in producing the original document, and may not understand the subject matter they are being asked to remediate.
Who Is Paying for this Remediation?
Municipalities are paying for accessibility remediation through staff time, third-party remediation services, software purchases, and delayed publication timelines when documents are not ready in time for a public meeting. Some agencies have invested in software tools that automate parts of the remediation process, which helps, but those tools still require human review and still cannot fully fix documents with deep structural problems. When municipalities foot the bill, that honestly means taxpayers are paying for it.
None of that cost is being recovered from the firms that submitted the inaccessible files. Contracts between municipalities and outside vendors rarely include accessibility requirements for deliverables, and even when they do, enforcement is inconsistent. The municipality may not even have a signed agreement with the companies submitting parts of building plans. The result is that the public sector absorbs a recurring cost that originates in the private sector.
The Case for Shifting Responsibility
Engineering firms, architects, and contractors already operate under a range of professional and contractual standards. Building codes, environmental regulations, submittal formatting requirements, and technical specifications are all conditions that professional firms are expected to meet in delivering their work. Accessibility requirements for documents are not fundamentally different from any of those standards.
Say, for example, a municipality requires files to be submitted as PDFs. If a firm submits construction drawings that do not meet the specified PDF format, the municipality will return them. If a report is missing required sections, it is returned for revision. There is no obvious reason why an inaccessible document should be treated any differently. The firm can obtain the tools, the professional capacity, and the contractual relationship needed for experienced assistance in producing accessible files. What is currently missing is the expectation that they must do so.
Building that expectation into procurement and contracting is the most direct way to shift the burden. Contract language requiring all deliverables to meet WCAG 2.1 AA or PDF/UA standards, combined with a clear process for returning non-conformant submissions, would place the responsibility for remediation where it belongs. The firm that produced the document knows its content, has access to the source files, and is in a far better position to remediate it than the municipal clerk who receives it, typically at the deadline.
What Needs to Change
Several things would need to happen for this shift to work in practice. First, procurement templates and standard contract language would need to be updated to include document accessibility as a deliverable requirement. This is not complicated to draft, but it requires someone with procurement authority to prioritize it.
Secondly, submission instructions would have to be updated to make it clear that nothing is considered successfully submitted unless it is accessible.
Third, staff who review submittals would need sufficient familiarity with accessibility standards to identify non-conformant documents and return them, rather than absorbing the remediation work themselves. That does not require deep technical expertise, but it does require basic training and clear guidance on what to look for.
Fourth, there would need to be a consistent policy on what happens when a vendor submits an inaccessible document close to a deadline. Municipalities are under pressure to publish agenda packets on time, and that pressure often leads staff to just fix the document themselves rather than push back to the submitter. A clear policy that puts deadline risk on the vendor, not the agency, would change that dynamic.
Finally, professional associations that oversee engineering, architecture, and construction could improve by making accessibility a standard part of their document deliverables, similar to how they handle other technical standards. Firms that implement accessible document practices early will be better prepared as more municipalities begin to include these requirements in their contracts and standard processes. Professional associations would be wise to invite speakers with accessibility expertise to their conferences, offer discounted accessibility training, and provide accessibility office hours for their members.
Where Things Stand
Right now, most municipalities are managing this problem internally. A few agencies, such as the City of Boulder, have started including robust accessibility language in their contracts with outside firms, but it is not yet a consistent practice. Compliance pressure on municipalities is rising as the DOJ’s web accessibility rule takes effect, meaning the volume of documents requiring remediation is likely to rise rather than decline. Serial plaintiff law firms are chomping at the bit for the April 24th, 2026, deadline to pass so they can declare open season on any Title II organization that came under the first deadline that continues to publish new inaccessible documents on their websites.
The question of who should bear the cost of making documents accessible is not complicated when you look at it head-on. The organization that creates the document has the greatest incentive, knowledge, and control over its accessibility. The municipality that randomly receives inaccessible filings at the last minute has the least control and knowledge. Procurement policies and document acceptance process modifications are the practical mechanisms for aligning responsibility with capability. There is no technical or legal barrier to using them that way.
Note: This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.