PDF Accessibility Solution

The Arizona State University Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (AI CIC), powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), partnered with The Ohio State University Libraries (Ohio State) to tackle a significant challenge in the digital era: improving the accessibility of the library’s digital collections. The Ohio State University Libraries’ collection contains hundreds of thousands of PDF documents, many of which did not meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards, making it difficult or impossible for individuals relying on assistive technologies to utilize those documents. To address this issue, the AI CIC collaborated with Ohio State to develop an innovative, artificial intelligence-driven solution designed to remediate these PDFs, improving accessibility for everyone, regardless of their abilities.

Tech Reformers takes this Open Source solution and installs it into your AWS environment. We work with you to maintain the code and integration with the Adobe PDF API. We offer support and monitoring.

Below are the key AWS services used to develop this solution:

• Amazon S3: Used to securely store and manage the documents being remediated
• AWS Lambda: Automates the file processing workflows
• ECS (Fargate): Handles document processing efficiently
• AWS Step Functions: Coordinates the various processes involved in splitting, processing, and merging documents
• Amazon Bedrock: Generates alt text for images and charts using advanced LLM capabilities

Optimized for scalability, the solution takes 3.5 minutes to remediate a typical 17-page PDF, making it ideal for large institutions managing high volumes of documents. Leveraging AWS services and Adobe Auto-Tag APIs, this solution encourages good accessibility compliance at minimal cost. Institutions can scale remediation efforts efficiently while keeping costs low, perfect for large document repositories needing both speed and compliance.

A key element of the solution is the use of Adobe Auto-Tag APIs which was designed to automatically clean metadata, apply appropriate tags, and further enable document remediation.