We know first-hand that bringing thousands of PDF documents into compliance with Title II of the ADA feels insurmountable. Building accessibility into the document creation process is no easy feat either. Source systems were built decades ago, accessibility training takes staff time and research, and budget and procurement cycles rarely line up with the Title II deadlines. CurbEffect handles your published documents and existing backlog while your team works upstream on a realistic timeline — not under deadline panic.
Most engagements move through the same four phases — discovery and pipeline build, backlog cleanup, ongoing remediation, and a step-down to validation as your upstream systems mature. You can start at any phase that fits your situation.
Phase 0
We start by learning your formats. We review a sample of your documents, map your terminology and structure, build a tagging pipeline specific to you, and run test batches with your team — the foundation that makes every deliverable after it accurate.
Phase 1
We work through your existing archive of PDFs — agendas, notices, bills, utility statements, whatever has accumulated — and deliver documents that conform to PDF/UA-1 and WCAG 2.1 AA, each with a veraPDF validation report and audit trail.
Phase 2
New documents, remediated as they're published. Your pipeline handles future agendas, notices, reports, and templated documents on an ongoing basis — no vendor coordination, no turnaround delays, no per-document negotiation.
Phase 3
When your upstream systems start producing accessible documents natively, we step back to a lighter-touch role — spot-checking, validating, and catching anything that slips through. We step out entirely when you no longer need us.
Every deliverable comes backed by the same standards-based artifacts, so your legal, procurement, and compliance teams have what they need without having to ask.
PDF/UA-1 conformance
Documents engineered to conform to ISO 14289-1, the international standard for accessible PDFs.
veraPDF validation report
An independent, open-source verification — not a proprietary compliance score.
Manual review
Every customized remediation template is reviewed by a human to ensure reading order, semantic tagging (lists, tables, headings), and overall accessibility.
WCAG 2.1 AA alignment
Structure, alt text, reading order, and color contrast aligned with the criteria regulators reference.
The Matterhorn Protocol
We follow The Matterhorn Protocol, which consists of 31 checkpoints and 136 failure conditions that list all possible ways to fail PDF/UA.
Pipeline maintenance
Templates and formats are maintained and updated as needed to adjust to evolving accessibility standards and regulatory requirements.
Schedule a free 20-minute call. We'll review a sample of your documents together, talk through your compliance timeline, and give you a clear scope and a concrete number — no obligation.
Schedule a free callYes. CurbEffect works with entities of all sizes — from small special districts to large municipalities. The ADA Title II deadline applies regardless of size, and our pricing scales to fit smaller volumes.
Because an honest number depends on your documents. Costs swing widely with layout complexity, format variety, volume, and timeline — so a single figure on a page would be misleading for most entities. We scope your documents on a free 20-minute call and give you a fixed number you can take to procurement. No meter, no per-document negotiation.
Document volume, layout complexity (single-column prose vs. multi-column with tables and charts), the number of distinct formats we maintain, your turnaround requirements, and the size of any existing backlog. Documents with heavy mathematical notation, scientific formulas, or deeply nested data are scoped separately so the standard work stays predictable.
Auto-taggers handle simple layouts but routinely misidentify tables, fragment sentences, and miss footnotes. We build a pipeline specific to your document formats and include human review — and we prove it with a veraPDF report, not a proprietary compliance score.
Yes. Some clients start with a backlog-only engagement to meet an immediate deadline, then move to ongoing as new documents accumulate. We'll scope whatever makes sense for your situation.
We'll look at a sample of your documents together, identify complexity level and format variety, estimate your backlog size, and walk through what a pipeline would look like for your organization. You'll leave with a clear understanding of the next steps and potential scope.