How Do I Remediate Thousands of PDFs at Scale?

A large PDF collection needs an inventory and repeatable acceptance process. Begin with actual counts, source availability and student tasks rather than an assumed university backlog or an advertised processing rate.

Inventory and scope

Deduplicate files and identify owners, active use, formats, complexity and source documents. Assess the applicable legal scope and exceptions. Record current barriers and urgent student needs separately from the longer backlog.

Prioritize work

Address known access barriers and current teaching or service tasks. High traffic can inform priority, but a document used by one student may still be essential. Assign specialists, source-based recreation or publisher requests where automation cannot safely produce a usable result.

Pilot before batching

Use authorized representative files, including difficult and unsupported examples. Set bounded batch sizes and inspect queue, resource and provider limits. Measure preparation, processing, review, correction and manual fallback. Include failures and unavailable outputs in capacity estimates.

The v0.9.5 release documented a 1,000-item tested boundary for its specific workflow. That evidence does not establish universal throughput, capacity beyond that boundary or every deployment topology. Later releases and the institution's environment need their own evaluation.

Accept the saved result

Retain originals, tool versions and output checksums. Compare source content with the downloaded candidate. Validate supported structure and perform the manual and assistive-technology checks relevant to the intended tasks. Do not auto-approve descriptions or structural changes solely because a confidence value is high.

Aelira Core is beta software. Supported workflows can apply eligible partial fixes and record outcomes, but some inputs need manual work or cannot produce a downloadable remediated file. Review the actual saved output, unresolved findings and content preservation before publication. Automated scores describe implemented checks rather than accessibility conformance. Inspect the public source and release documentation and evaluate a representative authorized sample before planning a rollout.

Prevent a new backlog

Use accessible authoring templates, publishing checks and clear ownership. Track accepted outputs, unresolved work, response times and new intake. Treat scanner scores as scoped measures and describe untested areas.

The DOJ Title II rule sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements for covered state and local government web content and mobile apps, subject to the rule's scope and exceptions. The April 2026 IFR extends the dates to April 26, 2027 for public entities with a population of 50,000 or more and April 26, 2028 for smaller public entities and special district governments. Determine the institution's cohort using DOJ's population rules; enrollment and federal funding alone do not determine it. Existing accessibility obligations continue before those dates.