PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1) had been published in 2012 (corrected edition 2014). By 2015, three years of implementation experience had accumulated across early adopter organisations. Sessions reviewed that experience: Creation tool maturity: - Microsoft Word's PDF export: Produced reasonable tag structures for simple documents but required manual intervention for complex layouts, lists, and tables. The "Mark as final" accessibility check before export helped but didn't guarantee PDF/UA compliance. - Adobe InDesign: More configurable for complex print layouts. Required careful paragraph and character style mapping to export tag types. The Articles panel for reading order control was essential. - Adobe Acrobat Pro: Auto-tagging as a remediation starting point, with the Reading Order and Tags panels for post-processing. Essential for remediating PDFs from non-accessibility-aware sources. - PAC 2 (PDF Accessibility Checker): The primary validation tool — free, accurate, widely adopted. Remediation economics — The cost per document for high-quality PDF/UA remediation was discussed extensively. Simple one-column documents: a few minutes of work per page after auto-tagging. Complex layouts (multi-column financial reports, engineering drawings, academic papers): could require an hour or more per page for complex tables and figures. Organisations with large PDF libraries faced sobering cost estimates for full remediation. The "good enough" question — Sessions grappled with the practical accessibility question: what level of tagging is good enough for screen reader users? PAC 2 passing was the minimum bar; testing with actual screen reader users (JAWS, NVDA) revealed that structurally valid PDFs could still be confusing in practice. The gap between "passes validation" and "is actually usable" was clearly articulated.

US accessibility law in 2015 created an interesting split: Section 508 (federal agencies) — Applied to federal government IT and required electronic information to be accessible. The existing Section 508 standards (from 2000) referenced the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines but predated the specific PDF/UA standard. The forthcoming 2017 refresh would align Section 508 with WCAG 2.0 and explicitly incorporate PDF/UA requirements. ADA Title III (commercial entities) — The Americans with Disabilities Act Title III prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation. Courts and the DOJ had been extending Title III to websites and digital content — an extension that private litigants were actively using. By 2015, settlements and court orders in ADA Title III cases were creating de facto digital accessibility requirements for commercial organisations even without specific PDF standards in the ADA text. State accessibility laws — Several US states (California, Illinois, Texas) had state-level accessibility requirements that applied to state government digital content, creating PDF/UA requirements for state agencies. Litigation risk for PDFs — Sessions noted that PDFs were increasingly named in accessibility complaints: government PDF forms, financial disclosure documents, healthcare information PDFs, and educational material PDFs were all appearing in complaints and litigation. The advice: treat PDF accessibility as a risk management issue, not just a nice-to-have.

Alongside accessibility, federal records management was a focus of the San Jose conference. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) guidance on acceptable file formats for permanent federal records listed PDF/A as a preferred format. Sessions addressed practical implementation: PDF/A in the digitisation pipeline — Federal agencies maintaining physical records archives were digitising at scale. The pipeline typically involved: high-resolution scanning to TIFF, OCR processing to add a text layer, conversion to PDF/A-1b, validation with veraPDF or Acrobat, and ingestion into a records management system. The scanned-PDF-plus-text-layer model — For historical records, a scan-and-OCR approach producing PDF/A-1b documents was practical and widely adopted. The resulting PDFs preserved the visual appearance of the original documents while adding a searchable text layer. PDF/UA compliance was typically not achieved (complex layouts, no structure tree), but basic text accessibility was provided. Cloud records management — Government cloud adoption was accelerating in 2015 (FedRAMP authorisation process was maturing). The question of whether PDF/A documents in cloud storage maintained their compliance over time was discussed. The answer: yes, if the storage system preserves bits faithfully — PDF/A compliance is a property of the file, not the storage system.