Illustrative scenario: The institution, quotes, percentages, costs, and outcomes are fictional assumptions, not customer evidence. Supported fixes remain partial and human review is required.
How a Small College Could Achieve A Reviewed Workflow on a Tight Budget
A 2,000-student, 150-course scenario: How affordable tools can make compliance achievable with managed department service from $2,249/month.
2,000
Students
Pilot
Measure review effort and cost
Human
Review before publication
The Challenge: Enterprise Tools Out of Reach
Consider a small liberal-arts college with a strong commitment to accessibility. This hypothetical inventory illustrates the resource questions it would need to test:
Budget Reality
- Annual IT budget: $210K
- Enterprise LMS tools: quote-based (not publicly listed)
- Anthology Ally: bundled within the Anthology suite
- Quotes can consume a large share of a small IT budget
Resource Constraints
- 1 IT staff member (part-time accessibility)
- 150 courses to remediate
- 1,200+ PDF syllabi/readings
- 800 PowerPoint presentations
- 300 video lectures
In this hypothetical scenario, the college compares current vendor quotes with the staffing needed for review and manual remediation.
Illustrative planning question
Why a College Like This Might Choose Aelira
- Affordable - managed department service from $2,249/mo
- Supported partial fixes - human review and manual work remain
- Easy to use - Single IT staff can manage
- No contracts - Cancel anytime, no multi-year commitment
- Defined scope - Processing allowance and service boundaries documented up front
- Bounded pilot available - Test against agreed evidence before committing
Implementation: One Person, 7 Months
Unlike large universities with dedicated accessibility teams, the college in this scenario has one IT staff member working on accessibility part-time (20 hours/week). A workflow could look like:
Weekly Workflow (5 courses/week)
Monday: Export 5 courses from Canvas (PDFs, PPT, videos)
Tuesday: Run Aelira CLI batch processing (automated, 2 hours)
Wednesday: Review saved candidates against agreed criteria (3 hours assumed; extend if required)
Thursday: Manual edge cases (complex tables, unusual formatting, 4 hours)
Friday: Upload approved versions to Canvas and check published files (1 hour assumed)
Planning assumption: 10 hours/week per person for 5 courses/week; revise throughput based on review findings and unresolved work
30 weeks
Total timeline
150
Courses completed
Review
Saved output and unresolved issues
Content Breakdown
PDFs (syllabi, readings)
OCR + structure tagging + alt text
1,200
PowerPoint presentations
Contrast fixes + alt text + descriptions
800
Video lectures (captions)
Auto-caption cleanup + technical terms
300
Images (course materials)
AI-generated alt text descriptions
2,500+
Illustrative Planning Outputs (Not Customer Results)
Review
Human acceptance required
Set a review milestone from applicable obligations
$32K
First-year cost
transparent pricing vs quote-based enterprise tools
Ask
Faculty feedback
Measure ease of use during an actual pilot
3-Year Cost Comparison
Enterprise LMS Tool
- Year 1: Custom quote
- Year 2: Custom quote
- Year 3: Custom quote
- Total: Quote-based
- Pricing not publicly listed; cloud-only
Manual (1 FTE)
- Year 1: $140,700
- Year 2: $140,700
- Year 3: $140,700
- Total: $422,100
- Slow, doesn't scale
Aelira
- Year 1: $26,988
- Year 2: $26,988
- Year 3: $26,988
- Total: $80,964
- Supported beta workflows; review and unresolved work remain
Illustrative cost difference: $341,136 before software-assisted review, manual repair, and other institutional costs. This is not measured savings.
Potential Knock-On Benefits
- Blind students could see better learning outcomes
- International students could benefit from captions
- Faculty may find accessible PDFs easier to edit
- SEO could improve (accessible content = better rankings)
Faculty Feedback
Illustrative: "IT could coordinate processing, while faculty and accessibility staff review the saved outputs and remaining barriers."
Faculty (illustrative)
Illustrative: "A blind student could finally access course readings independently."
Faculty (illustrative)
Illustrative: "Transparent pricing could help us plan a bounded workflow, provided we budget for review and unresolved work."
IT Director (illustrative)
Small liberal-arts college (hypothetical)
Affordable Accessibility for Small Colleges
Affordable accessibility for small colleges, no enterprise budgets needed. Managed department service starts at $2,249/month with a defined processing allowance.