The Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) has always served a specific audience: auditors, rating agencies, grant funders, board members, and oversight bodies. These are stakeholders who know how to read financial reports. But increasingly, even they face friction when budget documents aren’t built for accessibility.
For years, accessibility was treated as a public-facing checkbox—something that mattered for resident engagement, maybe, but not for formal reporting. That’s changing. In today’s transparency environment, accessibility is becoming important for all stakeholders, not just the general public.
Real Financial Transparency Requires Accessibility
The ACFR is the most comprehensive report a government produces about its financial condition. But when it’s locked in a static PDF and delivered in a format that’s hard to navigate, search, or interpret (even for seasoned reviewers), it falls short of its purpose.
- Credit rating agencies don’t want to dig through 300 pages to verify key indicators.
- Auditors need reliable, readable versions that support their workflows.
- Council members may rely on screen readers or need mobile access on demand.
- Oversight boards expect clarity, structure, and consistency.
This isn’t about simplification. It’s about accessibility. In this context, that means more than just ADA compliance. It means ensuring that stakeholders can consume, understand, and extract value from the ACFR without technical or design barriers.
Current Accessibility Standards: What’s Required Today
Government entities are already expected to meet baseline accessibility requirements when publishing public-facing content. These include:
- WCAG 2.1 compliance: The most widely accepted standard for web content accessibility, including screen reader compatibility, alternative text, keyboard navigation, and structured layouts.
- Section 508 compliance: Required for federal agencies and a widely adopted best practice in local government as well.
- Responsive design: Increasingly expected, as many stakeholders review reports across mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms.
While finance teams may not be directly responsible for accessibility enforcement, they often produce the content most at risk: highly technical, dense reports that are rarely built with accessibility in mind.
Looking Ahead: Accessibility and the FDTA
The Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA), passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act in late 2022, represents one of the most ambitious efforts to modernize public sector financial reporting in over a decade. Its goal is to increase the transparency, usability, and comparability of financial data produced by government entities and regulated entities, including municipalities that issue bonds.
At its core, the FDTA calls for the adoption of machine-readable, standardized, and open data formats across a wide range of financial disclosures. This could eventually lead to the end of text-heavy, static reporting in favor of structured formats that enable automated analysis, benchmarking, and aggregation.
Where Things Stand
Today, the FDTA remains in the rulemaking and specification phase. The SEC and Treasury are developing the data standards and taxonomies that will define how information must be reported. Many details are still unknown, such as what specific reports will be affected, what timeline jurisdictions will have to comply, and whether smaller governments will be exempt or phased in over time.
So yes, there’s uncertainty. But the trajectory is clear.
Why the FDTA Still Matters Right Now
Even in its current stage, the FDTA is shaping expectations:
- It reflects a broader federal and public push toward structured, accessible, and comparable financial data.
- It sends a signal to local governments that the future of financial reporting will not be document-based but data-based.
- It aligns naturally with digital-first, accessible formats that are more inclusive to stakeholders and assistive technologies alike.
Importantly, the FDTA is not about simplifying what governments report. It’s about reframing how they report it, with an emphasis on usability, for humans and machines.
Forward-thinking finance teams are already adapting. By embracing accessibility and structured publishing now, local governments can get ahead of the regulatory curve and align with best practices that will soon become expectations.
What Finance Teams Should Do Now
Accessibility is no longer a peripheral concern. It’s central to the credibility and reach of financial reporting. Finance leaders can take the lead by:
- Auditing current ACFRs for known accessibility barriers, such as untagged PDFs, broken reading orders, and missing alt text.
- Collaborating with communications and IT teams to improve publishing workflows and delivery methods.
- Exploring tools and platforms that make accessibility a built-in feature, not a post-processing task.
- Preparing for the shift toward structured, digital-first financial reporting.
A report that’s accessible is a report that works. It’s not about meeting minimum standards, it’s about ensuring your most important financial information serves the people who rely on it.
Euna Solutions’ Perspective
At Euna Solutions, we’ve built digital publishing tools that make it easy to create and deliver budget books, ACFRs, capital improvement plans (CIPs), and strategic plans. Accessibility was a core design priority from the beginning. Our publishing framework supports WCAG compliance, responsive design, and structured navigation to ensure every stakeholder can access and understand your most critical reports. Learn how Euna can support your digital ACFRs.