From inaccessible to inclusive: How the new PDF accessibility remediation solution helps institutions compliantly address accessibility requirements

On May 15, 2025, the world celebrates Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Providing access for everyone to engage in the digital world is critical. Knowing there is still a divide, an innovative approach and modern use of technology can help bridge the divide for the 1.3 billion people (16% of the global population) who currently live with disabilities or impairments.

Similar to European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada, the United States (US) has taken decisive action to improve information access through digital accessibility measures, with the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division (DOJ) revised Title II rule within the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This new rule adopts technical standards defined in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, a set of internationally-recognized standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which stipulate 50 success criteria to make websites accessible. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we also evaluate the accessibility of our services and customer experiences referencing internal and external accessibility standards to help ensure services are usable and provide delightful experiences for all users.

The revised rule requires that public entities—including state and local governments, public schools, community colleges, public universities, state and local courts, public hospitals, and healthcare clinics—to ensure that their digital content, including websites, mobile applications, and documents, is accessible for people with disabilities. PDF documents—especially older ones—can present challenging accessibility issues, and most fit the criteria for remediation, with limited exceptions. Consequently, public and higher education entities may have many public document collections across their webpages and archives that are inaccessible and non-compliant.

This leaves thousands, if not millions, of documents per public entity requiring remediation within the new rule’s compliance timeline: by 2026 (larger entities with populations of more than 50,000) or 2027 (smaller entities with populations less than 50,000). Given the expected time and effort to remediate content, customers across public sector have started taking stock of their situations and looking for solutions.

Why is PDF remediation important?

PDF accessibility is crucial for ensuring equal access to information for all users across an institution and supports the following:

Enhanced usability for everyone: Accessible PDFs benefit a wide range of users, not just those with disabilities. Features like clear document structure, alternative text for images, and proper tagging can make PDFs easier to navigate and understand for everyone.
Better performance and engagement: When PDFs are designed with accessibility in mind, they become more user-friendly and intuitive for all readers, regardless of their abilities. This can enhance the overall user experience and engagement with the content.
Increased efficiency and effectiveness: As technology and user needs evolve, accessible PDFs are more likely to remain usable and relevant over time. Implementing an in-house solution can be quicker and more cost-effective for public organizations, saving them and their constituents time and money down the line.
Improved legal compliance: Many jurisdictions have laws and regulations that require organizations to make their digital content, including PDFs, accessible to people with disabilities. Failing to comply can result in legal consequences and reputational damage.

Identifying and scoping the challenge in higher education

The Ohio State University Libraries (Ohio State) approached the Arizona State University Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (AI CIC), powered by AWS, with a problem: after an internal assessment, OSU officials found that any of their PDF documents did not meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards making them difficult for individuals using assistive technologies to access.

Additionally, Ohio State found that their legacy PDF documents lacked the requisite structure to expedite accessibility remediation—namely, alternate text on images and hierarchical content metadata tagging, which tags all document content based on its hierarchical structure (e.g., headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, etc.). Ohio State had several concerns about remediation. First, that manual remediation would be both cost and resource prohibitive; officials estimated manual remediation would cost upwards of USD $3-$4 per page, factoring in the need to hire external expertise and resources to complete remediation on-time. Further, they lacked in-house resources to manually remediate PDFs at scale or develop an automated solution, increasing their risk of non-compliance and legal action for non-compliance.

Investing in a repeatable, open source solution for PDF remediation

The AI CIC developed an innovative, open source, and AI-driven solution to automate the remediation of these PDFs and bring them into compliance with WCAG 2.1 standards. The solution leverages Adobe APIs, including the Adobe PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API, and various AWS services to efficiently and cost-effectively process and remediate large volumes of PDF documents:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): securely stores and manage the documents being remediated.
AWS Lambda: automates the file processing workflows.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)/AWS 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.

The open-source PDF Accessibility Remediation solution is architected so it can be used and deployed in multiple different ways, including bulk remediation, on-demand remediation of individual files, and custom remediation options that allow integration into existing repositories and workflows.

Results and next steps

Compared to manual remediation, the PDF Accessibility Remediation solution reduces cost and time from $1-$4 per page and hours per document, to cents per page and seconds to minutes per document, making it scalable for large document repositories. Ohio State plans to implement this solution as an integrated API service to provide on-demand accessibility remediation for its patrons.

Get started today

PDF accessibility remediation across a public entity or institution can be a daunting endeavor. The success of this project demonstrates the potential for wider application of this AI-driven document remediation solution across educational, cultural, government, and business organizations facing similar PDF accessibility remediation challenges.

Interested in learning more? Check out this demo video to get started, and try out the solution today. If you are interested in testing out this solution in your own organization, please fill out the AWS Public Sector – Contact Us form.

Public sector institutions worldwide are digitally transforming with cost-effective, scalable, secure and flexible AWS Cloud infrastructure. Find out how to get started at AWS Cloud for Higher Education.

About the ASU CIC

The ASU Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (AI CIC), powered by AWS, is a no-cost design thinking and rapid prototyping shop dedicated to bridging the digital divide and driving innovation in the nonprofit, healthcare, education, and government sectors.

Our expert team harnesses Amazon’s pioneering approach to dive deep into high-priority pain points, meticulously define challenges, and craft strategic solutions. We collaborate with AWS solutions architects and talented student workers to develop tailored prototypes showcasing how advanced technology can tackle a wide range of operational and mission-related challenges.

Discover how we use technology to drive innovation. Visit our website at ASU AI CIC or contact us directly at ai-cic@amazon.com.

Resources you might enjoy:

AWS Public Sector Blog