1,400 Legacy Documents Remediated — Zero Accessibility Complaints in 2 Years
Following a Department of Education OCR complaint, a public university remediated 1,400 legacy course documents to full PDF/UA compliance and achieved WCAG 2.1 AA on all seven administrative portals — within one academic semester.
1,400
Documents remediated to PDF/UA
24 months
Complaint-free since remediation
WCAG 2.1 AA
Full website conformance
6 weeks
Document remediation timeline
The Challenge
What A Public University System Was Facing
A public university received a formal complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights alleging that the university's course catalog, financial aid documents, and student services portal were inaccessible to students with visual and cognitive disabilities. The complaint specifically cited 1,400 legacy PDF documents — scanned images without OCR, lacking tag structures, entirely unreadable by screen readers — as well as WCAG failures across seven administrative web portals.
The university had a 90-day OCR resolution window. The Dean of Digital Learning engaged BuildWithAccess with a clear mandate: remediate the documents and the website before the semester's end, and build internal capacity to prevent recurrence.
Our Approach
How We Solved It
Triaged all 1,400 PDFs by remediation complexity: batch OCR candidates (text-based PDFs), manual remediation required (scanned images with complex tables), and archival documents needing accessibility notices only.
Deployed batch OCR processing for 920 text-based PDFs using automated tag structure generation and reading order optimization, with human review of all output.
Manually remediated 480 complex documents including multi-column course syllabi, nested-table financial aid forms, and campus maps requiring detailed alternative text descriptions.
Conducted a parallel WCAG 2.1 AA audit of all seven administrative web portals, prioritizing the financial aid application portal and student services dashboard for immediate remediation.
Delivered two 3-hour accessible document training workshops for the Web Services team and publishing staff, covering the Word-to-PDF accessible authoring workflow.
Created an Accessible Document Style Guide and Microsoft Word templates enabling future documents to produce accessible PDFs without manual remediation.
Produced OCR compliance evidence reports for each document batch, formatted for inclusion in the OCR resolution agreement submission.
The Outcome
What We Achieved Together
All 1,400 documents were remediated within 6 weeks — three weeks ahead of the OCR resolution deadline. The university's resolution agreement was signed and the complaint was closed. WCAG 2.1 AA web remediation was completed within the same semester.
In the 24 months since remediation, the university has received zero new accessibility complaints. The document templates and training program have become institutionalized in the Web Services onboarding process — new publications are produced in accessible formats as a standard workflow rather than as a remediation afterthought.
“The OCR complaint was a wake-up call. BuildWithAccess not only fixed our immediate problem but trained our team so we will not be back in this situation. Two years later, we are still complaint-free and our document workflow is completely changed.”
Services Used
- Document Accessibility
- WCAG Audit
- Training
Standards Achieved
- PDF/UA
- WCAG 2.1 AA
- Section 508
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