ADA Title II · WCAG 2.1 Level AA
Your website is mostly fine. Your PDFs are the problem.
Districts have spent years on the site itself, and it shows. What did not get touched is the pile of documents behind it — boundary maps, handbooks, board packets, calendars, forms — most of them scans, most of them unreadable to anyone using a screen reader, and all of them covered by the same rule as the pages that link to them.
April 26, 2027
Districts serving a population of 50,000 or more
April 26, 2028
Districts under 50,000, and special district governments
Those dates moved back a year in April 2026, the change is being challenged in court, and the department has said it may revisit the rules for schools specifically. So we are not going to sell you a countdown. The duty not to shut families out is already here, the backlog takes longer than people expect, and that is the whole argument for starting now.
The five documents that cause most of it
Every district has the same short list. Fixing these is most of the benefit for a small fraction of the work.
The attendance boundary map
Almost always a scan. A screen reader reads it as an empty image, and it is one of the most-opened parent documents of the year.
Replace it with an address lookup that answers in words. Find My School →
Enrollment and transfer forms
Usually a flat PDF with no form fields, so it cannot be filled in without printing it.
Rebuild as a tagged, fillable document or an accessible web form.
Board packets and agendas
Long, generated every month, and almost never tagged. Reading order is arbitrary.
Tag headings, lists and tables; fix reading order; add a real outline.
Calendars and menus
Published as images of tables. No text at all.
Publish the data as an accessible table, keep the pretty version alongside.
Handbooks and policy documents
Scanned once years ago and re-posted every year since.
One clean rebuild, then a template your office can reuse.
How it runs
Smallest useful thing first
- 01From $1,500
A look at what you actually have
We crawl the public site and count the documents, sort them by how often families open them, and test a sample by keyboard and screen reader. You get a list, not a score.
- 02See Find My School pricing
Fix the worst one first
Usually the boundary map, because replacing it with a working address lookup solves an accessibility problem and a phone-call problem in the same move.
- 03Quoted per batch
Work through the backlog
Software does the first pass on tagging and structure. A person reviews every page, because alt text, complex tables, forms and reading order are exactly what automation is worst at.
- 04Included
Stop the backlog coming back
A short guide for whoever posts documents, a template that starts accessible, and an accessibility statement with a named contact so a parent has somewhere to write.
- 05$300/month
Somebody still looking next year
Optional, and the step most districts skip until the second time they pay for the same audit. A crawl every month, new PDFs flagged as they are posted, a person re-testing enrollment and calendar flows each quarter, and a written summary you can hand to the board.
A first engagement is priced well under California’s competitive-bidding threshold for non-construction services, which for 2026 is $119,100 under Public Contract Code 20111 — in most districts that means a written quote, a requisition and a purchase order rather than an advertised bid. W-9, certificate of insurance, statement of work and an accessibility statement whenever your business office wants them.
The half of your exposure that is not on your website
The rule covers web content your district provides even when an outside vendor builds and hosts it. That includes systems you cannot edit, which is the single most uncomfortable fact in district accessibility and the one most likely to be left out of a scope of work. Here is what we can honestly do about each.
The LMS and the parent portal
Canvas, Schoology, Aeries, ParentSquare. You did not build them and you cannot patch them, but the content your staff puts inside them is yours and so is the choice of vendor.
We test them, tell you what is broken, and write the vendor a letter your procurement office can attach to the renewal.
Embedded third-party tools
The payment page, the lunch-account system, the bus tracker, the video player. Each one is a separate company shipping code onto a page with your district's name at the top.
We inventory every embed, test each one, and tell you which are genuinely unusable versus merely awkward.
Vendor accessibility claims
Most will send you a VPAT. A good number of those VPATs are generated from an automated scan and claim far more conformance than the product delivers.
We read them against what we found in testing and tell you where the document and the product disagree.
Staff-created documents already posted
Thousands of files, added one at a time over fifteen years by people who had no reason to know any of this.
We sort them by how often families open them, so you fix the two hundred that matter instead of arguing about the nine thousand that do not.
What we will not do is quietly leave these out of the scope so the quote looks smaller, and then let you discover them in year two. If most of your exposure sits inside a vendor system, the most useful thing we can sell you is an honest inventory and a letter with testing behind it — not a remediation project on the pages that were already nearly fine.
Two things worth saying out loud
We will not sell you a compliance guarantee
Nobody can honestly promise a website is compliant or will stay compliant, and the Federal Trade Commission has taken action against a vendor who claimed it. We will tell you what we tested, what we found, what we fixed, and what is left.
Replacing a PDF with a web page is not the whole job
It clears one document. It happens to be your busiest one, which is why we start there — but a vendor telling you it discharges your obligation is telling you something convenient rather than something true.
Send us your boundary map
Or a link to your enrollment page. We will tell you what a family using a screen reader gets today, and what it would take to fix — at no charge, before anyone talks about a quote.
Chimpipi builds websites. We are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice — your district should form its own view with its own counsel.