Auto-tagging and conversion to AI-friendly formats — The latest document accessibility enhancements in .NET SDK

We’re excited to announce the latest release of our .NET SDK, packed with innovative features to transform the way you manage, process, and interact with your documents. These enhancements prioritize document accessibility, AI compatibility, and responsive viewing, ensuring your workflows are future-ready.

Auto-tagging solution: Accessibility and compliance made easy

Many organizations struggle to meet legal requirements for accessibility, risking penalties and reputational harm. To compound these issues, they tend to tag PDFs manually, which is a time-intensive and error-prone process that requires specialized knowledge. Organizations producing large volumes of PDFs need automated solutions to ensure accessibility without overwhelming their resources.

Our new support for PDF/UA automates this process, ensuring compliance with global standards such as PDF/UA, WCAG, and Section 508. This feature auto-tags documents to make them accessible to users of all abilities and fully compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers.

What is auto-tagging?

Auto-tagging automatically identifies and marks key elements — headings, paragraphs, tables, lists, and images — using semantic tags. This ensures logical reading order, enabling assistive technologies to interpret documents accurately.

This powerful new feature helps organizations focused on accessibility and compliance — including government agencies, educational institutions, non-profits, publishers, and enterprises dealing with large volumes of PDFs. Beyond compliance requirements, many organizations, especially those in the education sector, must ensure their documents work seamlessly with screen readers and other assistive tools, which can be challenging.

What is PDF/UA?

PDF/UA is an ISO standard (ISO 14289-1) that ensures PDF documents are inclusive and accessible to all users, allowing everyone to access and benefit from their content, regardless of ability. PDF/UA complements other accessibility standards like WCAG, making it easier to create documents that are universally accessible.

PDF/UA ensures PDFs are compatible with assistive technologies — such as screen readers, specialist mice, magnifiers, and speech recognition and text-to-speech software — by requiring that all content in a PDF be tagged correctly to represent the document’s structure, including headings, lists, and tables.

Highlights

• Automatically tag and structure PDFs for logical reading order, compatible with screen readers and braille displays.

• Identify meaningful content and decorative elements to enhance the reading experience.

• Mark all meaningful content with the appropriate semantic tags and integrate it into the logical structure tree of all tags within a document.

Business benefits

• Achieve compliance with accessibility regulations — including WCAG, EAA, ADA, and Section 508 — and mitigate legal risks.

• Ensure inclusivity for users with disabilities by efficiently converting PDFs into fully accessible PDF/UA-compliant documents.

• Save time and resources by automating document tagging processes.

• Improve compatibility with assistive technologies, allowing users to easily navigate and interact with the content.

• Make content universally accessible and impactful without requiring expertise in accessibility standards.

PDF-to-HTML conversion: Enhance document accessibility and interactivity through responsive web formats

PDFs can present significant accessibility challenges, unrelated to end user abilities. They often require specialized software, which limits their usability across devices, and their content cannot be directly accessed in standard web browsers. Furthermore, PDFs aren’t inherently searchable or easily indexed by search engines, reducing their discoverability. Editing or customizing PDFs is another hurdle, as it frequently requires specialized tools, while their larger file sizes make them less efficient for web delivery.

Converting content to HTML eliminates these barriers, allowing end users to do this natively in any browser. Our PDF-to-HTML conversion addresses these issues, providing a versatile and user-friendly alternative for content accessibility.

With the new PDF-to-HTML conversion capability, documents can now be effortlessly displayed in web browsers. Businesses can digitize workflows by converting contracts or reports into HTML for interactive use, while enterprises, governments, educational institutions, and publishing companies can distribute documents or integrate them into web applications. Meanwhile, organizations can ensure compliance with legal and accessibility standards by providing HTML versions of regulatory documents.

Highlights

• Two types of PDF-to-HTML conversion: fixed layout HTML, and reflowed HTML.

• Fixed layout HTML preserves the original PDF design, ensuring high-fidelity formatting. This version maintains the exact positioning of elements as they appear in the original PDF. This conversion type is ideal for documents that require precise formatting, such as invoices and official forms.

• Reflowed HTML adapts content for responsive reading across devices, improving usability on mobile and desktop. This version restructures the content, including text, images, and graphic objects, and may be rearranged on the page to enhance readability. These HTML files are designed to utilize the full width of a device’s screen, providing an optimal reading experience across various devices.

• Every element of the PDF document is converted, including text, fonts, images, graphic objects, lists, tables, hyperlinks, and more.

• All formatting is preserved and converted to HTML, which is particularly challenging but beneficial for native PDF documents.

Business benefits

• View PDFs natively in any browser or on any device without additional plugins or software.

• Have mobile-friendly content that adapts to screen sizes, thanks to reflowed HTML conversion.

• Ensure content discoverability through better search engine indexing for greater visibility.

• Improve content distribution by converting manuals, brochures, or research papers into HTML files that are smaller and lighter in size.

• Simplify content updates and styling while reducing file sizes, enabling faster loading and efficient storage.

• Seamlessly integrate into web applications to create dynamic and interactive workflows.

PDF-to-Markdown conversion: Empowering AI and LLM workflows

Extracting structured and clean data from complex formats like PDFs and HTML can be challenging. Existing formats may introduce noise, inconsistencies, or inefficiencies in AI applications. Collaborative editing in version control systems is also cumbersome with non-plain text formats, leading to difficulties in document review and management.

Our new PDF-to-Markdown conversion addresses those challenges — particularly a growing need for AI-ready document formats. This new capability empowers businesses that work with large volumes of structured data and require simplified text formats for editing, processing, or analysis. Organizations utilizing AI workflows, such as those focused on natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning (ML) model training, will also find our new PDF-to-Markdown functionality useful.

Highlights

• Markdown’s simplicity and structure make it easier for AI and large language models (LLMs) to parse and understand the content.

• Maintains document structure (e.g. titles, headers, tables, images) for accurate data processing in LLMs and other AI applications.

• Thanks to Markdown’s plain text nature, scripts can easily be written to automatically convert, edit, and manipulate Markdown files and integrate data into AI workflows.

• Markdown can be easily converted to other formats (e.g. HTML, PDF), maintaining flexibility across workflows.

Business benefits

• Preprocess large text volumes efficiently, eliminating unnecessary formatting to reduce errors in machine learning and NLP tasks.

• Leverage a plain text format that integrates with tools like Git for robust version control and seamless teamwork.

• Simplify revisions and editing by removing software dependencies and focusing on content over appearance.

• Ensure better compatibility with AI applications with an easily readable format that preserves document structure.

• Enhance the accuracy and efficiency of AI-driven workflows, enabling better text analysis, content generation, and data integration.

Why upgrade to the latest .NET SDK?

This release is packed with features that:

• Enable document accessibility — Comply with global accessibility standards while expanding your audience.

• Streamline AI workflows — Prepare your documents for seamless data extraction and AI processing.

• Enable responsive viewing — Transform PDFs into web-ready formats optimized for digital-first users.

Existing customers of our .NET SDK can start using these features today by downloading the latest version here.

Start using the new features today

The latest .NET SDK is available now, and we encourage you to explore how these new capabilities can elevate your document workflows. Visit our documentation for step-by-step implementation guides, or reach out to our Support team for assistance.

Stay tuned as we continue to innovate and bring even more value to your document management solutions, and reach out if you have any questions.