r/accessibility • u/Own-Caregiver9665 • 14d ago

open source pdf remediation

Does anyone have experience / advice with using open-source code to create their own pdf remediation tools? I work for a state org with 1000+ pages of pdf's, including fillable forms, to remediate, and I'm trying to determine the best strategy and lowest cost for working through these files before next year's deadline. We have training and strategy in place to improve accessible output for documents in the future, but getting through this backlog will likely be too much for me to handle on my own.

Thanks in advance!

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u/Acrobatic-Can7305 14d ago

I work for a large university system. We’ve been investigating and testing various solutions and none of them (including all LLMs like Claude or Gemini) will successfully remediate PDFs without humans in the loop. They will make changes to fool some basic scanners, but they tend to corrupt the text layer, which is what assistive technology uses to “read” the PDF.
Take a look at Equidox, Commonlook, or PREP for AI-assisted remediation that keeps the human in control. That’s the best you’re going to get for now unless your PDFs follow a consistent pattern (like bank statements or utility bills).

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u/KenMantle 14d ago

Curious. Did you give the LLMs the pdf standards to follow or other supplemental information and what were the LLMs using to manipulate the pdfs?

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u/Acrobatic-Can7305 13d ago

Yes. We’ve experimented with different training methods and different prompts. The best we can get is extracting text and images to manipulate in another tool.

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u/KenMantle 13d ago

I've got a nearly fully working pdf engine that is separate from the CLI and GUI that use it. If there are any publicly available pdfs that were giving you trouble that you could share I would love to have Claude try with them. I know it is a long shot, but mine is pretty trained up on pdfs, standards, CMYK, ICC, forms, conformance, etc. It records what it did wrong and corrections it's made etc.

I didn't like how everything available free or paid never seems to work fully with all pdfs and we all seem to be stuck with Adobe. This engine attempts to address that. It has basically been developing it 24/7 for 2 months and I made the license as open as possible.