Courts have always been asked to do more with less, but what changed in recent years is that the gap between what the public expects from government services and how court operations actually work became too wide to paper over. People who interact with courts today arrive with expectations shaped by every other digital experience in their lives — they expect to complete a form on their phone, track a submission without making a phone call, and move through a process without printing, signing, scanning, and trying to figure out where to send the result. Inside most courts, though, the process still runs on PDFs, email threads, and institutional knowledge that lives in one person’s head, and the intake form posted on the website is often a scanned document that hasn’t materially changed in years.
That gap carries a real operational cost. Staff spend significant parts of their day chasing incomplete submissions, assembling packets by hand, and routing documents through processes that were never designed to be visible or repeatable, and cases stall not because of legal complexity but because the coordination layer holding everything together is invisible and fragile. When the person who knows how it works leaves, the knowledge goes with them. The ADA Title II rule didn’t create this problem, but it named it and gave courts a concrete deadline to address it.
What the Rule Requires
In April 2024, the Department of Justice published new regulations requiring state and local government entities to make their web content and mobile applications fully accessible to people with disabilities. The technical standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and following a deadline extension issued in April 2026, compliance is required by April 26, 2027 for jurisdictions serving populations of 50,000 or more, and by April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments.
Under WCAG 2.1 Level AA, digital forms and services must be:
- Perceivable: content works with screen readers, captions, and alt text
- Operable: interfaces function without a mouse, via keyboard, voice, or assistive technology
- Understandable: language is clear; error messages are useful; forms don’t time out without warning
- Robust: content works reliably across devices, browsers, and assistive technologies
Most court intake forms fail every one of these criteria, because PDFs — especially scanned ones — aren’t screen-reader compatible, don’t function on mobile devices, and have no mechanism for guided error handling or submission confirmation. Posting a PDF on a court website is no longer a neutral choice. Under the updated rule, it is a non-compliant one.
Why Courts Are a Distinct Case
The ADA Title II rule applies broadly to state and local government, but courts face a set of operational and governance realities that make the compliance challenge, and the stakes of getting it wrong, meaningfully different from most other agencies.
Courts are multi-party environments where a single case can involve clerks, judges, law enforcement, advocates, social services, probation officers, and members of the public, all playing distinct roles at different points in the same process. Most of that coordination currently happens over email or through direct staff contact, without a shared system of record for the handoffs, which means that when something falls through the cracks, it is often genuinely impossible to say where or why it happened.
Courts also operate under a higher standard of process integrity than most government agencies. The Rule of Law is not an abstraction inside a courthouse — it means that every step in a proceeding must be documented, defensible, and consistent regardless of which clerk processed the intake, which judge reviewed the petition, or which division handled the case. Informal processes aren’t just inefficient in that context; they create liability.
Beyond operations, courts are increasingly at the center of a public conversation about AI, automation, and judicial independence, and that scrutiny is legitimate. Any technology courts adopt will be evaluated for whether it supports or undermines human judgment, which means the right frame is not whether to modernize but how to do so in a way that makes decision-making more visible and accountable rather than less. Structured digital intake and workflow tools do exactly that — they don’t replace judicial discretion, they remove the invisible coordination work that currently obscures it.
The PDF Problem
Courts didn’t arrive at PDF-based intake because anyone thought it was a sound long-term solution. A paper form got scanned, posted online, and labeled digital, and then it stayed that way because replacing it meant navigating an IT project, a budget conversation, and a development queue that nobody had the bandwidth to manage. Manual remediation — going field by field through existing PDFs to address individual accessibility gaps — can close some technical deficiencies, but it doesn’t produce a guided intake experience. What it produces is a marginally more accessible document that still requires someone to download it, complete it correctly without any real-time guidance, and figure out how to submit it.
For the populations courts serve most — people navigating a protective order in a crisis, families managing a probate filing without legal representation, individuals moving through juvenile or drug court proceedings — that experience creates real barriers to access, and the ADA rule names those barriers as a problem worth solving. Courts that have been waiting for a sufficient reason to address them now have one with a hard deadline attached.
The Access to Justice Dimension
Accessibility compliance and access to justice are not separate conversations — they are, at bottom, the same conversation, and treating them as distinct misses the point of both.
When intake forms only function on a desktop computer, require access to a printer, or aren’t available in the languages spoken by significant portions of the local population, courts are effectively narrowing the set of people who can access their services, and the people most affected tend to be exactly the people the court system was built to protect. For someone attempting to file a domestic violence petition while staying safe and away from home, a form that requires a printer and a desktop isn’t just inconvenient — it may be the reason the petition doesn’t get filed at all. Mobile-first, language-accessible, guided digital intake doesn’t simply satisfy a compliance requirement; it changes who is actually able to reach the court and use its services, which is a meaningful difference in communities where those services matter most.
What Compliance Makes Possible: A Closer Look
The goal courts should be working toward is not accessible PDFs — it is structured digital intake that works for every member of the public and creates an operational foundation the court can actually build on over time.
To make that concrete, it helps to walk through a workflow that courts know well. Consider how a protective order or domestic violence injunction process typically functions today. A petitioner arrives at the courthouse or locates a PDF online, often a multi-page document that is genuinely difficult to navigate without legal guidance. Clerks review incomplete submissions and follow up by phone to collect missing information. The completed packet gets routed to a judge by email or physical delivery, and law enforcement notification happens through a separate manual process that runs parallel to the main workflow. At any point in that sequence, a step can be missed, delayed, or handled inconsistently depending on who is working that day, and there is no system that surfaces those gaps until something goes wrong downstream.
Now consider what the same process looks like when it runs on a structured digital workflow. The petitioner completes a guided form on any device and in their preferred language, with required fields enforced before submission so the packet arrives complete. The form routes automatically to the clerk for review without a manual handoff, and the judge receives the reviewed petition through the same system. Once the order is issued, notification to law enforcement is triggered as part of the workflow rather than as a separate task someone has to remember. Every step is timestamped, every action is attributed to the person who took it, and the full record exists as a natural byproduct of the work rather than something staff have to reconstruct from memory and email threads after the fact.
That is what court operations look like when the coordination layer is visible and owned by the people responsible for running it, and the same logic extends across every court workflow — probate filings, juvenile intake, drug court applications, permit petitions — because in every case the underlying problem is the same: work is moving through informal channels that were never designed to be auditable, consistent, or capable of improvement. Structured digital workflows replace that informal layer with one that is all three.
The Operational Case for Moving Now
Beyond compliance, there is a straightforward operational argument for courts to move on this before the deadline rather than at it, and it comes down to what structured processes make visible that informal ones don’t.
Courts that convert their PDF intake forms into digital workflows will have processes that generate data about how work actually moves — where cases are stalling, how long each step takes, which forms produce the highest rate of incomplete submissions and why. That information is entirely invisible in a PDF-and-email environment, and it becomes visible only when the process is structured enough to capture it. Processes that are visible can be improved, staff burden that is measurable can be addressed, and institutional knowledge that is embedded in a system rather than a person survives the turnover that every court eventually faces. A court administrator who can see how work moves through the organization is in a fundamentally different position than one who manages by exception and finds out something went wrong when a constituent calls to complain.
That is the operational state the ADA deadline is pointing courts toward, if they choose to approach it that way — not compliance as a burden imposed from outside, but compliance as the forcing function that finally closes the gap between how courts operate today and how they are capable of operating.
Three Things Courts Should Do Now
- Audit your public-facing forms. Build a complete inventory of every PDF or web form the public uses to access court services, because that is the actual scope of the compliance work ahead and also the starting point for understanding where the largest operational gaps exist.
- Prioritize by urgency, volume, and stakes. Protective order petitions, probate filings, and high-volume intake processes carry the most compliance risk and generate the most staff burden, while specialty court workflows in juvenile, family, and drug court carry the highest defensibility requirements. Starting with the forms where a missed step has the most consequences is both the right compliance strategy and the right operational one.
- Don’t approach this as a document remediation project. Accessible PDFs are not the destination — structured digital intake that routes automatically, documents every step, and produces data that courts can learn from is. Courts that build toward that goal now will have something durable. Courts that patch their existing PDFs will find themselves back in the same conversation within a few years, with a shorter runway and a larger backlog.
The deadline is fixed, and the backlog isn’t going to address itself. Courts that move now with the right approach won’t simply clear the compliance threshold — they’ll come out the other side with intake processes that genuinely work for the people who need them most, and with operations that are finally visible enough to improve.
SimpliGov helps courts convert PDF intake forms into compliant digital services, without IT involvement and connected to a workflow from day one. Learn how we’re supporting courts ahead of the ADA Title II deadline.
