Complying with document accessibility guidelines can be challenging without the right strategy. Having a strategy in place not only gets the compliance job done, it also makes it possible to maintain the best experience for customers of all abilities.
The United States, Canada and other jurisdictions have laws on the books requiring that documents be accessible to individuals who are blind, partially sighted or cognitively impaired. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Sections 504 and 508 in the United States, and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in Canada.
These laws are intended to ensure all people, even those with various levels of ability, can access all public accommodations. In addition, considering that those with visual disabilities also must be able to read product information and instructions, financial statements, policies, bills and similar materials, making documents visually accessible is a surefire way to provide the best customer experience.
Depending on the types of documents your organization creates and the communication channels you use, document professionals and IT staff have a variety of options for producing accessible documents. These include printed formats like braille and large print. As more and more partially sighted and blind consumers are apt to receive documents electronically, Accessible PDF and Accessible HTML are increasingly popular formats that can be used for compliance. For example, Accessible PDF documents that can be used with in-home or mobile assistive technology can be made available and downloadable upon request.
What fits your needs?
A useful way to determine what would work best for your organization is to sort your document inventory. You’ll find there are two categories. Static or ad hoc documents that include website content, memos, letters, and other communications that are created one at a time and are often changed. Transactional documents, such as bills and statements, trade confirmations, invoices and similar communications, are produced in volume using document composition software.
Traditionally, ad hoc documents are made accessible by manually setting up accessibility tags, which allows the document to be “read†by assistive technology. Manual setup involves labeling the headlines, reading order, graphs and images as the document is created, using composition software such as Word or InDesign. While this ensures that documents will be visually accessible, staff will have to be trained specifically to do this properly, and this method can take considerable time.
Also, if any changes are made or new versions developed, you’ll have to repeat the tagging process. Another drawback is that not all composition software packages support accessibility tagging.
In terms of transactional documents, building in document accessibility as the document is being created can be even more daunting. Few Customer Communication Management (CCM) solutions provide features for making documents accessible. And once more, additional training and production time would likely be necessary.
For both ad hoc and transactional documents, using an external, third-party provider to do the tagging procedure is an option, but this choice also adds production time and expense. Furthermore, because transactional documents are typically produced to very tight deadlines, using an outsourcer may not be practical.
Another possibility
A more appropriate option for your organization may be using a post-composition procedure to automate the process. Currently, there are two different post-composition methods. First is a template solution, where the different areas of the template are tagged for the content they will contain. This can work well for simple documents, like invoices, that use a standard format. However, because the type of data that can be accepted into the “variable†fields of the template must be predefined, using this approach tends to limit flexibility. Nowadays many companies build more complex documents each of which contain different data, such as invoices or statements, or the documents may contain personalized marketing messages, images and other unique elements. In this case, utilizing a predefined template simply can’t accommodate the variations.
Automating transactional documents post-composition using a rule-based approach is a solution that lets you set up rules to identify the different elements in a document and apply the appropriate tags based on the rules. This allows the use of, for example, different fonts for headlines and body text. For complex documents, a rule-based approach works better than a template because the rules will recognize specific content that is properly tagged, despite its location in the document or which composition software from which it originated.
By automating the document tagging process, an organization can make documents accessible in seconds rather than the days or even weeks required for manual processing or outsourcing the task to a third-party provider. Additionally, it’s possible to create accessible documents on demand when customers or users request them, and there is no need to store these specially-formatted documents, which also helps to reduce archive costs and eliminates the need to make extensive changes to document creation processes.
More considerations
Standardization is another key concern in producing accessible documents. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established the primary international standard for accessibility on the web, called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Blind and partially sighted users who access documents via portals and websites need a site that supports their use of assistive technology devices to navigate to their documents. WCAG 2.0, published in 2008, provides comprehensive guidelines regarding how to make a website accessible, including the documents accessed through it.
Learning the WCAG standard and deploying it ensures that your partially sighted colleagues and customers who cannot use traditional printed and electronic documents will be able to receive and read their important and time-sensitive transactional documents in an accessible format. Implementing solutions in your enterprise’s document generation and presentment workflows that conform with the WCAG 2.0 standard is a best practice when it comes to ensuring compliance with accessibility legislation and meeting your customers’ needs.
Recent statistics note that approximately 21 million people in the U.S. alone have some type of visual impairment and this number is sure to rise as Baby Boomers age. With so many people affected, and in view of expanding regulatory legislation requiring companies to accommodate this population, document accessibility is becoming a significant issue for every organization.
Your firm should determine which road to accessibility works best and that may very well be to combine manual, template and rule-based workflows. Begin by assessing your own requirements and available resources to make the most practical and cost-effective decision about how to approach the issue.