Director, Technology, Digital Accessibility (Freelance)

Overview

The Technology Director, Digital Accessibility is a part-time, freelance role providing senior-level accessibility expertise for a single client engagement, with a strong focus on PDF tagging and remediation. This person brings broad, expert-level knowledge of digital accessibility and hands-on experience with PDF tagging work, leading the strategy, tooling decisions, and quality standards that keep the client's document content accessible and compliant over time.

Responsibilities

Strategy & Program Leadership

Define the accessibility approach for the client's document content, including source tooling (Word, InDesign, and any CMS or DAM platforms in use) and the end-to-end PDF tagging and remediation workflow.
Set standards for semantic content structure and accessible authoring, and work with the client's content teams so documents are built right from the start, reducing the amount of manual tagging clean-up needed downstream.
Set and monitor compliance targets against WCAG 2.1/2.2 and PDF/UA, adjusting the tagging approach as the client's content needs or the standards themselves evolve.

PDF Tagging & Remediation

Direct the PDF tagging process: reading order, semantic structure (headings, lists, tables, artifacts, alt text), and metadata needed to meet PDF/UA and WCAG compliance.
Draw on hands-on experience with PDF tagging to guide and review work on complex or poorly structured source PDFs, including documents with tables, forms, multi-column layouts, and mixed media.
Apply working knowledge of Adobe Acrobat Pro's tagging tools to evaluate output quality and troubleshoot tricky cases, without needing to be the most technically specialized tagger on the work.
Build and refine tagging conventions and quality benchmarks specific to the client's document types, so tagging stays consistent even as volume or content complexity grows.

Tooling & Technical Oversight

Evaluate and recommend the toolchain for tagging, remediation, and testing (Adobe Acrobat Pro, PAC, screen readers like NVDA and VoiceOver, color contrast analyzers), balancing automation with the manual tagging QA the work actually needs.
Run the automated and manual testing process, validating tagged PDFs across assistive technologies, browsers, and applications before they ship.
Keep an eye on emerging PDF tagging and AI-assisted remediation tools, and bring in new capabilities when they genuinely improve tagging quality or speed for the client.

Qualifications

Expert-level knowledge of digital accessibility overall (WCAG 2.1/2.2, Section 508, assistive technology use and testing), with practical experience in PDF tagging and remediation work specifically.
Working familiarity with Adobe Acrobat Pro's tagging environment, PDF/UA requirements, and common tagging challenges (tables, forms, reading order, metadata) — enough to guide and evaluate the work, not necessarily execute every detail personally.
Ability to operate at a strategic level, advising a client directly on accessibility approach while staying grounded in the practical realities of PDF work.
Comfortable working independently as a freelancer, setting direction with client stakeholders without a full internal team or organizational infrastructure behind the role.