How Arizona State University and AWS are making the web more accessible to everyone

In April 2024, I posted a piece to my old Forbes column about the Department of Justice’s “final rule” on digital access to people with disabilities. The Biden-era edict was described as a “landmark” ruling for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“Websites and mobile apps are used by state and local governments to provide a wide variety of services including health care, education, civic education, voter information and registration, parking and permit applications, among others. Now, public entities, such as state and local governments, must ensure that their web content and mobile apps meet the technical standard established in the rule within two or three years, depending on population size. By requiring that public entities meet a technical standard, the rule will increase people with disabilities’ independence, flexibility, dignity and privacy in their everyday lives,” the Justice Department wrote of its ruling back in July 2024. “The department crafted this rule with broad input from the public, including from individuals with disabilities, advocacy organizations, state and local governments and web accessibility experts. Many members of the public provided valuable feedback, much of which is reflected in the final rule.”

Almost two years later, the Justice Department’s mandate is pressingly coming into view as the agency’s deadline for compliance is quickly approaching, falling on April 24. Specifically, companies must comply with the WCAG 2.1 Level AA technical standard; adherence is dependent on population, as next week’s deadline affects state and local governments with a population of 50,000 or more. (The deadline is pushed out a full year, to April 26, 2027 for populations of or governments with a population of 0–49,999, as well as special district governments.) In practical terms, what the ruling means is public-facing court documents, including PDFs, all must be made accessible.

In a concerted effort to spur compliance and engender greater awareness of accessibility, Arizona State University’s Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) is working alongside Amazon’s AWS team to make PDFs more accessible to all. Namely, the school has created a so-called PDF Accessibility Remediation tool, an open-source piece of software expressly designed to “tackle a significant challenge in the digital era: improving the accessibility of digital document collections.” The CIC even makes explicit reference to the aforementioned DOJ ruling, writing its Remediation tool is “a scalable open‐source solution that quickly and efficiently brings PDF documents into compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards.”

On the PDF tool’s website, the Cloud Innovation Center’s raison d'être is described as “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. The description goes on to say the CIC “harnesses Amazon’s pioneering approach to dive deep into high-priority pain points, meticulously define challenges, and craft strategic solutions, [and 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.”

In an interview earlier this month, Colleen Schwab, a global innovation strategist and leader of the CIC for AWS, explained to me that, at a high level, AWS is “finding common thread pain points” for individuals and/or organizations and then remedying said pain with technological medicine. One of those cures is the PDF Remediation tool, of which Schwab said was built to make PDFs “more approachable.” Schwab said AWS had heard from people in higher education, for example, who felt overwhelmed by the “sheer volume” of PDFs as the race towards meeting compliance intensified. Manual remediation, she said, wasn’t going to cut it. More pointedly economically, the costs for automating it—by way of Adobe’s API calls—were too costly for many budgets. For Arizona State and AWS, the question became “How can we solve this problem?”

“We [at AWS] love those types of problems because we’re seeing it from multiple angles,” Schwab said of the project’s impetus. “We don’t know if there’s a perfect path forward, and that’s what makes innovation so exciting.”

In a nutshell, Schwab told me making PDFs accessible, and indeed the internet writ large, is driven by a simple ethos: “People have access to information,” she said. For the CIC and AWS, Schwab said there existed an opportunity to “think about how artificial intelligence and all of these wonderful technologies can really solve a major problem,” saying AI in particular can “accelerate and catalyze” effective solutions.

Aryan Khanna, a senior at ASU and a cloud developer at the CIC, explained the project started in June and the team’s initial scope was to finish it within 6–8 weeks. The grunt work involved researching and collating a slew of open-source tools, but Khanna conceded there weren’t “not a lot of resources out there to make PDF accessible.” If Adobe’s API indeed was too pricey, Khanna recalled, why not convert PDFs into an accessible HTML format? AWS was the solution to make it happen, which he noted has the benefit of being literally accessible to public institutions with limited funding.

“This solution has been adopted by so many organizations,” Schwab said. “Because it is open source, we originally launched this publicly in January 2025, and it has been made better [since] by so much feedback we’ve received from the community—of users, of testers, of, you people within Title II organizations who are helping us think about different edge cases so that we can build that into the open source solution.”

The feedback Schwab referenced has been invaluable, as everyone has learned “so much about accessibility” whilst working on the PDF project. Part of the accessibility problem, she said, is most conversion tools don’t retain critical metadata needed for apps like screen readers. By leveraging the marvels of modern technology, the CIC has been able to “support that work the screen readers are doing to help make sure that when those documents are read, the content is available and accessible to all.”

Khanna said accessibility is something relatively new to him, telling me he was only “about two years” into the PDF project when it started. He admitted to “not knowing much” about accessibility at the outset, but since has “baked it into my workflow.” He added he’s been more focused on the backend bits of software development, whereas the user-facing aspects of accessibility had heretofore been unknown to him.

Shaashvat Mittal, a fellow ASU senior and CIC cloud developer, concurred.

“The major change for me, as an engineer, was I used to think I have to build an application and I have to make it work. But when I took over this project, I understood the end goal of this project—[I understood] who we are building this project for,” he said. “That’s the mindset that apart from looking for accessibility needs as well, it’s about looking on what the end goal of this project is—what the user’s perspective or need is. That change in perspective, and that change in mindset, is something that developed when I was working on this project. As I said, like, we are taking a lot of backend and architecture classes towards like our [computer science] degree, but while working on this project and learning about accessibility, it made us realize there are other things that also matters by making sure we are including every single user.”

Schwab said a major feature of the PDF remediation tool is its open-source nature, as it’s freely available on GitHub. She noted the team has received much feedback on how to improve it, both as a tool and how it’s distributed. The deployment, Schwab said, was “complicated” and included a 10-page documentation booklet on how to deploy it. That proved daunting for those who aren’t intimately familiar with AWS or has “limited technical expertise,” with Schwab telling me “we took that feedback and made the changes, and we converted [the tool] into a single-click deployment.”

“Anyone who has limited AWS knowledge or limited technical expertise in this domain can still deploy the solution and meet the [compliance] requirement,” Mittal added.

“Because this is an open-source solution, we welcome all of that feedback from the community of users that are finding this solution on GitHub or via media articles or wherever it might be,” Schwab said. “I’ll also say the thing we often hear as well is people praise the fact this is open-source. From the AWS side, this is consumption-based pricing, meaning it’s just pay as you go—which has been really well-received by users. Then also because it is open-source and under an MIT license, that essentially means people can customize the solution. I often describe that, we at the Cloud Innovation Center built an engine, but other organizations can add the tinted windows and whatever color paint they want on it. They can change the UI and UX they… what that means in the real world is people are providing customization aspects to this.”

She continued: “You can imagine if a solution was deployed at, say, a district level, and all of the other institutions below in that district or departments want to leverage it. They all want to sort of cost-share in the solution, so they’ve added those different customizations. They’ve added things like their own single sign-on and security requirements. The ease of deployment, the customization aspect, and then also realizing that people can can build [and] can fork that GitHub—and they’ve done that and provide different bells and whistles on top of it that are all helping to feed the accessibility community and to feed the PDF remediation efforts.”

Looking towards the future, Schwab was effusive in her praise of the CIC and students like Khanna and Mittal, who literally represent the future of the Center’s ongoing work. She hailed the importance of people like them being “indoctrinated early in their careers” on the cruciality of accessibility, telling me “that’s knowledge they are going to take forth into these long and powerful careers they are all going to enter into.”

Schwab also said “knowing we have more technologists coming into the workforce with this accessibility foundation” is exciting because, to Mittal’s earlier point, “seeing that that mental shift they have in realizing the importance of this particular area as they go on to build new technologies that are beyond this PDF remediation solution.”

For their respective parts, both Khanna and Mittal emphatically said Schwab’s sentiments “hit the nail on the head” and pledged to carry the early lessons they’ve learned about accessibility into whatever future endeavors crosses their paths.

“I consider this [PDF project] a starting point on my accessibility journey,” Mittal said.