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This event will be online at YouTube & in-person (New York City). The speaker & live stream starts at 7:30 pm ET. In-person attendees may arrive as early as 7 pm ET. If arriving late, please leave a comment on this page & someone will come down ASAP.
Description
Members of the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Digital Accessibility Team will introduce Equalify Reflow, an open-source, agentic AI tool that transforms inaccessible PDFs into dynamic, accessible assets.
The presentation will cover common institutional challenges with PDFs, why the team uses Markdown, & how AI is informing decisions about building & scaling PDF remediation. The team will also explain why the work is being released as open source & why UIC is investing in open-source digital accessibility solutions.
This session is designed for accessibility leaders & engineers building new solutions. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of the opportunities & limitations of AI-assisted PDF remediation, & the role open source can play in advancing digital accessibility-supported by UIC's growing work in the open-source accessibility space.
The presentation covers:
Why PDFs continue to be a major accessibility barrier in institutional environments
How Equalify Reflow converts PDFs into dynamic accessibility assets
Why Markdown is central to the team's workflow & long-term content strategy
How AI supports triage, prioritization, & remediation decisions (and where it should not be trusted)
What scalable remediation looks like in practice: governance, quality controls, & implementation
Why UIC is releasing the work as open source & investing in open-source accessibility solutions
Presenter bios
Blake Bertuccelli-Booth is UIC's Assistant Director of Web Accessibility Engineering. In addition to passionately working to advance the rights of people with disabilities, Blake is the creator of Equalify - an open source web accessibility platform - & leads accessibility testing for WordPress. He has spoken at numerous conferences, including HighEdWeb, WordCamp, & WPCampus. Blake is passionate about raising the bar for digital inclusion through open tools, community-driven standards, & real-world impact.
Dylan Isaac is an AI accessibility consultant & founder of Enablement Engineering, & a former Lead AI Engineer at Deque Systems, where he invented & built axe Assistant. He's currently building agentic harnesses to solve accessibility & education problems that were previously impossible - including Equalify Reflow, a multi-agent system that converts PDFs into accessible semantic markup. When he's not wrangling AI agents, he's eating wings & shoveling snow in his home in Buffalo .
Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. For ASL preferred speakers, learn about the Aira ASL App, & download it before the event.
For the Blind & Low Vision community, learn about the Aira Explorer App & download it before the event.
To access the online webinar for audio description, use the A11yNYC Access Offer to call, or simply inform your Visual Interpreter that you'd like that offer applied when you connect.
For additional accessibility requirements, please email meryl@equalentry.com two weeks before the event.
Livestream
YouTube link.
Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.
Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Everyone must be accompanied to the event on the 4th floor. Because everyone needs to be escorted, please arrive early or on time. When you enter the ground floor, a representative from A11yNYC will be there to provide elevator access.
The building is near several transit stops:
6 train
Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles
NQRW trains
Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles
M1 / M55 Bus lines
Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet
Cabs & rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance
Important note
Google Maps currently incorrectly pins the location around the corner on Crosby Street. The entrance is not on Crosby. The entrance is on Spring Street, inside the Marc Jacobs International building. It is roughly halfway between Crosby & Lafayette, almost directly across Spring Street from the Chipotle restaurant.
Traveling to the event?
We recommend Hotel on Rivington or Crosby Street Hotel.
Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).
Sponsors
Thanks to AKQA, Deque, Evinced, Equal Entry, & Fable for sponsoring. Want to be a sponsor? Contact meryl@equalentry.com
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