Turning Pixels into Data: Imaging for Accessibility

Deadline: 2020-04-23
Award: S150,000 CAD
Open to: Canadian Entities*

Public Service and Procurement Canada's (PSPC) Document Imaging Solutions Centre (DISC) is seeking to develop innovative capture solutions to improve accessibility of digitized documents and increase production capabilities, thus providing citizens and government organizations with more cost-effective, accessible and adapted digital information.

In light of the recently adopted Accessible Canada Act, DISC is facing technological challenges in providing digitized documents with improved readability for those with disabilities. Current imaging technologies for high-volume production are not designed to produce accessible documents that include proper tagging, image description, and reading order.

On the other hand, accessibility remediation solutions require significant user input and validation to produce accessible documents and are therefore unfit for high-volume production environments. DISC is looking for technological solutions that make use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and/or Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to integrate to our current imaging processes, with the objectives of producing documents in standard accessible formats (specifically HTML5 and ePub3) that respect all accessibility guidelines, while improving our accuracy rate and reducing costs associated with quality assurance.