When the Community College System of New Hampshire came to us about document accessibility, the numbers alone told the story. Seven colleges. Fourteen web domains. Decades of accumulated PDFs, from course forms and newsletters to program plans, budgets, policies, public notices, and meeting minutes. More than 5,500 documents in all. Every one of them needed to be accessible, and some were the stuff of remediation nightmares: scanned pages, hand-drawn diagrams, handwritten notes, math notation. Fixing that by hand, document by document, wasn’t just expensive. It was never going to keep up, because the colleges publish new PDFs every week.
CCSNH didn’t need a one-time cleanup project. They needed something sustainable, a solution that would make every PDF accessible today and keep making them accessible tomorrow, without anyone having to think about it. That’s exactly why we brought them DocAccess.
DocAccess installs with a single JavaScript snippet and goes to work on every PDF linked from a site, automatically converting current and future documents into screen reader-friendly, WCAG 2.1 AA-aligned HTML transcripts. The hard stuff is where it shines: handwritten and hand-drawn content, mathematical formulas, tables, and multi-column layouts all come through cleanly, and transcripts are searchable and translatable into more than 250 languages. Readers can navigate by document outline, ask the document questions with built-in AI assistance, and even connect to a live visual interpreter 24/7 through DocAccess’s partnership with Aira.
Just as important is what DocAccess doesn’t do: waste resources transcribing documents nobody reads. For CCSNH, older and rarely accessed documents are handled on demand. They’re still served in the accessible viewer with live assistance available, and the moment a reader requests one (or a document starts getting views), full transcription happens automatically. It’s an approach that keeps the system fast, affordable, and genuinely sustainable across an archive this large.
Today, DocAccess is serving roughly 4,600 unique documents across CCSNH’s fourteen domains, nearly 57,000 pages in all, with almost 30,000 pages already fully transcribed and new documents detected and processed automatically as they’re published. No backlog, no remediation treadmill, no anxious audits. Just documents that work for every student, on every device, with a screen reader or without.
With ADA Title II’s digital accessibility requirements now in force for public institutions, PDF archives are the compliance gap hiding in plain sight on most college and municipal websites. If you’re staring down a mountain of your own, we’d love to show you what DocAccess can do. Get in touch and we’ll help you get a free accessibility report of your site’s documents.
