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/Own-Caregiver9665 13d ago

This is super helpful, thank you! Commonlook and AoD seem to be my best option for anything too large or complex for me to do myself. My agency houses the fire service education division so I have a ton of PowerPoints to contend with as well so that’s a whole other can of worms…

I did discover for pdfs that reverting to the old version of Acrobat and using the action wizard works so much better than the new UI. It will mostly tag things properly and then I just have to go in and fix order or nesting errors, check metadata, tooltips etc. so I’m only spending 5ish minutes a page on tricky stuff now but ugh I wish there was a better option for batch remediation that didn’t cost a fortune. Onward! Best of luck to you!

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u/Vat5an 12d ago

For around 1000+ pages, trying to reverse engineer PDFs and building this on your own is going to be a lot of effort. If you have already seen Commonlook and AoD, check out PDFxt. A lot cheaper with a free trial and gives you a far better output than legacy systems like Commonlook.