About Docability

Public documents should work for everyone. People who use assistive technology should be able to read what everyone else reads, whether it’s a meeting agenda, a rate notice or a grant application.

Making a PDF accessible by hand is slow, and the legal pressure to do it is growing. Docability rebuilds each PDF with the structure assistive technology needs and reports what it found and changed, so organizations can spend their time reviewing documents instead of tagging them.

Regan Waldron, Nate Washburn and Carter Johnson met through a startup program at Utah State University.

Through her father’s connections in the special district industry, Regan learned early about the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule. It requires state and local governments, including every special district regardless of size, to make the documents they publish online accessible, and most of those documents are PDFs. Many of these organizations have small staffs and years of agendas, minutes and budgets online, with no one to rebuild them by hand. Regan set out to solve that.

She first brought on Nate to build the remediation engine that rebuilds each PDF, then Carter to build the platform around it: the web application where organizations upload and review their documents, and the infrastructure it runs on.

Along the way, accessibility became more than a deadline to us. Behind every untagged agenda is a resident who can’t read it with a screen reader, and a clerk who wants to get it right. We built Docability for both of them, so that public documents work for the people with disabilities who rely on them and are simple to get right for the organizations that publish them.