Accessibility on your District Website: 5 Hidden Gaps Hindering Compliance

Board agendas, minutes, and supporting documents are often posted publicly as a PDF. While this fulfills some meeting transparency obligations, this practice is not accessible on its own.

Without the right setup, PDFs – both those that are composed digitally or made up of scanned images – cannot be interpreted by screen reader software. This leaves users with low vision unable to independently review board meeting notes, like their peers.

Why It Matters

Board governance materials are among the highest-risk pages on any district website. They are public-facing, legally required, and frequently accessed by community members, journalists, and advocacy organizations. 

If a parent with a disability cannot independently access the agenda for a meeting about their child’s school, they may have cause to file a complaint under the ADA’s digital accessibility mandate.

What To Do

If notes are taken by hand, stop scanning them into a PDF and posting them without review. If you must scan, consider utilizing optical character recognition (OCR) software to produce searchable text. Then, verify the reading order before posting the PDF publicly.

Better yet, avoid the extra hassle by producing board notes digitally from the start. Use your board management platform or word processor’s built-in export function to produce tagged, accessible PDFs. Before posting it publicly, check every PDF’s accessibility by selecting all text (Ctrl+A). If nothing highlights, the PDF’s content is inaccessible.

Booster clubs, athletic departments, and activity sponsors frequently build standalone sites or use third-party scheduling platforms that the district links to, but does not control. Despite this, these perimeter sites are required to meet the same accessibility standards as the district’s core website.

These standalone sites often fall short of achieving suitable accessibility. They may lack alt text, utilize poor color contrast, or rely entirely on mouse-based navigation.

Why It Matters

If the district requires or directs families to use a platform, the district remains responsible for its accessibility, even if a vendor or volunteer organization built it. 

A family that cannot access tryout schedules, game results, or registration forms because of an inaccessible third-party site has the same legal standing to file a complaint as if the district homepage were inaccessible.

What to Do

Inventory every external site your district links to or requires families to use. Ask each vendor or organization for a current VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template). If they cannot provide one, or if their VPAT is more than two to three years old, escalate the issue.

Consider including accessibility conformance language in any agreement—formal or informal—with organizations that publish content on the district’s behalf.

Online registration systems, parent communication apps, meal payment portals, and learning management systems are all vendor-provided tools that districts embed or link from their websites. 

Many administrators assume the vendor is solely responsible for accessibility. But without proper documentation, districts remain fully liable for any non-accessible content or functions on those third-party platforms.

Why It Matters

When the district licenses, requires, or makes a platform available as part of its program, the district retains legal responsibility under current ADA guidelines. Vendor promises do not eliminate district liability.

If a required enrollment form or parent communication channel is inaccessible, the district—not the vendor that created or hosts it—faces the potential complaint.

What to Do

Require accessibility conformance language in all technology contracts, such as through a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template). If a vendor tool is found to be inaccessible after adoption, your contract should include a no-cost exit clause or a binding remediation timeline.

While negotiating, ask vendors pointed questions: Does the platform support keyboard-only navigation? Is it compatible with screen readers? Are timed interactions adjustable for users who need more time? No matter their response, document your due diligence.

Teachers routinely upload syllabi, study guides, worksheets, and newsletters to classroom pages or learning management systems. These documents are rarely checked for digital accessibility, despite being highly visible to students and their families.

Common accessibility limitations in this type of classroom content includes images without alt text, PDFs created from screenshots, Word documents lacking proper heading structure, and color-dependent information with insufficient contrast.

Why It Matters

If a student with a disability is required to access a document to participate in instruction, that document must be accessible. This is not just a web content standard under the updated ADA guidelines; it is also a FAPE obligation under IDEA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

What to Do

Train staff on accessible document creation, with a focus on color contrast, alt text, page structure, meaningful links, and transcription (all covered in our digital accessibility primer).

Making these foundational practices memorable and actionable for teachers is also key. One way to do that is by building a short accessibility checklist into your LMS upload workflow. That way, teachers see accessibility reminders at the point of action, empowering them to self-initiate implementation until these principles become a habit.

Registration and enrollment pages are an essential gateway for all families. But too often, they’re built with form elements that lack proper labels, rely on drag-and-drop interactions without keyboard alternatives, or display error messages that are not announced to screen readers. 

Why it matters

These are high-stakes interactions; a family that cannot complete enrollment is effectively locked out of an education to which their child is entitled.

Enrollment pages and resources are a prime target for accessibility auditors. It is public-facing, high-traffic, and directly affects access to public education. An inaccessible online enrollment process represents a likely ADA Title II violation – just as a physically inaccessible school building would incur scrutiny from students with certain disabilities.

What to do

Test your enrollment forms with a keyboard only (that is, without using a mouse). If you cannot complete the entire process using Tab, Enter, and arrow keys, the form is not suitably accessible.

Also, test these same forms using screen reader software (NVDA is a free option). Ensure every form field has a visible label and a programmatic label that assistive technology can read. Verify that error messages identify the problem and are announced automatically. 

Don’t forget: if your forms are vendor-provided, require the vendor to demonstrate accessibility conformance. No matter what, your district is on the hook for ensuring digital accessibility is maintained.