Council documents that pass the accessibility check
We ran veraPDF 1.28.2 (PDF/UA-1) over 37 published municipal PDFs — council agendas, minutes, budget summaries, hearing notices, capital improvement plans. Zero passed. Every template below is derived from those real documents and renders as tagged PDF/A-2A + PDF/UA-1, so what your residents download is what the validator expects.
The five templates
Sample data uses the fictional City of Riverton throughout, so no real jurisdiction's figures are ever misattributed. Each render is checked in under assets/samples/civic/templates/ with its veraPDF companions.
Council Meeting Agenda
Masthead with meeting meta box, public-comment notice, numbered Consent and Regular items with sponsor and action lines, clerk certification.
Open the Council Meeting Agenda templateCouncil Meeting Minutes
Attendance box, numbered minute items with motion and vote lines, approval with clerk and mayor sign-off. Continues the agenda's fictional meeting.
Open the Council Meeting Minutes templateAnnual Budget Summary
Fiscal meta box, manager's message, revenue and expenditure lines with amount and share columns, highlights, reserves note, dual sign-off.
Open the Annual Budget Summary templateNotice of Public Hearing
Hearing meta box, proposal summary, property and request details, numbered participation steps with comment deadline and accommodation note.
Open the Notice of Public Hearing templateCapital Improvement Plan
Five-year program meta box, funding sources with amount and share columns, projects grouped by category with cost and schedule, debt note.
Open the Capital Improvement Plan templateWhy this matters now
US ADA Title II covers state and local government web content and mobile apps, which includes the PDFs they publish. The Department of Justice's rule adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard; its compliance dates, extended by interim final rule in April 2026, are 26 April 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more people and 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. The API renders the same compliant pipeline these templates use — Markdown or template DSL in, archive-grade accessible PDF out — and the skill file teaches any AI assistant to author new templates in the same pattern.
Methodology and per-file results live in docs/civic-pdf-compliance-survey.md. The corpus is a curated convenience sample — indicative, not measured — and every failure is reproducible with pnpm verapdf:civic.