Overview
In the United States, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act compliance ensures digital and document accessibility for individuals with disabilities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 61 million adults—1 in 4 U.S. adults—live with a disability that may require accessible digital content. Ensuring 508 compliance enables millions of Americans to access government websites, documents, and digital services, promoting greater inclusion and equal opportunities. Automating Section 508 remediation plays a crucial role in making documents more accessible while reducing the burden of manual corrections.
Precise’s 508 as a Service (508aaS) is an Artificial Intelligence-driven solution designed for on-demand document remediation, ensuring compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. By automating 508 remediation, 508aaS helps federal agencies achieve faster, more cost-effective compliance, minimizing manual effort and allowing teams to focus on their core mission.
Challenge
Identifying and correcting Section 508 compliance issues in documents is often a labor-intensive and repetitive process. On average, a 508 specialist spends 20 minutes per page manually fixing accessibility issues.
To address this challenge, we analyzed hundreds of sample documents from federal agencies using Microsoft tools to develop an automated solution that leverages Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) to streamline PDF 508 remediation, significantly reducing time and costs for our customers.
Solution
By utilizing Generative AI and Machine Learning (ML), 508aaS effectively detects and resolves accessibility issues in PDFs, all while maintaining the document’s original layout and visual integrity. Our solution focuses on the most common HHS 508 compliance rules, achieving a high success rate in automated fixes within minutes and significantly reducing the need for manual intervention, particularly with complex, redacted, or scanned documents.
To further improve the remediation of intricate documents, Precise’s 508aaS incorporates an ML model that can handle complex layouts, including two-way, three-way, and multi-layered tables. The solution utilizes OCR and ML to automatically detect and correct complex document structures such as tables, forms, and images.
For documents containing intricate forms, our solution applies OCR before processing to ensure precise text extraction. The system also integrates accessibility tags and organizes the document structure, making the content compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers. Additionally, the PDF reading order is enhanced to ensure a logical content flow, providing a seamless reading experience. Throughout the 508 AI processing, the document’s fidelity is preserved, retaining its original appearance after remediation.
Precise’s 508aaS solution is built to seamlessly integrate with multiple Generative AI platforms, including Amazon Bedrock and Azure OpenAI. It can be configured to leverage either platform based on customer preferences, offering flexibility while maintaining high performance, scalability, and security in document accessibility solutions.
Impact
The Precise 508aaS solution offers an intuitive interface designed to enhance the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of 508 issue correction. It automates the remediation of common accessibility issues in alignment with Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 standards.
Key Benefits of Precise 508aaS include:
- Higher Coverage Rate – Achieves an 89% compliance coverage rate based on HHS Accessibility Compliance Requirements.
- Higher Fix Rate – Successfully remediates 96.6% of identified issues making government documents accessible to individuals with disabilities (based on 100+ documents).
- Cost Efficiency – Reduces manual remediation and testing efforts through automation, lowering costs and improving resource efficiency.
- Faster 508 Remediation – Processes large volumes of complex documents, accelerating compliance and improving accessibility compared to effort performing manual corrections in minutes, compared to hours or days with manual remediation.
- Lower Compliance Risk – Avoids potential penalties and rework due to non-compliance with Section 508.
- Higher Quality – Eliminates common mistakes made during manual remediation with consistent application of accessibility guidelines across documents, improving compliance quality.
- Ensures PDF Fidelity – Retains the original document structure and appearance post-remediation.
By automating the most time-consuming aspects of 508 compliance, Precise 508aaS empowers federal agencies to achieve faster, cost-effective accessibility remediation that reduces manual effort allowing customers to focus more on their mission.
