Accessibility Compliance Modernization for FDA's Office of Science & Center for Tobacco Products
Delivering 100% Section 508 and WCAG compliance for thousands of scientific documents and videos—on schedule and within budget despite 3x complexity.
Client Overview
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—specifically the Office of Science (OS) and the Center for Tobacco Products (CTP)—manages a large repository of scientific documents, guidance materials, and video content used to support regulatory review, research, and public communication.
As a federal entity, CTP must ensure all public-facing and internally distributed materials comply with Section 508 and WCAG accessibility standards.
Challenge
CTP faced a growing backlog of scientific content—including thousands of pages of documents and a large volume of video assets—that needed to be made fully compliant.
Key issues included:
Massive Content Volume
Content spanning multiple formats requiring comprehensive remediation.
Inaccessible Scans
Scanned documents rendered more inaccessible than typical PDFs, requiring extensive reconstruction.
Inconsistent Practices
Historical inconsistency in document creation, metadata tagging, captioning, and remediation.
Knowledge Gaps
Client team needed greater clarity on federal accessibility standards and compliance paths.
Compounding this: The complexity of the content resulted in a threefold increase in remediation effort compared to standard engagements.
Our Approach
Nine Alpha deployed its Five-Step Accessibility Assessment, Remediation & Certification Framework:
1. Inventory & Triage
Full analysis of the documents, videos, and file formats to determine accessibility gaps and prioritization.
2. Technical Assessment
Deep evaluation against WCAG 2.x, Section 508, PDF/UA, captioning standards, and FDA-specific publishing requirements.
3. Remediation Execution
- Corrected structure, tags, reading order, alt-text, tables, forms, and metadata.
- Repaired or reconstructed problematic scanned documents.
- Provided captioning and transcript corrections for video content.
4. Quality Assurance & Verification
Multi-layer QA including automated tools and human expert review.
5. Certification & Knowledge Transfer
- Delivered compliance certification packages.
- Trained client personnel on WCAG, Section 508, remediation expectations, and sustainable document-creation workflows.
Results
Despite the unexpected technical complexity and the tripling of effort required to remediate improperly scanned documents, Nine Alpha:
On Schedule & On Budget
Delivered all work according to plan despite 3x complexity increase.
Federal Compliance
Full remediation to Section 508 and WCAG standards.
Reduced Future Compliance Burden
Educated the FDA team on WCAG, best practices for document creation, and how to avoid producing inaccessible content.
Repeatable Certification Process
Provided a repeatable and defensible accessibility certification aligned with Section 508 and WCAG guidelines.
Impact
The engagement strengthened the Office of Science and CTP's ability to:
Ensure accessible dissemination of scientific and regulatory content.
Meet federal compliance mandates with confidence and audit-ready documentation.
Prevent recurring accessibility issues through improved upstream content-creation practices.
Support scientists, reviewers, and the public—including people with disabilities—with high-quality, accessible information.
Nine Alpha's disciplined methodology, technical expertise, and ability to scale to meet a 3x workload increase positioned the project for success while maintaining strict timelines and quality requirements.