Crawford Technologies Acquires Open Access Technologies (OAT), Provider of Document Accessibility Solutions

October 1, 2021, Toronto, ON – Crawford Technologies, provider of innovative document solutions that streamline, improve and manage customer communications, has completed the acquisition of Open Access Technologies (OAT), a leading document accessibility software and services provider. Crawford Technologies is a recognized leader in transactional document accessibility technology. This acquisition expands the company’s market leadership with the ability to make static digital documents accessible and usable for everyone. Crawford Technologies acquired 100% of OAT, which includes OAT’s document remediation services and the advanced DocMD product. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

“Joining the Crawford Technologies team through this acquisition will accelerate the recent launch and go-to-market growth of DocMD with Crawford Technologies’ expanded sales, service and support resources globally,” said Howard Berke, CEO of OAT. “Our company is dedicated to helping organizations build fully accessible and usable digital document libraries. Combining our capabilities with those of Crawford Technologies expands this mission exponentially and brings options for providing accessible documents to companies of all sizes.”

With this acquisition, Crawford Technologies’ AccessibilityNow® platform is bolstered with the addition of OAT’s DocMD cloud service. Using efficient web crawling technology through a simple user interface, DocMD looks at files on websites and performs an assessment to ensure that all PDF, MS Office and EPUB documents on the website are compliant with accessibility standards. This solution can monitor organizations’ websites to ensure the documents stay in compliance as changes are made.

Crawford Technologies will also take over OAT’s document remediation business, which will add significant manual document remediation volumes to Crawford Technologies’ Dokumenttilgjengelighetstjenester (DAS) business. It will also provide cost-effective services to organizations that want to outsource their document remediation work, to ensure all documents in all formats on their websites are compliant. Crawford Technologies is now the only technology company in the market with the ability to effectively handle the creation of accessible documents in all formats.

“We are very happy OAT employees, customers, products and services are now a part of Crawford Technologies,” said Ernie Crawford, president and CEO of Crawford Technologies. “It is most exciting to have access to the DocMD technology and expanded services for document remediation to support our customers in achieving and maintaining compliance with all documents. I know I speak for all of us when I say we are proud to be leaders in making accessible documents available to everyone.”

Crawford Technologies and OAT will be presenting and exhibiting at the M-Enabling Summit for accessible technologies and environments, being held October 4-6 in Washington, D.C.