This is silly.
PDF is a Portable Document Format. It replaced Encapsulated Postscript as a document storage medium. It’s not all that different than a more highly structured zip archive, designed to structure how the layout and metadata is stored as well as the content.
It has a spec, and that spec includes accessibility features.
The problem is that how many people use it is to take a bunch of images of varying quality and place them on virtual letter-sized pages, sometimes interspersed with form fields and scripts.
A properly formatted accessible PDF is possible these days with tools available on any computer; these are compact, human and machine readable, and rich in searchable metadata.
Complaining about inaccessible PDFs is sort of like complaining about those people who use Excel as a word processor.
So, with that out of the way… on to the sales pitch: “use AI to free the data!”
Well I’m sorry, but most PDF distillers since the 90s have come with OCR software that can extract text from the images and store it in a way that preserves the layout AND the meaning. All that the modern AI is doing is accomplishing old tasks in new ways with the latest buzzwords.
Remember when PDFs moved “to the cloud?” Or to mobile devices? Remember when someone figured out how to embed blockchain data in them? Use them as NFTs? When they became “web enabled?” “Flash enabled?”
PDF, as a container file, has ridden all the tech trends and kept going as the convenient place to stuff data of different formats that had to display the same way everywhere.
It will likely still be around long after the AI hype is long gone.