Government PDF Accessibility in 2026: What the Latest Statistics Actually Say

A benefits form. A notice about a hearing date. A guide explaining what you qualify for. Federal agencies publish thousands of these every year, and for a lot of people they are the only way in. For anyone using a screen reader, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology, an inaccessible PDF is not an inconvenience. It is a closed door.

GSA’s latest Section 508 assessment data shows how far agencies still have to go, and where the government itself is starting to change course.

How accessible are federal documents right now?

Not very, and the trend went the wrong way. Only 23% of agencies’ top-viewed public internet pages fully conformed to Section 508 standards in FY2024. Internal pages fared slightly worse at 20%. The governmentwide conformance score fell from 1.79 in FY2023 to 1.74 in FY2024, a year-over-year decline rather than a plateau.

GSA’s FY2025 baseline came in at 1.96 out of 5, which looks like a jump. It is not one. GSA describes FY2025 as a new baseline following significant revisions to the assessment criteria, and says plainly that readers should avoid comparing year-over-year conformance percentages. Treat it as a fresh starting point.

What do the numbers say about documents specifically?

Documents fare worse than anything else GSA tracks. Of the electronic documents agencies tested in FY2025, 38% fully conformed. That is the lowest rate of any category, behind hardware at 83%, public web pages at 72%, intranet pages at 65%, and software at 47%. Among top-viewed public documents, 37% fully conformed.

GSA does not isolate PDFs, but it does track electronic documents as their own category, separately from web, video, hardware, and software. That separation matters, because a website can be conformant while the PDFs linked from it are not.

Coverage is the other half of the story. Agencies estimated they own roughly 4.6 million electronic documents and reported testing about a quarter of them. Twenty-nine agencies, just under half of those scored, had no way to track document conformance testing at all. Twenty-one could not estimate how many documents they owned.

The most common defects in top-viewed public documents were missing text alternatives, missing info and relationships, meaningful sequence, page titles, and headings and labels. Those are tagging failures. Not exotic ones.

A note on precision: “electronic documents” includes more than PDFs, so these are PDF-adjacent figures rather than PDF-only ones. They remain the best government-published proxy available.

Why don’t most agencies have a conformance score?

Because most of them were never measured. GSA received responses from 212 agencies, parent agencies, and components, but conformance was measured for only 60 of them. Components did not submit conformance data independently; their parent agencies were expected to include it.

The 212 break down into 21 CFO Act agencies, 152 components from 12 of those agencies, and 39 small and independent agencies.

So for most respondents, there is no measured conformance figure at all. You cannot remediate what you have not inventoried, and for a document-heavy agency, an unaudited library is a significant unknown.

The gap is wider still. GSA notes that 43 agencies did not respond to the FY2025 assessment at all, and more than half of those that did cited resource limitations.

Size does not explain it either. Agencies of every size appeared across all five performance categories, from Very Low to Very High. Budget alone is not the fix.

More people on the job, same results

Agencies are investing in program management, at least on paper. Of the 60 agencies scored in FY2025:

• 35 had a part-time Section 508 program manager, averaging 8.9 hours a week on compliance work
  
• 17 had a full-time program manager
  
• 8 had none at all, and four of those eight reported having a Section 508 program anyway

FY2024 told a similar story. The share of entities with a full-time program manager rose to 33%, up from 28% the year before, and 21% more entities had a program manager than in FY2023. Even so, 11% still had none.

Having someone responsible is a necessary first step. But a part-time owner putting nine hours a week against a large document backlog is not a remediation program with real capacity.

Why does this data exist at all?

Congress required it. Public Law No. 117-328 mandated annual Section 508 reporting, codified at 29 U.S.C. § 794d-1. GSA prepares the assessment in consultation with the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Access Board, and reports to four congressional committees.

The assessment is now a standing accountability mechanism. Agencies can expect continued scrutiny.

The federal push toward HTML-first

The most notable development is a shift in messaging. GSA, working with the U.S. Access Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, presented a session called “That Doesn’t Need to Be a PDF” as part of its Section 508 Best Practices webinar series. GSA describes it as promoting an HTML-first approach that reduces authoring burden, improves accessibility, and still enables high-quality print output without relying on inaccessible PDFs.

The reasoning is not complicated. HTML is natively more accessible, reflows for zoom and mobile, and is easier to maintain.

GSA’s own recommendations point the same way. The FY2025 report urges agencies to prioritize accessible authoring tools so that content is accessible by default, which it argues lowers or eliminates remediation costs rather than managing them.

What this means for agencies and vendors

• Inventory first. The 60-of-212 figure shows measurement is the biggest gap, and a third of scored agencies could not say how many documents they hold.
  
• Ask whether it needs to be a PDF. Convert what you can to HTML.
  
• Remediate what remains. Forms, legal documents, and print-ready materials will still need properly tagged, tested PDFs.
  
• Fix it at the source. Accessible authoring tools and templates stop defects being created in the first place.
  
• Fund the program, not just the title. A named program manager is progress, but hours per week determine results.
  
• Track categories separately. Report on documents apart from web pages, as GSA now does.
  

The bottom line

The 2026 picture is sobering. Conformance declined year over year; most respondents have no measured conformance figure at all, and electronic documents conform at a lower rate than any other category GSA tracks.

But the direction of travel is clearer than it was. Reporting is mandatory, documents are tracked separately, and there is a growing federal conversation about publishing in HTML first. Agencies that start counting what they have, cut what does not need to be a PDF, and budget properly for PDF remediation on what remains will be in a very different position when the next assessment comes round.