Accessible notices: PDF/UA and WCAG for government mail

An SB 255 notice is a letter on paper, so accessibility can seem beside the point. But the same notice is also a PDF: it is archived, emailed on request, attached to a case, and read aloud by assistive technology for residents who ask for an electronic copy. The resident portal and alert emails are web content outright. For a public agency, all of these are part of the program, and all of them should be usable by everyone.

The standards in brief

• WCAG 2.1 Level AA is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines standard most U.S. public agencies build to for web pages and apps. The U.S. Department of Justice's 2024 rule under Title II of the ADA adopts WCAG 2.1 AA as the technical standard for state and local government web content.
• PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) is the standard for "universally accessible" PDF. A PDF/UA file is tagged: its headings, paragraphs, tables and reading order are marked up so assistive technology can follow them, and it declares its language and title.
• veraPDF is an open-source validator, developed with the PDF Association, that checks a file against PDF/UA-1's machine-checkable rules.

What makes a notice accessible

For a one- or two-page letter, the checklist is short but strict:

• Real headings ("Notice of Recorded Document", "Recorded document", "If you did not expect this document") rather than big bold text.
• A logical reading order, so the address block, the explanation and the document details are read in the order a sighted reader would take them.
• A tagged table for the document details, with header cells marked as headers.
• The document language set (English or Spanish) and a meaningful title.
• Alternative text on the county seal or logo.
• Text that is real text, not a picture of text.

Keeping the county's own template

Counties rarely want a vendor's letterhead. They have an approved template, usually in Microsoft Word, sometimes as a fillable PDF form. SentraDeed accepts either: the county's Word template with merge fields, or a fillable PDF with named fields. Whichever the county uses, every notice is output as a tagged PDF/UA document and validated with veraPDF, and an editable Word copy is produced alongside it for staff who need to make a one-off change. Templates are available in English and Spanish.

Fitting the envelope

Accessibility and mailing requirements meet in the address block. SentraDeed places the recipient's name and tax-bill address where a standard #10 window envelope shows it, so the tagged PDF the county sends to its printer is the same file that sits in the record. Each batch also produces a mail-house manifest listing every notice in the print file.

The portal and emails

The resident portal is built to WCAG 2.1 AA in English and Spanish: labeled form fields, error messages tied to their fields, visible keyboard focus, a skip link, sufficient color contrast, and status messages announced to screen readers. Alert emails are semantic HTML with a plain-text alternative.

Check it automatically, every time

Accessibility that depends on someone remembering to check doesn't last. In SentraDeed's build, every notice PDF, from every template path, is validated with veraPDF, and automated axe-core checks run against every page of the staff console and resident portal in both languages. An automated keyboard-only test walks through resident sign-up, confirmation and unsubscribe. Automated tools catch a large share of problems but not all of them, so they complement, rather than replace, human review with assistive technology.