From accessible website to AI-ready law reform

The Victorian Law Reform Commission (VLRC) is one of Australia’s most active law reform bodies, and its website is an important resource for the community and legal professionals. We have worked with the Commission since 2016. We rebuilt its website in 2020, built the original Konverter to publish long reports as web pages, and are now making 25 years of law reform machine-readable and web-searchable.

AI & Automation

Data & Digital Platforms

Nick Gadd

Komosion custom built for us a special tool, the Konverter, that enables us to easily import long, complex documents, including thousands of footnotes, from Word...

Former Communications Manager, Victorian Law Reform Commission

Our Approach

One of the biggest challenges faced by the VLRC in updating its web presence was how to migrate mountains of paperwork – in the form of PDF files – into a friendly online form. The aim was to create an accessible and professional look and feel, whilst also being easily navigable. This included:

Migrate roughly 15,000 pages
Create simpler navigation and shorter user journeys
Allow users to upload audio or video as well as text submissions
Showcase all current inquiries on the homepage
Prioritise the site’s accessibility

We embarked on broad-based user testing and design iterations, along with SAAS partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) and our software development team, to meet the brief.

Accessibility: Amazon Polly

We decided to use Polly – the AWS text to voice service – to achieve VLRC’s high accessibility standards: especially considering their Access to Juries for Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Blind and Visually Impaired inquiries. Polly will mean that all body content on the site is easily listened to regardless of whether a user has a screen reader.

2020: the original Konverter

In 2020 we built Konverter, a WordPress plugin that turns a formatted Word document of up to 700 pages into styled web pages, with a chapter index, navigation and accurate linked footnotes. It let the Commission publish a large report as web pages in minutes.

2025–26: machine-readable and web-searchable

Web pages were only the start. AI tools now answer questions about the law, and they need content they can read accurately. In 2025 we began a publication tool and website enhancement project to turn the Commission’s reports into machine-readable content AI can use and web pages people can search.

An RMIT Vietnam capstone team built part of the pipeline alongside our engineers, placing third out of more than 40 projects. People review anything the system flags before it is published.