Open Source Accessibility for Higher Education

Accessibility is the foundation on which every Aelira feature is built. We did not start with a technology and go looking for a problem — we started with the reality that millions of students encounter inaccessible course materials every semester, and we worked backward from there. The platform scans and remediates documents across eight formats against WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA specifications because that is what content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust actually requires. Accessibility is not a feature we bolted on after launch. It is the reason the company exists.

Twenty-six percent of US adults live with a disability. When a professor uploads an inaccessible PDF, they are not making a formatting choice — they are excluding students from the material those students paid to access. We believe that how content was authored should never determine who can learn from it. Equity is the principle that drove us to make Aelira open-core and to price it for higher education budgets, not enterprise procurement cycles. Accessible content should be the default, not a retroactive afterthought squeezed in before a compliance deadline.

Aelira is purpose-built for higher education. The content types we handle — course syllabi, lecture slides, research papers, exam materials, multimedia recordings — reflect the real artefacts that move through universities every semester. We integrate directly with the systems faculty already use: Canvas, Blackboard, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. The April 2026 ADA Title II deadline makes this work urgent, but our commitment to learning extends well beyond any single regulation. Wherever learning happens, the materials should work for everyone.

Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. Meeting WCAG 2.1 AA is necessary, but true inclusion means designing for the full spectrum of human ability — screen reader users, keyboard-only navigators, people with colour vision deficiency, and learners with cognitive or neurological differences. We built Aelira not to produce documents that pass an automated checker, but to produce documents that actually work for the people who need them. Every remediation should make content more usable, not merely more technically conformant.

Most accessibility tools stop at detection. They generate a report, hand it to someone who is already overworked, and hope for the best. Aelira's key differentiator is that it remediates: faculty upload broken content and receive fixed content back. Our AI-powered engine adds alt text to images, tags document structure, repairs reading order, fixes colour contrast, and generates proper table markup. Detection without remediation is a to-do list. Remediation is the actual work — and that is what we chose to build.

Faculty can spend forty or more hours per course manually remediating documents — time taken away from teaching, research, and students. Automation handles the mechanical, repetitive work: tagging headings, generating alt text, restructuring tables, repairing PDF structure trees. Humans stay in the loop for the judgment calls — nuanced alt text, context-dependent reading order, discipline-specific terminology. The division is deliberate: machines do the labour, people do the thinking. That is how we give faculty their time back.