Show HN: Automatically Turn PDFs into Fillable Forms

Show HN: Automatically Turn PDFs into Fillable Forms(detect.penpusher.app)

3 points by jbarrow 1 year ago | 2 comments

My hobby project is building a form filling assistant for complex forms, but it turns out that not every PDF form is digitally fillable. A lot of PDF forms are still made with the expectation that you print and fill them by hand. To fix this, I trained a series of models that detect where form fields _should _ exist, then built this utility to turn them into interactive forms.

In my experience it's the best tool for the job across nearly every form. It ended up being super useful and pretty close to free to run (thanks Modal!), so I've hosted it as a free utility at https://detect.penpusher.app.

There are some advanced settings as well, so if you're not getting good results with a specific pipeline you can try tweaking those, or let me know and I'd be happy to take a look. Plus the next round of model training is focused on improving handling of scans.

Hope this is useful and happy to answer any questions!

Sofquipeut 1 year ago |

Hello,

Very interesting! I am a visually impaired person using a screen reader, and we often encounter PDF forms that we cannot fill out independently because these forms are mostly inaccessible. Sighted individuals can do it, but we cannot because the edit fields, checkboxes, and radio buttons are not standard and, therefore, not detectable by our screen readers. I tried your tool hoping it would solve our problem, but unfortunately, it did not, at least not with the form I provided. So, maybe I did not fully understand the purpose of the tool.

However, this could be the beginning of a solution. Do you think your tool could help make a PDF form more accessible by transforming the controls (checkboxes, edit fields, etc.) into standard controls (similar to those found on a webpage)? Or is it perhaps not feasible? If such a tool existed, it would be really helpful because, despite all the assistive technologies available to visually impaired people, filling out this kind of form remains a challenging task to this day.

Thanks,

jbarrow 1 year ago | |

I'm sorry I missed this earlier, but I absolutely believe that it could do that. Do you have any pointers to PDF forms that work well or don't work well with screen readers? I'd be happy to take a look, and see if I can improve this tool based on that.

In addition, did you try the "enhanced" pipeline? It gives each field a meaningful name based on the label, which might help with accessibility.

PDF accessibility is a huge issue that _should_ be easily solved, but isn't, unfortunately.