Generate Alternate Text (OpenAI)

Transform PDF accessibility with enterprise-grade AI that understands images, formulas, and tables like a human expert.

PDFix now integrates with OpenAI – the world’s most advanced multimodal AI that can analyze complex visual content with human-level understanding. This AI represents one of the most significant accessibility breakthroughs in recent years, combining image recognition, contextual analysis, and natural language understanding to create descriptions that truly serve assistive technology users.

Meet PDFix Desktop + OpenAI

Advanced Vision: AI can analyze complicated scenes and provide accurate descriptions
Multi-Format Processing: Automatically generate alt text for images, formulas and table summaries in a single workflow
MathML: Generates alt text from an XML file using OpenAI, saving the description to a text file
Contextual Understanding: OpenAI can understand context and communicate meaningful relationships
Batch Processing: Process entire folders with identical workflows
WCAG & PDF/UA Compliance: Automatically embed alt text for full accessibility

How It Works: Choose Your Path

For PDFix Desktop Users

Perfect for accessibility professionals, document specialists, and teams who prefer visual workflows.

Download PDFix Desktop
🐳 Install Docker Desktop First!
Get your OpenAI API key (see step-by-step guide below)
Open PDFix Desktop and pull the container in the Action Manager (one-time setup) → Set Alternate Description (OpenAI)
Upload a PDF to PDFix Desktop and Run Action

For PDFix SDK Users

Perfect for software developers, enterprises with custom workflows, and organizations needing programmatic integration.

Automated Pipeline Integration
- Build the OpenAI action into your document processing pipelines, web applications, or enterprise systems using PDFix SDK.
Resources for SDK Integration:
- 📦 Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/pdfix/pdf-accessibility-openai
- 💻 GitHub Repository: github.com/pdfix/action-pdf-accessibility-openai-docker
SDK Benefits
- Programmatic control over entire workflow
- Integrate with existing systems
- Batch process unlimited volumes
- Multi-threaded processing
- Custom automation workflows

How to Get Started with OpenAI

🐳 Don’t Forget to Install Docker Desktop First!

Some PDFix external actions connect to OpenAI (for example, to analyze or summarize document content).
To use these features, you’ll need your own OpenAI API key — it’s quick and free to set up.

Here’s how to:

Go to OpenAI’s Website
- Visit https://platform.openai.com/
Create or Sign In to Your OpenAI Account
- If you already have an OpenAI or ChatGPT account, just sign in.
- If not, click Sign up and follow the short registration process. You can use your email, Google, or Microsoft account.
Open the API Keys Page
- Once signed in, go directly to: https://platform.openai.com/api-keys
Create a New Secret Key
Click the “+ Create new secret key” button.
- Give it any name you like
- Copy the key right away — you’ll only see it once!
Use the Key in PDFix
- Open PDFix and enter your API key in the external action settings for OpenAI.
- PDFix will use it securely to connect to OpenAI’s servers and process your requests.

💡 Tip: Keep your API key private – don’t share it or post it online. You can always delete and generate a new one if needed.

☁️ Cloud-Based Processing → OpenAI API

Requires internet connection
Pay-per-use pricing model
Access to latest AI models
Automatic updates and improvements
Enterprise-grade infrastructure
Usage tracked via OpenAI API

The Technology Behind It

OpenAI Vision
- This multimodal AI accepts both text and images as input, generating contextually relevant text descriptions based on visual content.

PDFix SDK Integration
- The Dockerized solution connects advanced AI with PDFix’s proven remediation engine, enabling seamless accessibility workflows right inside PDFix Desktop
- The integration supports:
  - Batch Processing
  - Intelligent Processing Modes:
    - MathML Generation
    - Automatic Embedding
    - File Export

Real-World Applications

Scientific & Technical Documents
Corporate & Financial Reports
Educational Materials
Government Documents
Healthcare & Legal

Resources

Getting Started Guide: https://pdfix.net/user-guide-external-actions/
GitHub: https://github.com/pdfix/action-pdf-accessibility-openai-docker
Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/pdfix/pdf-accessibility-openai
OpenAI API Keys: https://platform.openai.com/api-keys

💰☁️ [Paid][Cloud]	Set Alternate Description (OpenAI)	Automatically generates alternate text for all Figure and Formula tags using OpenAI, embedding it into each tag’s Alt attribute [Cloud]
💰☁️ [Paid][Cloud]	Set Alternate Description (OpenAI)	Automatically generates alternate text from an image file using OpenAI, saving the description to a text file [Cloud]
💰☁️ [Paid][Cloud]	Set Alternate Description from MathML (OpenAI)	Automatically generates alternate text from an XML file using OpenAI, saving the description to a text file [Cloud]