What will accessible documents cost?

Count pages posted per month by opening last month’s agenda packets, minutes and notices on your website and adding up the page counts shown in your PDF viewer. Packets usually dominate. Take the average of two or three typical months, and leave out one-off documents such as a budget book or a master plan, which are better quoted separately.

PDF remediation prices vary widely by vendor, turnaround and how complex the pages are, such as tables, maps and forms, so the calculator asks for your own quote instead of assuming a rate. Ask two vendors to price the same sample packet, and ask whether the price includes a human check and a record of the work.

Doing it in house can be cheaper when documents start as well-built Word files, because tagging them takes minutes. It gets expensive with scanned attachments, long packets and maps, where one packet can take hours, and the time comes from the same person who prepares the meeting. The calculator shows that staff time in hours and dollars.