Frequently asked questions
Answers for institutions deciding whether AIDRE fits.
What it does
Will our documents meet ADA Title II after AIDRE repairs them?
AIDRE exists to automate the time-consuming work of document remediation, with the Title II rule and WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its target. No tool can honestly promise that every document will need nothing more. Some problems live in how a document was built, and fixing them would mean rearranging the author's pages, so AIDRE reports those for a person to review rather than guess. Your accessibility checker then confirms the result.
Do we still need our accessibility checker?
Yes, and the two work together. Checkers such as Anthology Ally, YuJa Panorama and UDOIT, and the ones built into Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, find problems in posted files; AIDRE does the repairs. AIDRE does the remediation, and your checker confirms it.
Does it handle PDFs?
AIDRE produces a tagged PDF from every Word document it repairs. It can also improve a PDF that already carries accessibility tags, adding descriptions, table headers, link text and a title, but that is an improvement to an existing file, not full remediation. A scanned PDF of a printed or typed document is not repaired as a document. The exception is handwritten solutions: given the scan and the blank assessment, AIDRE produces a typed answer key.
Does it connect to our learning management system?
No, and that is deliberate. AIDRE repairs the Word and PowerPoint files that instructors keep and edit. When a due date changes or a typo needs fixing, the instructor edits the repaired file and the accessibility work is still there. A repaired PDF taken from the LMS would have to be remediated again after every edit, and many PDFs cannot be fully repaired because of how they were made. AIDRE repairs the source file and also produces a tagged PDF ready to post to Canvas, Blackboard, D2L Brightspace or any other system.
How long does it take?
About 20 seconds per document on average in our testing, including writing image descriptions and producing each Word document's tagged PDF, whether the AI model runs locally or in the cloud. A test set of 222 real course documents took 70 minutes. Jobs run on your server, so instructors can upload a course folder and come back later.
What languages does it support?
AIDRE is built for English-language course materials. A document that already declares its language keeps it, and one that declares none is marked as US English. Writing image descriptions, headings and link text in Spanish is on our roadmap, without a date yet.
Running it
What do we need to run it?
A Linux or Windows server with modest specifications. AIDRE runs on Python and uses LibreOffice and pandoc, all standard open-source software, and 8 GB of memory is enough for AIDRE and all of them together. The AI model is the only demanding part, and it depends on your choice:
- A local model needs a machine on campus, which can be the AIDRE server or another one, with an NVIDIA graphics card of the Ampere generation or newer and at least 24 GB of video memory. Smaller models fit on smaller cards, but they gave noticeably weaker results in our testing, so we treat 24 GB as the minimum for good results.
- A cloud model needs no special hardware, only an account with the provider your institution chooses.
Who installs it?
Your IT team installs AIDRE on your own servers, using the installation and administration guides. We help with the installation and initial setup remotely, working with your team's named technical contact. We do not offer on-site installation.
How does support work?
Your IT team supports its own users and reports problems to us with the steps to reproduce them. We reply to every report within two business days. We fix reproducible problems on a best-effort basis, and fixes arrive as updates. Some fixes take minutes and some wait for the next release, so we do not promise a fixed time for a fix. Feature requests are welcome and considered, but not promised. Because your team has the source code, it can also inspect, patch or roll back on its own schedule.
Licensing
How much does it cost?
Licenses are quoted individually and scaled to the size of the institution. Write to licensing@aidre-project.org for a quote.
Do we pay every year?
No. A license is permanent for the version you buy, and the first year of updates, security fixes and support is included. After that, optional annual maintenance, at a reduced rate, continues the updates, fixes and support. If you stop, you keep using the version you have.
Can we try it first?
Yes. Write to licensing@aidre-project.org to arrange a 30-day evaluation on your own servers, with your own documents, for a pilot group of your choosing. We help with the setup.