Thank you for the time you gave during our recent discussions and demonstration. St Stephen in Brannel Parish Council has already established a thoughtful accessibility process: documents are checked in Word, converted to PDF, checked again in Adobe and, where necessary, corrected before publication.
This proposal is not about replacing that good practice. It addresses the time it consumes and the gaps that can remain even after several checks. During the demonstration, a newly published council document that had been checked multiple times still showed missing bookmarks, a missing language entry and reading or tab-order issues when assessed against the wider WCAG requirements.
The challenge is becoming larger as supporting documents are now published individually. The crawl found 1,233 PDFs and 13,377 pages across the domain, while 431 PDFs were associated with 2026 alone. A sustainable approach therefore needs to improve both the existing estate and the workflow for future publications.
Our recommendation is to use Recite Me's PDF discovery and remediation platform as a staged programme: prioritise current, essential and quick-win content; remediate a larger volume in year one; and retain an annual allowance for new and priority documents thereafter.
Kind regards,
The council's commitment is clear. The remaining issue is that the current process is labour-intensive and does not consistently evidence WCAG 2.2 AA conformance.
The estate crawl found 1,233 PDFs containing 13,377 pages, with an average of more than 10 pages per PDF.
Applying the pre-23 September 2018 filter identified 72 PDFs / 283 pages that may be archivable, subject to the council confirming they are not needed for an active service.
Publishing supporting papers individually has increased annual document volumes; the crawl associated 431 PDFs with 2026.
A recently checked council PDF still contained issues that the current Word and Adobe workflow had not resolved.