This reporting project was prioritized by a client's request to ensure their user-generated reports met ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance guidelines.
In educational technology, teachers and administrators generate thousands of custom reports daily - from individual student progress to class-wide analytics.
These reports vary significantly in content, length, and complexity, making manual ADA compliance impossible to scale. The system needed to automatically ensure all digital content was accessible to users with disabilities, regardless of how the report was generated or what content it contained.
Primary Goal
Develop an automated system to ensure all user-generated reports are ADA compliant at the point of creation, handling variable content while maintaining accessibility standards without user intervention.
Additional Goals
• Rebrand Integration: Leverage a recent merger as an opportunity to rebrand our report templates while implementing accessibility automation, ensuring consistent branding across dynamically generated content
• Extended Compliance: Stretch goal to extend the automated compliance system to all document types within the application, including ad-hoc reports, scheduled reports, and system-generated notifications
The main challenge was education - but not in the way you might expect. While our team understood ADA standards for user interfaces, we faced a complex challenge in automating PDF accessibility for dynamic content. Each report could contain different elements - tables, graphs, text blocks, or images - all requiring specific accessibility treatments. Traditional manual PDF compliance methods wouldn't scale for our thousands of daily user-generated reports, and our development team had no prior experience with programmatic ADA implementation for variable document generation.
I tapped into internal resources by collaborating with our organization's PDF specialist. By combining their document expertise with my knowledge of ADA compliance, we developed an intelligent automated system that analyzes and tags content as it's generated. The solution included a sophisticated template system that could:
• Automatically identify and appropriately tag different content types
• Apply proper heading structures regardless of user input
• Ensure all dynamic tables maintain accessibility features
• Generate compliant alt text for system-created charts and graphs
• Maintain consistent navigation structure across variable content
Additionally, we created a flexible branded cover page template that could accommodate any type of user-generated content while maintaining compliance standards, significantly reducing future development needs.
• Collaborated with our PDF expert ("PDF Pat") to analyze how manual compliance processes could be systematically automated
• Documented common patterns in user-generated reports to identify automation opportunities
• Studied various report types to understand the full scope of content that needed automated compliance
• Mapped the complete report generation workflow to identify automation points
• Consulted with educators to understand their report creation patterns
• Explored templating approaches that could maintain compliance regardless of content type or length
• Developed an intelligent system to automatically inventory and tag dynamic content types for accessibility
• Created a master template with flexible structures to handle variable content while maintaining compliance
• Designed a smart cover page system that included fixed header and footer elements, dynamic content areas, and an intelligent tagging system all working together to support user-generated content
• Established automatic content recognition rules to properly tag and structure different types of report data
• Implemented a verification system to ensure compliance criteria were met during document generation
• Reviewed the automation concept with Product Managers using real examples of varied user-generated reports
• Conducted technical deep-dives with BA and Development teams to establish requirements for automated compliance
• Served as ADA subject matter expert throughout development, focusing on solutions for dynamic content challenges
• Set up regular review sessions to validate automated compliance features against different report types
• Created documentation and led knowledge-sharing sessions to build team expertise in ADA automation
• Created an automated system leveraging Adobe Acrobat's auto-tagging capabilities enhanced with custom content recognition
• Modified the existing PDF converter to handle dynamic content verification for user-generated reports
• Built an intelligent template system that maintains accessibility standards regardless of user input or content type
• Established automated quality checks to verify compliance across all generated documents
• Integrated the new branding elements into the automated system while preserving all accessibility features
Although this was a relatively compact project, it achieved significant success that provided valuable insights. The project demonstrated that prioritizing automation from the start could effectively maintain ADA compliance even with variable user-generated content. We completed all requirements, including our stretch goal, 30 days ahead of schedule, largely due to early investment in understanding technical constraints and cross-functional collaboration. The flexible template system continues to accommodate new report types, proving the long-term value of building adaptable solutions that can scale with organizational needs.