How Ketchly works
Making a PDF ADA-compliant means giving it the invisible structure screen readers need: tags, reading order, image descriptions, and more. Doing that by hand takes specialist software and hours per document. Ketchly does it in three steps.
Upload your PDF
Drag in any PDF your district publishes: board minutes, meeting agendas, budgets, newsletters, policies, digitized collection materials. Scanned documents work too — Ketchly reads scanned pages the way OCR software does, then goes further by rebuilding the document's structure, not just its text.
You don't need to know what's wrong with the document. That's Ketchly's job.
Ketchly remediates and validates
Ketchly's AI rebuilds what accessibility standards call the document's tag structure — the machine-readable outline that tells a screen reader what's a heading, what's a table, what order to read things in, and what each image shows. It sets the document language and title, describes images in plain English, and makes tables navigable.
Then it checks its own work: every document is validated against PDF/UA (the ISO standard for accessible PDFs) using veraPDF, the open-source validator the industry treats as the referee.
When the AI isn't sure, a human looks. Some judgment calls — like whether a chart's description actually captures what matters — get flagged for human review instead of guessed at. You get remediation that's fast because it's automated, and trustworthy because it isn't only automated.
Download your compliant PDF and report
You get back two things:
- The remediated PDF, meeting the PDF/UA standard, ready to publish on your website.
- A compliance report in plain language: what was remediated, what standard it was validated against, and when. File it with your board packet or hand it to your auditor — it's your record that the work was done.
Questions
Does this make my district ADA compliant?
Ketchly remediates your PDFs to the PDF/UA standard and validates them with veraPDF, which helps your district meet the Title II requirements for the documents on your site. Compliance applies to your whole web presence — no single tool can promise it, and you should be skeptical of any that does.
What about scanned documents?
Yes — scans are most of what small districts have, so they're what Ketchly is built for.
How long does it take?
Minutes for most documents. Documents that need human review take longer, and you can see the status while you wait.
What is PDF/UA?
The international standard (ISO 14289) for accessible PDFs — the PDF-specific way to meet the WCAG 2.1 AA requirements that DOJ's Title II rule references.
Do digitized collections have to meet the deadline?
Some qualify for the rule's archived-content exception — but the exception is narrow (a designated archive area, reference use only, no changes after archiving), patrons can still request accessible versions of exempt documents, and anything you digitize and publish after April 26, 2028 must be accessible from day one.