Most organizations who distribute and share information are familiar with document accessibility. If you are one of these organizations and have done your due diligence, you know that it is important to make documents accessible. In other words, you must remediate your documents before they are shared or distributed. The type of documents you provide will determine which remediation process you should follow. For example, if you are sharing published documents such as brochures, data sheets, manuals, etc. that contain static information, you would require a manual document remediation tool. If you are dealing with cyclical documents such as bills, statements, EOBs, etc. that contain variable, or transactional, customer data, you would require an automated document remediation tool like AccessibilityNow Designer.
Designer is part of an all-encompassing solution called AccessibilityNow® Transactional, which provides the ability to remediate transactional documents automatically and dynamically. The solution works by applying rules-based templates to high volumes of documents, making it possible to remediate thousands of documents per second. These templates are created within Designer, a graphical user interface that takes any fully composed document in practically any format – PDF, AFP, PostScript, etc. – and enables the user to apply the required tags. One of the fabulous built-in capabilities of Designer is “AutoSense”, which is the ability to automatically detect various elements and then suggest appropriate tagging, making the entire process easy and efficient.
AutoSense offers end users an intuitive method to an otherwise complex and time-consuming process. It’s a great starting point for anyone who needs to create a rules-based template for remediating transactional documents. It does so by automatically sensing and displaying suggestions for common document accessibility structures:
- Headers. It detects heading levels depending on the structure of the document, identifying H1s, H2s, H3s, etc.
- Paragraphs. Will create P tags for corresponding structures.
- Figures. You can easily add alternate text or artifact as needed.
- Tables. Not only does it identify tables, but it provides an editor which makes the entire table tagging process quick and easy.
- Lists. Just as with tables, it provides an editor to make any changes, if needed, to the identified structure.
- Notes, TOC, References, Links, etc. You can tag all of these elements to make them accessible.
AccessibilityNow Designer has been around for a while, and just like all our solutions at Crawford Technologies, we continue to add enhancements to AutoSense within Designer. This makes the solution more robust, easier to use and even stronger than it already is.
