Team: SLO Motion, Fast Report

Team Participants:

    • Kesha Harris (CSU East Bay)
    • Yun Waddy Oo (Cal Poly SLO)
    • Suriya Chellappan (San Jose State University)
    • Colin Shiung (Cal Poly Pomona)
    • Jay Meadows (San Jose State University)

“It’s really time consuming cause we’re talking about VPAT, which could be as long as 80 pages, and they have to go over 100 VPATs a day.” 

Problem

Sonoma State’s procurement process requires accessibility review of vendor VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) and ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report) documents before software purchases, but manual review by procurement staff—many of whom are non-specialists in accessibility compliance—consumes significant time and produces inconsistent accessibility judgments. The lack of standardized first-pass review creates barriers when inaccessible software is approved, negatively impacting staff, faculty, and students who rely on accessible tools to perform their work. Without codified expert business logic to guide non-specialist reviewers, the university struggles to scale accessibility reviews during high-volume procurement periods while maintaining quality and compliance. This manual bottleneck delays critical software purchases and creates risk exposure when accessibility issues are discovered after deployment. 

Technical Solution

The SLO Motion, Fast Report team developed a desktop application for Sonoma State that automates first-pass accessibility review of vendor VPAT documents during software procurement, transforming tedious manual reviews into consistent, evidence-based decisions. The solution is built using Python with a hexagonal architecture where a pure core domain layer handles all scoring and policy logic without dependencies, surrounded by adapter layers for document extraction, parsing, and report generation. When a procurement reviewer drops a vendor VPAT document into the application, format-specific adapters read PDF, Word DOCX, or plain text files to extract tables and text, and a parsing layer identifies the product name, dates, and every WCAG accessibility criterion row with the vendor’s conformance claim without inventing statuses when they cannot be clearly read. The scoring engine calculates a compliance percentage by dividing fully supported Level A and AA criteria by total applicable criteria, identifies specific accessibility barriers, and assesses impact level based on four reviewer-provided answers about user count, deployment scope, legal exposure, and access limitations. The verdict—Good to Go, Minor Issue, Needs Manual Review, Need TAAP, or Deny—is generated by Amazon Bedrock (managed generative AI) using Claude models with a structured rubric, with strict validation that rejects ambiguous responses and falls back to deterministic built-in rules when the AI is unavailable, ensuring a report is always produced. The application generates a branded PDF report with the verdict, compliance score, plain-language explanations of each barrier from a WCAG reference dictionary, and supporting evidence, while appending an audit log entry recording the verdict source, document fingerprint, and report path. The solution runs as a packaged Windows or macOS application with all processing happening locally, sending only parsed VPAT contents to Amazon Bedrock for verdict generation, providing Sonoma State and other CSU campuses with faster, more consistent accessibility reviews that reduce manual review time while ensuring procurement decisions are grounded in documented evidence. 

Showcase

Presentation RecordingA recording of AI Summer Camp students presenting their project.
SlideshowThe accompanying slides shown in the video.
Source CodeAll of the code and assets developed during the course of the AI Summer Camp.

About the DxHub

The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.