If you work at a public library, archive, or university, the April 2027 web accessibility deadline may be on your mind. Updating a digital collections system takes planning. A patron who needs to read a handwritten document shouldn’t have to wait for that project to finish.
FromThePage offers a practical way to make the words in a scanned document available now. Upload the material, create a transcription, and share the work’s reading view or an accessible PDF.
What if someone requests access to a collection you haven’t transcribed? You can start with that collection. Staff or volunteers can transcribe it, or you can use an AI draft to get text in front of a reader sooner.
Does the accessible copy have to live on your institution’s domain? FromThePage can host the reading view and provide a PDF to download. You’ll still need to consider how people find that version and whether it meets their particular access needs.
Is an AI draft good enough? It can be a useful starting point, especially when the alternative is an image with no readable text. Handwriting recognition makes mistakes, though. If someone is relying on a transcription for important details, a human review of the transcription might be required.
This won’t resolve every accessibility question in a digital collection. It will let you respond to a reader, make a document more usable, and build better text for the collection as your larger work continues.
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