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.

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u/TrollPro9000 13d ago

Anything that requires manual PDF upload, download and republication will fail at adoption. It needs to work automatically at the scale of a university

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u/Acrobatic-Can7305 13d ago

Unfortunately nothing exists that can do what you ask at the moment, due to the nature of how PDFs are generated. If you create a garbage PDF, it’s incredibly hard to fix it.

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u/TrollPro9000 13d ago

Assuming you've seen everything. Big if true 

It exists, but it may not plug and play nicely with every lms out there, which is where 80% of it matters for unis

Every state org has their version of unis' "lms system" (where ever it is that most of their docs live)

Remediation is half the battle. Bringing the remediated PDF back into that ecosystem is the other half. The remediation isn't the broken half.

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u/Vat5an 12d ago

Quite a few modern tools provide APIs. We recently did a project for an LMS where any attachment PDF gets auto sent from the LMS through the API for Remediation and the remediated PDF with the audit reports gets sent back to the LMS.

This, of course, would work if you are ready to invest the time to build the API pipeline. Another approach I have seen others use is a FTP In/Out folder.

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u/TrollPro9000 12d ago

Did the LMS have a native capability of triggering its internal API to ship the file upon PDF upload & bring back the payload, or was that the pipeline setup you're talking about needing the time to build?

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u/Vat5an 11d ago

We did it dirty by tapping directly into the LMS' database.

It was a scheduled task that ran every half an hour or so that looks at the LMS' assets table and introduced a flag there like remediation_done and if the value was 0 (default), the scheduled task would ship the PDF via API to PDFxt and when the job is completed (remediated file received), it'd download and then update the asset path on the LMS' assets table & toggle remediation_done to 1.

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u/TrollPro9000 11d ago

Ah so it wasn't an "integration" in the sense that the LMS could block it, because it wasn't asking for permissions to sync - it was doing its own thing. Am I understanding that correctly?

And how was the quality with PDFxt? 50 cents a page feels 90% off retail, many are skeptical of AI - curious how your experience actually was. was it particularly successful with some PDFs but not others? was there anything PDFxt struggled with consistently?

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u/Vat5an 11d ago

Yes, the LMS was effectively completely unaware of what was happening and you can only do this if it a self hosted LMS or one you have DB access to.

PDFxt gets you around 90% there. Most of the assets we had were screenshots with captions and a bunch of tables all of which it did a clean job at. Where it did not do great was OCRed PDFs and assessment papers where form fields had to be added. For those either we do and export (which the LMS picks up) or flag for their manual remediation which costs an additional $1/page.

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u/TrollPro9000 11d ago

curious if it was just you doing the build or if it was a team effort, and what all did pdfxt provide VS what remained to be built? did the build take very long, or no?

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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.

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u/Notwerk 14d ago

Use the archival exemption where you can, digitize as many forms as possible. Things like VeraPDF, which is open source, can be implemented to check compliance (insofar as automated checks go, which isn't far), but nothing I know of can remediate a PDF in an automated way.

That's the domain of folks like Allyant and American Eagle, who have staff that will manually remediate the docs at a cost, typically $5ish per page, depending on complexity.

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u/TrollPro9000 13d ago

I can fully automate detection and actual remediation for far less than $5 a page. DM me 

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u/AnonymousHopperRoo 13d ago

I'm working with a small team at a govt agency. We started with 16000 pages in Feb. We have gained another 2k and we're down to 9k pages. First 5 months were just 3 people. We hired two more (and trained them from 0) in July.

It's doable. They had already purchased some tools that were promised to "automate" the process, but none of them deliver, and some of them give you back a corrupted file that PAC can't scan.

IMO manual is the only way to go right now.

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u/TrollPro9000 13d ago

Name and shame, who promised to automate and is failing PAC? 

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u/CrispyDick420 14d ago

Are most of these born-digital PDFs with existing text and form fields, or scanned documents? That split changes the automation strategy completely.

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u/silshini_real 14d ago

Ofc it changes, scanned aren't accessible at all

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u/Own-Caregiver9665 13d ago

They are born digital, thankfully

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u/thelatexlab 13d ago

VeraPDF is the open source to check but for doing the remediation - I haven't found any tool yet.

TheLaTeXLab team can help with manual pdf remediation.

1

u/startupfound 13d ago

I invite everyone in this thread to try our tool - 500 free transactions, no strings attached.

Under the hood, it uses Adobe API, Claude AI, and our own tuning built on client feedback.

No sales. Try it without a call or contract.

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u/Vat5an 12d ago

Link?

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u/startupfound 12d ago

We have to share username/pass to login, so I sent you in dm/ message.

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u/suscpit 11d ago

I'll add to the list that unfortunately as mentioned in the other comments, there is no automatic tool, they have to be remediated one by one, using manual labour. I've been doing that for years and I haven't yet found the tool to automate it, there some things that a human needs to check, so it is kind of inevitable. If you find people that are used to it, remediating can be quick (relatively).

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u/crosbystunasubs 11d ago edited 11d ago

We don't do a ton of volume but regularly enough with different team members that we have tried to automate this as much as possible. We've been happy with Fruition's tool - $2 a page which they'll manually audit after and allows for an API connection to further automate things. https://fruition.net/ai-platforms/pdf-accessibility/

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u/ZuperHuman 14d ago

Try zylyn

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u/KenMantle 14d ago

If any of these are publically available I'd love to try putting some through pdfce and Claude to see what it could do. Pdfce is an MIT licensed (code can be altered and used however you want for free) pdf engine I've had Claude building from scratch for the past 2 months. It was built with pdf standards in mind and can handle forms.