Our Approach
...isn't this actually a step forward?
PDFs sit across the digital estate, accumulated over years. Cost, exposure, and quiet exclusion build alongside, none of it on the brief when the documents went up.
The estate is found and ranked by what is read. The documents that matter are now inclusive web pages. The work runs in the background without pulling in a project team.
The same decision returns more than was asked of it. Visitors who could not access the content read it on their own terms. The organisation is present in AI-led answers and across the modern web reading layer, where PDFs are weaker.
How it works
'Remove the distraction' we have really tried to.
Once the order is placed, the work shifts to us. No project to manage, no team to brief. ARTY is running behind the scenes, greeting visitors and supporting their needs, delivering the appropriate experience.
Add the secure tag
A little, secure element you include on your pages. For most websites it's included in the templates, and that's setup complete. Each organization has their own secure tag, to use landscape wide.
Fit and forget
ARTY - their for your visitors (people and computers!). PDFs for those they want them, inclusive pages for those with screen readers. AI (LLMs) structured content - agents data, fast.
Your visitors benefit
Visitors who need accessible content get a version built for the web. As you publish new documents, they are picked up and converted without you having to flag them.
Why we don't offer the old approach
Attempting to patch a PDF is a long process with an uncertain outcome.
The instinct makes sense. You have a PDF on your site. It has accessibility issues. Surely you fix the PDF? In practice, that process is slower, harder, and more fragile than it looks from the outside. Here is what it actually involves.
Finding the PDF
Most organisations do not have a complete record of what PDFs exist across their site, where they are hosted, or who owns them. A document published 7 years ago sits alongside one added last month. Before anything else can happen, it has to be found. Often the longest part of the whole process.
Checking what is wrong
Each PDF needs to be assessed individually. Is it a scanned image? Does it have a tag structure? Is reading order correct? Are tables structured in a way a screen reader can follow? This assessment takes time and requires someone who knows what they are looking at. No two PDFs present the same problems.
The remediation work
Depending on the document, this means adding tags, correcting reading order, writing alternative text for images, restructuring tables, dealing with forms, and handling any scanned content through OCR. Even with tooling, this is manual, document-by-document work. Average time estimates for this step alone run to around 23 minutes per document. Tools help. They do not eliminate the hours.
Testing and checking nothing broke
Once remediated, the document needs testing to verify accessibility has genuinely improved. It also needs to be checked that the content itself has not shifted, that tables still read correctly, and that the document still says what it is supposed to say. This step is non-negotiable for documents that carry formal information. Especially important where the PDF is a formal record.
Getting it back onto the site
The remediated file then needs to replace the original on the site. In some cases, particularly where the PDF was published as a record of something at a point in time, it may not be appropriate or possible to replace it at all. A committee report from 2018 is a record. It cannot be overwritten. Some PDFs cannot be replaced, only supplemented.
This is why we take a different approach. Rather than attempting to patch the original document, we convert PDFs into accessible web pages. The original PDF is not touched. Visitors who need accessible content get it in a format that is built for the web from the start.
The process is automated, it scales across the document estate, and it does not depend on being able to open, modify, or republish a file that may have been locked, archived, or formally recorded years ago.
The Evidence
Whitepaper
Automation is the starting point, not the destination
AI delivers an immediate, measurable improvement. This paper sets out how we then layer human oversight on top, so the gaps automation cannot reach are still covered, without the cost or delay of remediating document by document.
Content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.
The elephant in the room
Perfect is the enemy of accessible.
Some expertise comes with a preference for the slow lane.
Manual remediation, done properly, takes days per document at significant cost. At scale, that maths does not work. AI handles 85-90% of your PDFs in minutes, freeing specialists to focus on the ~5% that genuinely needs a human eye. More documents accessible, to more people, far sooner.
Waiting for each document to be hand-checked keeps your content inaccessible while the clock runs. Progress now reaches real people now. That matters more than a perfect score on a fraction of your PDFs. And the remaining 5-15%? We handle that by offering direct 1-2-1 support for your visitors.