Case study: a state health department’s 438 PDFs, through Proof in about three hours

Picture the Section 504 coordinator at a state health department. The HHS rule's compliance date of May 11, 2027 is on the calendar (as of October 2026). The department's website holds decades of board minutes, survey data, vaccine flyers and disease reports, and nobody knows what shape they are in.

How big was the library?

Proof crawled the department's website and found 916 PDFs. 438 of them, 11,204 pages in all, became the library for this study: board and committee agendas and minutes, youth and school health surveys, immunization materials, surveillance reports, plans, and health education flyers. These documents run long: 25.6 pages on average, and 25 run past 100. The oldest are four annual reports from 1910 to 1913. If nobody has counted the PDFs on your own site, that is the step that comes first.

What shape was it in?

Not one of the 438 documents met WCAG 2.1 AA. Between them they failed 2,155 accessibility checks, and 134 (31%) could not be read by any checker at all: 120 had never been tagged and 14 were scans with no text layer. The first analysis of the whole library took 37 minutes.

What did Proof do in about three hours?

The coordinator chose the whole library, kept the recommended settings, and pressed one button: "Remediate 438 documents". Machine fixes apply on their own, anything an AI writes waits for a person, and documents Proof finishes completely are certified under the department's standing instruction. Two hours and 20 minutes later, 437 of the 438 documents were done, and Proof had:

• made 122 of the 134 unreadable documents readable, tagging 109 and adding a text layer to 13;
• fixed 1,569 of the library's 2,155 failed checks (73%);
• certified 14 documents outright, each with a public verification page that says no person approved it;
• drafted 5,792 image descriptions across 313 documents, for a person to accept or edit.

No one touched a file. The last document, a 106-page report, finished after the rest.

What was left for a person to do?

When the run finished, the coordinator was not facing 438 files to rebuild. They had a review queue, sorted by the decisions only a person can make, with the work already drafted:

That is about 16 minutes for each document that ends up certified, or under two and a half weeks for a single reviewer. Long documents are where the time goes: reading order is confirmed page by page, and these documents average 25.6 pages. We estimated these times from 5,236 timed review actions by remediators and public-agency staff working in Proof on 635 public-sector documents, applied to this library's own queue.

How many documents end up certified?

Working that queue certifies 366 of the 438 documents (84%) to WCAG 2.1 AA, from a starting point of zero. Where a review turns up a real problem, that document goes to repair instead of sign-off.

The other 72 need a repair before they can certify: most often a list or a table to tag, or content the tagging missed, or a rebuild from the source file. Proof names each of those documents and the repair it needs. Your team makes those repairs in Proof, or Ockem's experts take them on Assured, quoted per document, with the same certificate at the end.

What would this library cost?

Ockem charges one flat price per document, charged only when the document certifies. At the pack rates for a library this size, $15 to $22 per document, the 366 documents that certify come to roughly $5,500 to $8,000 before long files are counted. A file over 50 pages counts as one document per 50 pages, and these documents average 25.6 pages with 25 past 100, so the true figure is noticeably higher here; the pricing page's estimator does the sum for your own count. Most documents need one manual check from your team, two at the 90th percentile; in this library that review is the 98 hours above.

A remediation service that rebuilds files one at a time is commonly quoted at $3–10+ per page: $34,000 to $112,000 for the same 11,204 pages, with the review done for you. A checker costs little and fixes nothing.

How does this compare with a checker or a service?

A checker reports on every file and stops. A remediation service rebuilds files one at a time and takes weeks. Proof did the rebuilding across the whole library in under two and a half hours, and what it handed a person was a short, specific decision on each document.

What does the certificate say?

Each one names what the machine checked, what a person attested and what was not tested, and links to a public page anyone can use to verify it. A certificate Proof issues on its own says exactly that: no person approved it. What the certificate claims, and what it does not.

How we did this study

We pointed Proof's crawler at the department's public website, imported every linked PDF, and ran one remediation with the recommended settings. The department did not take part and we do not name it. The counts of documents, pages, checks and fixes are Proof's own measurements of the run, read when 437 of the 438 documents had settled. The review hours and the certified count after review are estimates, from timed review work in Proof on other public-sector documents, applied to this library's queue. Prices are Ockem's list prices as of October 2026; the per-page range comes from vendor quotes we reviewed in August 2026. This study was written by Ockem, which makes Proof.

If you are that coordinator, start where this study started: count your PDFs, free.

Questions

This study reports Ockem’s own measurements and estimates. It isn’t legal advice.