Use Case

Universities (Higher Ed.)

University PDFs spread across faculties, schools, research centres, libraries, admissions, and student services, with no central team holding a complete view. Prospectuses, fee tables, bursary guidance, course handbooks, policy documents, and forms can remain live long after details have changed. Yet students, parents, regulators, AI search, and AI agents can still find them, treat them as current, and use them when comparing courses, checking obligations, or supporting application and forms completion. That makes unmanaged PDFs more than an accessibility problem. They affect compliance, marketing accuracy, and institutional control. If outdated content on fees, entry requirements, funding, or support remains visible, it can mislead applicants, trigger challenge, and shape decisions before the university even knows it is being used.

Summary

Universities carry accessibility duties and wider consumer obligations across a PDF estate that few central teams have fully mapped. Course information, fee schedules, bursary guidance, admissions materials, policy notices, and administrative forms often sit across multiple departments and legacy pages. Creating a challenge: content can remain publicly available, outside formal review, while still being surfaced, relied on, or repeated by applicants, advisors, AI systems, and automated form-support journeys. We convert PDFs into inclusive content (web pages automatically) regardless of which department published them or when. That helps institutions keep information accessible, current, and easier to govern, while reducing the risk of people or AI agents acting on unmanaged content.

The Challenges

Regulation, volume, and documents
that never stop changing

Visibility

<25%

Of faculty consider accessibility when publishing

Fewer than 25% of faculty consider accessibility when designing course materials. PDFs are published continuously across departmental sites, research pages, library resources, and administrative forms, without a central view of what is being added or where it sits.

Speed

99%

Time savings and 0% Internal distraction.

What previously required weeks of specialist correction, updates and review is now dealt with automatically.

Scale

110k

PDFs identified at a single institution

When Ohio State University assessed its position following news of the DOJ Title II rule in 2024, it identified over 110,000 PDFs that did not meet accessibility standards.

The obligation is in force. In the United Kingdom under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 and the Equality Act 2010, in the United States under DOJ ADA Title II with public universities treated as state entities and an April 2026 deadline for institutions serving populations over 50,000, in Australia under the Disability Discrimination Act, and across the European Union under the European Accessibility Act from June 2025.

When Ohio State University assessed its position following news of the DOJ Title II rule in 2024, it identified over 110,000 PDFs that did not meet accessibility standards. The scale of the discovery was not exceptional. It reflected what accumulates at a large institution over years of decentralised publishing.

Scanned PDFs are standard output from academic course packet production. Where a document has been scanned rather than digitally authored, it presents text as an image. A screen reader finds nothing to read.

Universities are responsible for the accessibility of materials they host and link to, not only those they produce. Research papers, library resources, and third-party materials linked from institutional pages all fall within the scope of the obligation.

How It Works

How automation works

The secure tag is installed once on the university's website. aicm discovers linked PDFs across the institution's public-facing estate, including faculty course materials, departmental research, library resources, and administrative documents, and converts each into an accessible web page sitting alongside the original as its accessible online version.

Scanned documents, third-party materials, and files with no editable source are all covered in the same process. Nothing requires manual handling from the institution's accessibility or IT team.

As new documents are published across faculties and departments, accessible versions are created accordingly. The original PDF is not modified in any way.

The Outcome

Inclusion isn't just human

Students, researchers, and visitors reach accessible versions of institutional documents without the university having to process each one manually.

Against manual processing, the cost reduction is 95% and the time saving is 99%. Accessible versions stay current as the estate changes across the academic year, supporting human access, AI discovery, and AI-assisted journeys.

Now the university has stronger control over what is understood, and acted on, creating a clear advantage over institutions still leaving document content unmanaged.

The Detail

Real-world outcomes

Comparison of manual remediation cost and time for university PDF estates. Select a row to read the full account.
Institution	Estate	Manual cost	Manual time	Expand
Public university ~2,500 students	3,200 PDFs	~$613,333	~12,267 hours
Top-10 institution scale	71,000 PDFs	~$13.6 million	~272,167 hours