Metadata in WordPerfect: ADA and WCAG 2.1 Compliance

WordPerfect 6.0a (1994) in Windows 3.1, showing metadata being edited via the Document Summary dialog. Screenshot captured in a virtualized environment in July 2026.

© 2026 Rietta Inc.

Courts throughout the United States still use WordPerfect. So why is metadata still being ignored?

In our work with State courts, we have come across WordPerfect files, or PDF documents generated from them, with metadata deficiencies: no title (or subject), no author, and so forth. Now that WCAG 2.1 requirements are enforced through ADA Title II, documents without sufficient metadata to assist a user with disabilities using assistive technology are non-conformant with federal law. That’s a significant risk for every state court system in the United States, and the ADA Title II compliance deadline, April 26, 2027, is closer than it feels.

Metadata has been part of the Document Summary properties in WordPerfect going back to the DOS days. Without putting my full computing antiquities hat on, I pulled my old copy of WordPerfect 6.0a from my personal archive and loaded it into a virtualized environment. Above is a real screenshot from that session: a document called smithvgr.wpd, with an Author field, a Subject field, Keywords, and an Abstract, all filled out in a dialog box that’s 32 years old. A young clerk from that era is now a senior judge, soon to retire, and yet more often than not, key court documents are still written today without anyone ever going in to add these specific details.

Not every metadata field is required for ADA and WCAG 2.1 compliance, but the key fields you should have for accessible court documents are:

Title : An unambiguous title that correctly identifies the case name or style

Language : Must specify the document language attribute as “en-us,” or another language if the hearing or ruling was conducted in a language other than English

Author : Should be organizational, such as “Court of Appeals for the State of…”

Description : A brief summary of the contents, the outcome, or what is actionable. This is a good place to summarize the holding in the case and any direct orders, such as “judgement affirmed,” or “reversed and remanded,” etc. This is useful for a person using assistive technology and also for indexing and searchability rather than relying solely on an external CMS.

Keywords : Not required for ADA, but useful for filtering and search.

Title and Language matter most for compliance, since these are the two fields that most often constitute a violation of federal law when left blank. A person with disabilities can’t easily tell one document from another when files have been downloaded to their own device without a proper title. Language is a bit different; in practice, most screen readers fall back to the user’s local configuration, en-us for most of us, and don’t actually struggle reading an untagged document out loud. But that fallback doesn’t satisfy the law. WCAG and ADA Title II require the language attribute to be set regardless of whether a reader notices the gap. It’s one of the more overlooked fields in accessibility work.

Here’s the interesting historical wrinkle. WordPerfect 6.0a never had a dedicated Title field, and it didn’t have a language attribute either. What it had was Subject, the closest thing WordPerfect had to a title. In practice, when a Title is missing but the Subject field is uniquely descriptive, agencies may reasonably copy that Subject to the new Title rather than leaving it blank or generating something generic. Language, on the other hand, simply wasn’t a designed feature yet prior to multi-lingual screen reading technology. Screen readers and multi-language accessibility weren’t the priority they are now. For most agencies, either an organization-level default en-us or an algorithmically detected language can accurately provide this piece of metadata at scale.

We’ve often seen the original WordPerfect filename carried forward into a Microsoft Word or PDF variant, presumably because there was never a title or subject set in the court’s process to draw from. A filename like smithvgr.wpd doesn’t mean much to a person without disabilities either, but it’s especially unhelpful when it’s what gets read aloud, verbatim, to someone relying on a screen reader.

This is one example of the many metadata deficiencies that our Metadata Minder platform is built to catch. Unlike accessibility vendors who stop at PDF and Microsoft Office formats, we process WordPerfect files in bulk too, and report on metadata deficiencies at scale, so state and local government agencies aren’t left guessing about their exposure ahead of the deadline.

April 26, 2027 is coming, see my previous article The Real ADA Title II Deadline for Government Documents. Metadata...