Why this tool was developed
On April 24, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice published a final rule updating Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), requiring public institutions—including Penn State—to ensure that digital content is accessible and conforms to WCAG 2.1 Level AA technical standards by April 26, 2027.
PDF documents are one of the most common formats used across the University for academic, administrative, and public-facing content. Many existing PDFs were not originally created with accessibility in mind and require remediation, so they can be fully used with assistive technologies such as screen readers, keyboard navigation, and text-to-speech tools.
The PDF Remediation Tool was developed by the Libraries’ Development Team to help units efficiently improve the accessibility of their documents and support the University’s compliance with federal accessibility requirements. Contact your unit's Accessibility Web Liaison to gain access to the tool.
How it works
The PDF Remediation Tool uses the Adobe Auto-Tagging API and AI-assisted document analysis to automatically improve the accessibility of PDF files. The tool performs several key functions:
- Adds structural tags to identify headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables
- Identifies and tags document reading order
- Detects and tags figures and images
- Applies document metadata such as title and language
- Improves compatibility with screen readers and assistive technologies
- Generates alt text suggestions for images and figures
The remediated PDF is available for download for 24 hours.
This automated process significantly reduces the time required to remediate documents manually and helps make content more accessible to users with disabilities.
Important limitations
While the tool greatly improves accessibility, it does not guarantee full compliance. Automated remediation typically achieves approximately 85–90% accessibility, depending on the complexity and structure of the original document.
Manual review and correction are still required to ensure full accessibility compliance, especially for:
- Complex tables
- Multi-column layouts
- Figures requiring accurate alt text descriptions
- Documents with inconsistent structure
- Forms and interactive content
Known Issues and Adobe Roadmap
This tool relies on Adobe's Auto-Tagging API and some limitations and behaviors have been inherited from Adobe's platform. Adobe is actively working to improve the Auto-Tagging API.
See our List of Known Issues documentation for details about intermittent issues we have seen in our testing with the PDF Remediation Tool using the Adobe Auto-Tagging API.
See the Manual Remediation Guide for required post-processing steps.