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Re: Tools for PDF Remediation

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From: Michaels, Cody
Date: Nov 1, 2024 6:59AM

Hi Vaibhav, I can only speak to Acrobat and Equidox - as that is what my institution uses. We need to remediate a large number of documents, most of which were created prior to our institution (a private American university) made an accessible documents initiative. Since we are a library, we can't just update our templates and leave it at that.

I found very early on that Acrobat wasn't sufficient for the types of documents I was working with, most of which have very complicated lists and tables where the Acrobat user interface was poorly equipped to deal with. I investigated and found Equidox, whose software is much more user-friendly than working in the Adobe tag tree. But I can't say I'd recommend it without qualifications. Equidox tries to emphasize conversion to HTML documents instead of PDF, and their HTML export works well. The problem is that, for institutions like our own, that simply isn't an option - especially for scanned documents that are decades old.

Equidox's PDF export tool has some issues, though. The software has two ways of dealing with content - a sensitivity tool to automatically detect zones, and a drag-and-drop interface for drawing zones manually. The problem I find is that Equidox doesn't always correctly export tags based on these zones, with some content being put in inappropriate places, and some things not being correctly tagged - rows in tables, for example, don't usually come out with the row scope identified except in the HTML export. Equidox helps make it easier for us to tackle the scale of document remediation we need, but it doesn't perform perfectly - which reduces its value considerably. Acrobat will take you farther, but at a much slower (in my opinion) pace that can quickly spiral out of control if you have a large number of unique documents to process, especially scanned documents that need to undergo OCR.

In short, my institution at least is still looking for the fabled perfect tool that is both easy to use at scale, and actually achieves the goal of making documents accessible.

Cody Michaels
Library Systems Technician
Hunt Library
<EMAIL REMOVED>
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Florida | Arizona | Worldwide