Section 508 & Document Accessibility

Accessible documents in every language built from the source file rather than repaired after publication.

A document can be perfectly translated and still be unusable to someone relying on a screen reader, keyboard navigation, magnification or another assistive technology. It works the other way too. An accessible English file does not produce an accessible Spanish, Arabic or Vietnamese file on its own. Each language version has its own reading order, its own metadata and alt text and each one has to be checked.

The Translation Company does both jobs in one place. We remediate PDFs build and check every language version, and write the conformance report when procurement asks for one. The work is delivered in-house and led by an accessibility practitioner who holds the IAAP Accessibility Document Specialist (ADS) credential and the DHS Section 508 Trusted Tester credential.

One vendor takes a document from the source file through translation, tagging, alternate formats and the mailbox, under one service level. A remediation shop cannot say that, and neither can a translation vendor.

Operating to ISO 9001 and 17100 standards  ·  Women-owned (WBENC), SAM.gov-registered  ·  U.S.-based linguists and U.S.-only data handling  ·  Serving public-sector clients since 2005

ON THIS PAGE

• The Standards Map: Section 508, ADA Title II and Section 504
• What We Remediate
• Where Accessibility Work Becomes Difficult
• Where to Start on a PDF backlog
• What Accessible Document Remediation Looks Like
• Multilingual Accessibility is the Hard Part and Our Advantage
• What the Checker Catches and What It Misses
• VPAT and ACR Authoring: What They Are and Who Needs One
• How We Price This and Why Not by the Page
• Who We Do this Work For and How We Handle the Files
• Talk With Us About Your Document Accessibility Program

The Standards Map: Section 508, ADA Title II and Section 504

“Section 508 compliant” is often used as shorthand for accessibility. It is not that simple any more. Three separate rules now apply, and which one governs your content depends on who you are and where you publish it. We do not reduce that to a single badge.

Framework	Who it reaches	Technical benchmark	Current timing
Revised Section 508	Federal agencies and the electronic content they publish	WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA, with specific rules for non-web documents	In force. Federal electronic documents such as PDFs, word-processing files, spreadsheets and presentations can be covered.
ADA Title II web/mobile rule	State and local government web content and mobile apps	WCAG 2.1 AA	Population 50,000+: April 26, 2027. Smaller entities and special districts: April 26, 2028.
HHS Section 504 web/mobile rule	Recipients of HHS federal financial assistance	WCAG 2.1 AA	15+ employees: May 11, 2027. Fewer than 15: May 10, 2028.

Both of those deadlines moved back a year in spring 2026. It means most of this work has not been done yet, and the volume arrives in 2027.

So the question to ask a vendor is not whether they can write “508” in a proposal. It is which standard governs your content, and whether they can tell you why. Federal Section 508 still runs on WCAG 2.0 AA. The newer ADA Title II and HHS Section 504 rules run on WCAG 2.1 AA. If you publish documents through a website covered by either of the newer rules, those documents come into scope with it. 

What We Remediate

We can start with an existing file that needs repair. We would rather start with the source file, before the final output exists.

• Accessible PDFs — tags, heading structure, lists, logical reading order, bookmarks where appropriate, language metadata, alternative text, tables, links and interactive elements.
• Microsoft Word — accessible styles and heading hierarchy, meaningful link text, image descriptions, readable tables, document properties and structure that survives conversion as cleanly as possible.
• PowerPoint — reading order, slide titles, alternative text, contrast and non-color cues, meaningful links, table structure and accessible object sequencing.
• Excel — sheet organization, table/header structure, meaningful names and labels, alternative text and patterns that make workbook content easier to navigate with assistive technology.
• InDesign and multilingual desktop-publishing source files — accessibility decisions made upstream so translated output does not have to be rebuilt from zero after every export.
• Forms and complex tables — work that often requires more manual judgment because interaction, associations and reading logic cannot be inferred reliably from appearance alone.

We also produce captions, transcripts and alternate-formats. Those sit on their own page, because Braille, large print and audio are a different production line with a different turnaround. This page is about the digital document.

Where Accessibility Work Becomes Difficult

The riskiest documents are rarely the longest ones. They are the ones where the layout carries meaning that was never written into the file. That is common in institutional publishing, where a page may look obvious to a sighted reader while assistive technology receives an entirely different sequence.

Complex tables

A simple table is quick work: mark the header row, check the reading order, done. A complex table is not. Merged cells, headers stacked two or three deep, and footnotes that sit outside the grid all have to be read one cell at a time, in order, and still make sense.  Sometimes the honest answer is that the table should not be a table. We will tell you that. Splitting one complex table into three simple ones usually serves the reader better than tagging a structure that was never going to work.

Forms and Interactive Documents

A form is accessible when someone can fill it in and submit it without a mouse. Tagging the text around the fields does not get you there. Every field needs a label the screen reader can announce. Instructions have to be tied to the field they belong to, not just printed above it. The tab key has to move through the form in the order a person would fill it in. And an error message in red text is not an error message, because nobody hears red. This is why a two-page benefits application can cost more to remediate than a forty-page report. That is also why we do not quote a blended per-page rate.

Charts, Diagrams and Alternative Text

Alt text is not a description of what an image looks like. It is the information the picture is carrying. A bar chart showing enrollment falling for three years does not need an alt text that says “bar chart.” It needs an alt text that says enrolment fell for three years. A decorative border needs no alt text at all, and marking it as decorative is part of the job. In multilingual work, alt text is content too and it must be translated and reviewed with the rest of the file.

Where to Start on a PDF backlog

Nobody starts this with a clean library. There are usually years of PDFs behind you, made in different departments, with different tools, by people who have since left. Treating all of it as equally urgent is how a budget gets spent without the riskiest documents being fixed.

We sort the backlog by one question: what happens to someone who cannot read this document? A benefits application, an appeal notice or an enrolment form comes first, because someone loses something real if they cannot use it. A 2019 annual report comes last. Each document then lands in one of four piles: fix it now, rebuild it from the source file, leave it until the next revision, or take it off the website.

It also stops the common mistake: paying to remediate a finished PDF that is about to be revised next month.  If the document is still live and still edited, fix the template it comes out of. Then every version after this one is born accessible and nobody pays for the same repair twice.

What Accessible Document Remediation Looks Like

Running a checker and clearing the red flags is not remediation. It is the first ten minutes of it. A document has to expose its meaning and structure to someone who may never see the page the way its designer intended.

On a typical PDF, the order goes something like this. 

• Rebuild the tag tree, so every heading, list and figure is identified as what it is. 
• Set the reading order, and check it by listening rather than looking. 
• Set the document language, so the screen reader uses the right voice. 
• Write the alt text. 
• Fix the table headers. 
• Then test the whole file with a keyboard and no mouse.

How long that takes depends on what the file is, not how many pages it has.

Multilingual Accessibility is the Hard Part and Our Advantage

An accessible English file does not make an accessible Spanish one. Spanish runs about twenty percent longer than English, so the layout moves and the reading order moves with it. The alt text has to be rewritten in Spanish, because alt text is content. The language metadata has to say Spanish, or the screen reader reads it aloud in an English voice. Arabic needs the reading order rebuilt right to left. Every one of those is a separate piece of work, and it happens once per language.

So a vendor who receives twenty finished PDFs at the end of a project is not doing one job twenty times faster. They are doing twenty jobs.

We work earlier than that. Translation, multilingual desktop publishing and accessibility sit inside the same production environment, so we tag the source-file once, before any language is exported. The structure then comes out the other side already in place, in every language. We still test every language separately. Tagging once does not mean checking once, and any vendor who tells you otherwise has not done a right-to-left file. PDF repair is not going away. Legacy files, scanned records and anything a third party sends you arrive as finished PDFs, and there is no source file to go back to. We do that work too.

If you publish the same notice in twelve languages every quarter, the difference is not a small saving. It is the difference between a project you run once and a repair bill you pay four times a year, forever.

What the Checker Catches and What It Misses

The software is good at what it is good at. A checker will find missing tags, a missing document language and empty alt text in seconds, and auto-tagging handles clean digital text well enough. We use tools where they save time.

But what it cannot do is judge. A checker confirms that alt text exists. It cannot tell you the alt text is wrong. It confirms a reading order has been set. It cannot tell you the order makes no sense. It will pass a form where every field is labelled accordingly.

None of that shows up as a red flag, and all of it fails the person trying to use the document.

So a person checks every file after the software has. They read the tag tree, follow the reading order, and work through the form with a keyboard. A passing score is where our review starts, not what we hand you. The federal government’s own Section 508 training materials says the same thing: tag accuracy and reading order have to be checked manually.

VPAT and ACR Authoring: What They Are and Who Needs One

Some buyers need more than an accessible file. They need a document that states, requirement by requirement, how far the thing conforms and where it does not. We write those, using the VPAT framework published by the Information Technology Industry Council.

The two terms get used interchangeably and they are not the same.  

• VPAT is the template. 
• Once the supplier has evaluated the product or service and completed the template with conformance findings, the completed document is an Accessibility Conformance Report, or ACR.

Anyone who sends you a “VPAT” is sending you a filled-in template and calling it by the wrong name.

The current VPAT 2.5Rev comes in four editions: 

• 508 for the U.S. federal Section 508 standard
• WCAG for WCAG-focused reporting
• EU for EN 301 549
• INT for reporting across the combined frameworks. 

Ask which edition your own procurement rules call for before anyone starts filling one in. An ACR is only worth what the testing behind it is worth.

How We Price This and Why Not by the Page

We do not publish a per-page rate. Page count tells you almost nothing about what a document will take, and a single blended rate only works if the vendor is guessing which way the mix will fall. We would rather look at your files first.

• How the file was made: Born digital, scanned, or a mix of both. A scanned page has to be OCR’d and proofread before anything can be tagged.
• Whether the source file still exists: If it does, the work is cheaper and the result is better.
• How many tables and charts, and how complex: A chart needs alt text written by someone who understood the chart.
• Whether there are forms: These are the expensive pages.
• How many languages: Each one is its own file, tested on its own.
• Which standard applies, and what has to be documented: WCAG 2.0 AA and 2.1 AA are not the same job, and an ACR is separate work again.

If what you need is the lowest advertised per-page rate, we are not the right vendor, and we would rather say so now than after the kickoff call. We learned that the hard way. In our first years we took work from clients whose expectations we could not meet, and it went badly for both sides. So we say who we are not for before anyone spends time on a proposal.

We are built for the buyer whose files have to survive a review, work in eight languages and still be defensible in two years.

Who We Do this Work For and How We Handle the Files

The documents that need remediation are rarely brochures. A benefits denial notice contains a name, a case number and a reason. An IEP contains a child’s diagnosis. That material goes through the same production line as everything else we handle. Accessibility work is handled the same way translation is. Professional tools only, access limited to the people on the job, and handling terms written into the contract rather than promised on a call. Nothing goes into a consumer AI tool because it would be faster. Our vendors are contractually barred from training on client content or keeping it, and we will put zero-retention terms in writing.

We have worked with public-sector buyers since 2005. Our public record includes: 

• The County of Santa Clara
• Harris County
• The City of San José
• The City of Celina
• Newark Public Schools 
• The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District

They are all named clients, and their procurement offices can say what working with us was like.

We are registered on SAM.gov and our supplier-diversity credentials are certified, not self-declared. The accessibility work is done in-house. It does not get passed to a remediation shop with our name on the invoice.

Most of the time accessibility is not the whole job. A county needs the public notice translated and the PDF tagged. A district needs parent letters that work in six languages and in a screen reader. Those are usually two purchase orders, two vendors and two people to chase when the deadline moves. Here they are one.

Talk With Us About Your Document Accessibility Program

Pick the document that worries you most. A form with nested tables, a board packet nobody has opened for a long time, a notice that has to go out in eight languages next quarter. Send it with the source file if you still have it, and tell us which standard you have been asked to meet.

We will remediate it and send it back, along with what we found, what it would cost at volume and which of your documents we think you should not be paying to fix at all.