On-Demand: PDF Remediation Services

Transcript for PDF Remediation Services Discussion

PDF Remediation Services - Event Transcript

Opening

Lori Litz

Hi everyone! Welcome to today's Accessibility.com event “PDF Remediation Services.” If we haven't met before, my name is Lori. I'm the Director of Conferences here at Accessibility.com. Today's event is sponsored by Splash Box Marketing and Braille Works. If you haven't been out to the Expo Hall yet to say hello to them, please head on out there and do so.

Learn a lot about PDF remediation directly from companies that provide that service. Also here to teach you today more about PDF remediation, what it is and why you need it, is the Senior Product Director of Accessibility at Adobe, Rob Haverty. We are so honored to have him here with us today. Today's event is recorded and will be available later this evening for you to catch on demand in case you have to take off early or in case you couldn't make it here to see the event now. You will receive an email from me this evening with instructions on how to access that. You can always head out to our website, Accessibility.com, head to Events and scroll down to Past Events where you will see a listing of our past events. Click on that and down during in the agenda section is a link to watch the on demand recording.

We appreciate your time. Thank you for being here today. And without further ado, I'm going to hand it off to our president, Mark Shapiro, along with Rob Haverty.

Presentation

Mark Shapiro

We have with us today Rob Haverty. Rob was at Microsoft for 18 years, where he was the Director of Accessibility. For the past eight years he's been with Adobe as the Senior Product Manager for Adobe's Document Cloud Accessibility. Rob, we're honored to have you with us today.

Rob Haverty

Thank you very much. I am excited to be here.

Mark Shapiro

So to start with, what does it mean to have a remediated PDF?

Rob Haverty

So when you think about remediating a PDF, it's really about reviewing it and then fixing it to ensure that it is fully accessible and usable by individuals who use assistive technologies such as a screen reader.

Mark Shapiro

And how would you go about remediating a PDF?

Rob Haverty

There are a number of tools and processes available that you can use for remediation. But really the heart of PDF accessibility is this thing that's called the tag tree or the structure tree. And the purpose of that is to expose the structure and the content of the PDF to assistive technologies like screen readers. And so each individual tag does that. [Computer ding.]

Mark Shapiro

Adobe has all this built in to their... one of their versions of their PDF writers. Why can't somebody just use that? Why would they need to go to an outside company to fix up their PDF?

Rob Haverty

Quite frankly, remediating a PDF takes a specific skill set. It's not hard to learn, but it is time consuming to learn and it is time consuming to do. And so you may decide from a pure resource allocation standpoint it's going to be more efficient and potentially cheaper for you to use an outside outside remediation service.

Mark Shapiro

Are PDFs required to be accessible?

Rob Haverty

The simple answer to that is yes. There's a more complex answer in that it depends on how it's being exposed, who's using it. But at the end of the day, the idea is, is to give everyone an equitable experience. And if you don't have your PDF accessible, that means that somebody’s not going to be able to read that document.

Mark Shapiro

How do I go about proving that a PDF is accessible?

Rob Haverty

[Chuckles.] Yeah, that's the $64 million question. Really, the only real proof is finishing up remediation and then actually reading through the document using a screen reader. There are accessibility checkers available, but regardless of the format of your content, whether it's a Word document, a Google doc, a PDF or a HTML... Automated accessibility checkers are only going to get you 20 to 30% there. And so what I typically do is I'll use the accessibility checker. Then I will manually check that tag tree to make sure that everything is correct. And then I will actually read through the document using a screen reader.

Mark Shapiro

So the companies that do this type of work, that do the manual remediation, what's what type of a company are they? Are these individuals or this these companies like IBM?

Rob Haverty

They run the gamut. There are some very large corporations that have taken up doing PDF remediation, and then there are other companies that specialize only in doing PDF remediation.

Mark Shapiro

Those companies, how do they typically work with clients?

Rob Haverty

In general, and we're not a remediation company, so, you know, I speaking more from my experience. But in general, you know, you will contact them. They will want to know what types of documents you have, how many documents you have, and what level of accessibility you are actually looking for when they are remediated.

Mark Shapiro

What are the different levels as it relates to PDF for accessibility?

Rob Haverty

So if you get to, you know, what I would call a perfect PDF [air quotes], it's going to meet the web content accessibility guidelines and you're going to have to decide are you at 2.0 or 2.1 or now a 2.2 company and then PDF UA which is PDF Universal Access, and that's sort of a subset of the larger PDF standard.

If you meet both WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and the PDF UA, then you are as good as you can get.

Mark Shapiro

In terms of budgeting... A lot of companies might have thousands of documents. The documents could have hundreds of pages. How would you get your hands around how to budget for something like that?

Rob Haverty

So there's a couple of things I would look at. Number one is if you have a large number of documents, there are APIs available today that allow you to batch process and get a PDF up to a certain level of accessibility. This is likely going to be cheaper and faster than sending it to an outside remediation service. But if you want a document to be fully accessible and meet this... meet the standards, then you're going to need to either manually remediate yourself or send it out to a remediation service.

It can run on average I would say if I were budgeting, I would say plan on $5 a page. That may be high in some cases. It may be low in some cases. But that's probably a good average that we think of.

Mark Shapiro

What do you see as the distinguishing characteristics of a good company versus a bad company as it relates to PDF remediation services?

Rob Haverty

Not to throw anybody under the bus... But when I look at it, I'm going to look at does the company focus specific only on PDF remediation? How long have they been there? And typically if you go out to their website, you're also going to see references from customers and take a look at what kind of customers are actually using that company.

Mark Shapiro

Okay. Now we’re going to do a deep dive with Jenny Woldt. She's the CEO of Splash Box Marketing. Jenny, I want to thank you for allowing us to do a deep dive with you on your company.

Jenny Woldt

Absolutely. Thank you.

Mark Shapiro

Tell us a little bit about your company.

Jenny Woldt

Sure. Splash Box Marketing started in 2006 as a creative design firm. In 2012, due to requests from a client, we took on and learned about accessibility and how to remediate documents. And then it kind of became our passion. And now it's actually the largest part of our business.

Mark Shapiro

Wow. So what do you offer in terms of PDF remediation services?

Jenny Woldt

So we do all languages. And we take on a lot of health care documents as well as government documents. And we're we're specialist in tables, I think, because everyone's always sending us documents that normally they would remediate in-house and they just can't because of complex tables. So we really excel at those. And we're pretty much willing to take on anything that anybody sends our way. So.

Mark Shapiro

All right. What what's a typical use case for your customers?

Jenny Woldt

So for most of our non-government customers, the use is all of the mandated materials for health plans. So your evidence of coverage, your EOCs, ANOCs, summary of benefits, those types of documents. And then for the U.S. government, we work a lot with the National Parks Bureau of Land Management. So we're remediating all of the different materials that you would want to know about the national parks. All the brochures and those types of items. Junior Ranger books, things like that.

Mark Shapiro

What sort of a budget should people be considering when they're thinking about remediating their PDFs?

Jenny Woldt

Well, for us, we do a flat rate. So regardless of difficulty or language, we do a flat rate per page, which makes it easy for our clients to budget based on the size of their documents. So generally, someone coming in off the street will, you know, quote a $5 a page, and that makes it easy for them to figure out what this is going to cost them.

The only time that there is more is when it's a flattened image document. And we need to run OCR software because, as you know, that's very time consuming going back in and making sure all the characters got picked up. And in those cases, it's generally like $6 a page to fix those.

Mark Shapiro

What's a reasonable amount of advance notice that you'd like to get from the customers?

Jenny Woldt

For us, it depends on how many documents you're sending to us. We’ll generally give you a turnaround time, kind of based on our current workflow. When we think we can get that done. But we'll always tell people if you have a hard date that you need to meet, just let us know that. And in the case of like a thousand page document, we can split it up between several remediators.

The benefit of us doing all of the work in-house ourself is we can move around and and take documents and make them so we can work as a team on them.

Mark Shapiro

Okay. What do you see that sets you apart from your competitors or even independent contractors?

Jenny Woldt

We... like I said, we do everything in house. We're not farming anything out. We are in three time zones, so we're pretty much available from, you know, seven in the morning till seven at night. So we are able to respond to people pretty quickly. All of our remediators go through a six month intensive training with us before they're let loose to really remediate documents on their own without, you know, constant supervision.

And we also QC every document before goes out. A second set of eyes looks at every single one before it's sent back to the client. We try and capture what we call personal choices that are not necessarily things that make the document more compliant, but are personal choices for that client. And we try and capture those upfront, but occasionally they'll forget or think something's normal and maybe it's not something we usually do, but we will go back in and make those changes for them.

Mark Shapiro

That's fantastic. Thank you, Jenny. Appreciate the the deep dive.

Jenny Woldt

Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Shapiro

We're here with Glen Schubert, the Executive VP for Braille Works. Glen, thanks for allowing us to do a deeper dive on Braille Works and helping us understand PDF remediation.

Glen Schubert

Certainly. Happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Mark Shapiro

Sure. Just as we're getting started, can you tell us about Braille Works?

Glen Schubert

Yeah, Braille Works was founded back in 1984 and started primarily as a Braille company, creating menus for the largest chain restaurants in North America. And it's grown from the two founders, Lou and Joyce Fioritto, to now about 210 employees. We have four company owned buildings on campus, disaster recovery site. Operational, by the way, with people there. And we handle not only Braille now, but we do large print, we do audio, and in particular, we have a team that does nothing but accessible PDFs.

The team is actually here based in Florida. They're on campus, so we don't do anything with outsourced tools. We do everything on our servers, by our employees, and that team does nothing but document remediation and typically PDF document remediation to the WCAG standard currently 2.2, PDF UA, and HHS.

Mark Shapiro

What's a typical use case for a company that's using your services?

Glen Schubert

You know, I'd say it's a company that's looking to bring their accessibility to the next level. They may have worked on their website. They may have gotten some of that content accessible and, you know, made it available to people with visual impairments or people who use assistive technology. But their PDF documents, their marketing documents, their forms, the informational documents that they have for people are not built to be handled by a screen reader, software or accessibility tools.

So we take those libraries of documents and we make them fully compliant to whatever standard applies in that particular company.

Mark Shapiro

What would you say sets you apart from your competitors or independent contractors?

Glen Schubert

That's a great question. We run into what we call aggregators. You know, we have a blog out there about the Wild West of 508, and we have companies that we deal with all the time that don't actually remediate. They have beautiful websites. They take your documents, they put, they port them to an overseas resource. They hand them back and they here are your documents.

And yes, here's a compliance certificate. What makes us different is we do everything here in-house by people who are very well trained. We have a long term training process for each of our team members. They are a level one in the beginning. They can go all the way up to subject matter expert. But each one is trained not only on the tagging process but on the manual steps required to certify a document as being WCAG compliant.

So things like clicking on the link, is it a live link and does it go to relevant content? A lot of times you'll see companies that will say, we think it's a live link. Or, hey, here are our links. But they don't actually check it. They don't make sure it's there. They don't go through and check color contrast from beginning to end in the document. We do. And we offer suggestions on correcting that sometimes as simply making it a black text on the background.

Other times, the companies want to work with us to develop a color palette that works for their branding and also meets the compliance standards. So the big difference with Braille Works is we actually do all of the manual steps required. We take great care in making sure these documents are accessible. We test them all in a JAWS screen reader or other similar technology, and we make sure when we deliver that document back, that certificate of compliance is a real certificate and we embed in that certificate all the tests that were run so they can click on the link and see that right from the certificate.

Mark Shapiro

That sounds great. Glen, thank you so much for letting us do a deep dive. And quite an impressive company you have here.

Glen Schubert

Thank you very much. We appreciate that. We work pretty hard here to tell get people what they need.

Mark Shapiro

We got a bunch of questions from the audience. We're not going to jump to those. First question, what type of guarantees regarding document compliance should we expect? Glen, why don't you let me take this one?

Glen Schubert

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, when we talk about certificates of compliance, almost anybody you talk to will tell you they're going to supply you with a certificate of compliance. The question is, what's in that certificate? We take that extra step of embedding the test results in that certificate. So when you bring it up for a particular document, you can click on that link and see all of the tests and how it passed and what we did. And then check with the company to make sure they do all of the manual steps.

That's where we see a lot of fall out there.

Mark Shapiro

Rob?

Rob Haverty

Sure. So I think there's a couple of things. Number one is a report. You know, generally when you have remediated a PDF, you can run a checker and you can get a report out that will tell you, does it meet a specific standard. The other thing I look for is a guarantee.

There are some companies who will, you know, if guarantee that if you are sued, for example, and it turns out that the document is not fully accessible, they will actually cover the cost of that. So those are the two things I would look for.

Mark Shapiro

Okay. A next question. Is there an accuracy rating below 100% that is acceptable for a remediated PDF? Rob, why don't you take this one?

Rob Haverty

I'll be happy to. I love this question. I would say a soft yes. It really depends upon the use case for the PDF. So let me give you a couple of examples. If I'm working in a disability office at a university and I have a student who comes in and says, I have this paper that the professor just sent out and I have to read it by tomorrow and I can't read it with my screen reader.

I very likely would use an automated tagging service to get it up to a usable and readable quality so that the, you know, the student can proceed. They don't need a perfect document. In another another case, you know, when I when I'm working specifically with large companies, not all of their documents are equal. You may have a document that every customer has to read.

That one should probably be 100%. Or you may have a document that people are required to fill out a form that they're required to fill out before proceeding. That one should be 100%. But then you may have a bunch of other stuff out there that you know quite in reality, not everybody reads, that doesn't get to 100%. You know, I would certainly check with your own legal department, but it's kind of like it's going to pass an automated checker, probably.

You're okay with that not being 100%. Obviously, we want everybody to be 100%. But the reality is, if I've got 100,000 documents, I'm not going to get to 100% of them all.

Mark Shapiro

Jenny?

Jenny Woldt

There is not an acceptable rating below 100% for us to send a document back to the client that says this is fully remediated. We see a lot of shortcuts taken. But at the end of the day, if it's not completely accessible to the hardest sighted individual on the other end, then it's not worth anything.

Mark Shapiro

Glen?

Glen Schubert

Yeah, you know, we have pretty high standards here, so we set the bar at this. We are delivering a fully compliant document. We do have clients who ask for accessibility over compliance. And by that I mean they, they may not necessarily want us to change the color contrast in the PDF for branding reasons, but they want someone using assistive technology to be able to read and understand all of the content.

In those situations, we do not issue a certificate of compliance, but it's specifically at a customer's request. We do deliver a certificate of accessibility, meaning that all of the content is readable using assistive technology.

Mark Shapiro

Is it better to provide the original file such as an illustrator file or the rendered pdf? Jenny?

Jenny Woldt

Normally we we like to get the rendered PDF. Just that way we don't run into issues with text shifting or there being nuances when we create the PDF. But in cases where the document perhaps had some issues as a PDF, in those cases we will ask for the original native files and create the PDF ourselves, have the person look over it to verify it all looks good to them, and then we'll remediate that one.

Mark Shapiro

Glen?

Glen Schubert

Sure. The answer to that is kind of a two part answer. Typically we want just the PDF. One of the things that people may not understand is that the way a PDF renders on your system could be different from the way it renders on our system. We may not have the font family that you're using. We may not have the same parameters set up to save that file.

The reason I said it's a two part answer is primarily we want the PDF for remediation, but in some cases the fonts may not be embedded in the PDF or there may be components that don't come over well - alt text and things in the images. And in some cases we can pull that from the source file. So initially PDF and then we'll request the source file as needed.

Mark Shapiro

Rob?

Rob Haverty

Absolutely, and I will, I will take issue with that or because I would provide both. It is always it can sometimes be easier to actually go back and fix that original source document and then reconvert it to a PDF using the appropriate conversion tool that will give you a tagged PDF. It's also useful... I was actually doing a document earlier this week and by being able to go back to the source document, I was able to better understand the intent of the author and then get the document the PDF tagged more appropriately.

Mark Shapiro

All right. Next question. If you create a document in Word or Google Docs and it passes the accessibility checker, 100% passes, and save it as a PDF, would that PDF be 100% accessible? Glen, why don't... why don’t you take this one?

Glen Schubert

Yeah, that's great. Typically, no. You find that the process of saving as a PDF can affect the tag tree structure. So what you have as a an accessible Word document or accessible PowerPoint or source document. Once it saved to PDF, you do have to do some touch up on that. May not be a lot, but in some cases it can be pretty dramatic.

Mark Shapiro

Rob?

Rob Haverty

Absolutely. The simple answer is no. You know, as I mentioned previously, there's no automated checker that's going to give you a 100% assurance that your PDF is accessible or any content format, whether it be Word or Google Docs or wherever you're bringing it from.

It will do a good job if you do the right work, but you know, not to pick on anybody. But let's take Word, for example. If I create a very complex table that has nested headers, Word does not allow me to actually indicate that. And so when I convert it to a PDF, those nested headers are not going to be tagged correctly and I'm going to have to fix that.

Mark Shapiro

Why can't someone just use an automatic accessibility checker and such as Adobe to get a document 100% accessible?

Mark Shapiro

Jenny?

Jenny Woldt

Great. So the accessibility checker is great, but there are items that require human intervention for your metadata, your making sure the alternate text is correct, making sure all the OCR was processed properly. Tag trees are correct. Reading order is also correct. And these are things that require somebody to actually physically go through and check these things.

Mark Shapiro

Next question Do PDF remediation service companies provide training to help create better source documents?

Mark Shapiro

Rob?

Rob Haverty

I will be happy to take that. Some do, some don't. But there is a host of training available out there. You know, if you go out to the web and search on PDF accessibility training, you're going to get a lot of results. I would suggest that people look for the most current training available because the... PDF remediation is rapidly advancing and we're improving the tools to do that.

And you really don't want to get trained with a course that's ten years old that's not going to take advantage of the new advances.

Mark Shapiro

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Thank you, Rob from Adobe, Jenny from Splash Box, and Glen from Braille Works.

Closing

Lori Litz

I want to echo Mark's sentiment in thanking Jenny, Glen and Rob for being here with us today. The day is not yet over. If you head on back to the lobby or if you're already in the lobby, you can head on over to Braille Works is putting on a breakout session called the Wild West of PDF Remediation.

And if you've ever tried to remediate a PDF, you know exactly what they're referring to. We also invite you to head on out to the Expo Hall and visit with Splash Box Marketing and Braille Works to learn more about PDF remediation services. Our next event is April 9th and that will be PDF Remediation Software. And yes, there is a difference.

We invite you back in April to that event to learn more about the differences between services and software as it relates to PDF remediation. As I mentioned earlier, today's event is recorded and will be available again this evening. I will email you out instructions on how to access it. Thank you all so much for being here. Head on over to the Wild West of PDF Remediation and have a great rest of your day.

Glen Schubert

Okay, everybody, I appreciate your time. We all enjoyed the previous session, and in that we learned a lot. We're going to go through a couple of things from Braille Works perspective that we've learned in the dozen years or so that we've been remediating PDF Documents Brief History on Braille Works. We started obviously as a Braille company, but now we have an entire division that does nothing but remediating documents to the week at standard PDF Standard and the HHS standard.

When we talk about document remediation, one of the things that we've learned and we phrase that the Wild West of PDF remediation is that there's not an overwhelming resource out there that guide you through this process. So you're out there kind of on your own. When we talk about finding a PDF remediation vendor and I apologize for, I went into the Wild West, it's much like navigating the Wild West, You know, you're out there looking around.

There's not solid structure everywhere on who's good, who's not, and you need to find a company that will guide you through the process of making your documents accessible and be reasonable. And by and by not, I mean, there are some companies that are, you know, using nothing but overseas resources. You have companies that use nothing but auto timing resources.

Here. It really works. We don't use anything outsourced, but we use a combination of tools, both automated tagging and manual tagging. So why is it so hard to find a vendor? The Web sites all look great. I think you heard me mentioned in the previous session groups that we refer to as aggregators. They just gobble up PDF documents.

They hand them to another company to remediate. They hand them back to you, but on their websites they look great. They use the right buzzwords, They offer a certificate of compliance, but they don't actually make the PDFs accessible. They get close. And in some cases some of the tagging is correct, but it's not 100%. For some reason, when I'm clicking on, there we go.

Well, we went the wrong way. Let's go back up. There we go. The reason for that is there is a lack of regulation in this industry. We don't have a governmental body certifying anything. We have some companies providing some guidance, but we don't have a true resource that says these guys know exactly what they're doing. They know how to properly remediate documents.

There are some private companies that have put up standards and it's it's kind of an area that's evolving in PDF remediation. But again, going back to the fact that these companies can create beautiful websites and it looks like they know what they're doing, if you don't know the ins and outs of document remediation, it can be very easy to be fooled.

So without a share of policing, the bad guys can be outlaws, roam free. Moving along, I thought, There we go. Let's try again. No, this is running, so I apologize for this. Accessibility checkers are very little help. They do help a little, like I say. But the word little is important here. Why? They don't help. The accessibility checker report isn't enough.

So, for example, I could take a PDF that has some tables. That has lists. I can put everything under a P tag the paragraph tab, and it'll pass the checker. We see this all the time in the industry, companies forcing the document to pass the checker, not doing the work to make the document compliant. And that's a big deal.

It's a huge deal. And the reason I say that, let's see if this slide is going to change for me. There's a lot of technology almost. There we go. The reason this is so important is because you look at the report and you say, Hey, this thing is accessible, but their tags aren't present. The existing image doesn't have all text color.

Contrast ratios aren't checked. It doesn't check to see if your URLs are actually present or they go to live links. So you end up with a report that's essentially useless. You could have a report saying this document is awesome. It passes the checker 100%, but you run it through Jaws or another screen reader and you find out you can't navigate it, you can't read lists, or you don't know how many items are in the lists.

The tables read left to right, top to bottom. So you have no idea what's in each cell. It's just ridiculous. And we you know, we do. Okay. Keep that logo up there. Or the icon says the Wild West of media for mediation. And this is one of the reasons it is so easy to force a document, pass a checker, and you think you've got something reliable when you don't.

There we go. There we go. Accessibility checkers can't check your list. Your bullets are headings. Are they incorrect tags Again, Image Alternate text. Is it correct? Do the links go to the URL? I'm going through a list here hoping. Okay. Now why does all this matter? We've talked a little bit about it, but let's go a little more into detail.

This matters for I guess the biggest reason is that you are responsible for your documents being compliant, not your vendor. And I know we've heard comment that the vendor will stand behind it and yes, we stand behind it and we will. But essentially, your company is on the line. You can have a vendor give you documents that are non-compliant and you post them on your website.

They're not going to come back to the vendor. You may have recourse based on your contractual relationship, but you may not. And if you buy cheap document remediation and you post them on the website, they're going to look to you as the brand and you as the company. It'll affect you sort of in the in the accessibility world.

It'll affect you in terms of your marketing, your ability to reach your customers. It all lands on you. Even though you had a vendor tell you this document was inaccessible, How do we spot the outlaws? Now this is is kind of important because it's it's easy to think I found somebody, but I don't necessarily know. One of the things that we find is they will tell you it's always a flat page rate.

I can tell you from experience, and I'm not a person who remediate, but I've talked extensively with our team and are subject matter experts. If I have a forms page with 100 forms a form fields in it, and I've got to enter tooltips and I've got to put in varying ranges of things that can be put into that form field, I've got to go to every single one of those on a page.

We have forms that have 100 fields on a form that is radically different from tagging something that has three paragraphs of text. It's labor wise, gigantically different. So when you look out there, look very carefully. I mean, if you're providing very simple documents and you're quoted a flat page rate for just this type of content, that's one thing.

But we hear from companies and we've seen companies in bidding opportunities where they throw out a flat page rate for everything regardless. We heard earlier one of the speakers talking about OCR is different because there is another process. There's extra labor involved, so watch out for that. You will get people that will say, We'll do your whole library for X dollars a page if you run into that, run fast, run far.

They don't know what they're doing. If they did, they would understand that remediation of a very complex page can take hours in some cases, and remediation of a simple page could take minutes. So watch for that. They don't correct color. Contrast is the next item. We see this over and over and over again. We get documents and obviously we see the work of other providers because people send documents to us for evaluation and they haven't touched color contrast yet.

They have a certification that this is we can compliant watch for that. They also ignore images of text. The OCR I mentioned earlier, those documents that to a sighted reader look like text. I can read them, you can read them, but when you click on them that text content turns blue. There's no actual text there and a screen reader won't read it, so they'll avoid that.

You won't see anything in terms of OCR being done by these companies. Let's see if this is going to take it will take another way, other ways to spot the outlaws. They don't manually check the PDF for compliance. There are a number of manual steps that has to be done in order to certify this document is compliant and they have no mechanism to do it.

They rely solely on software. And we heard Rob talk about that earlier, that the automated taggers can create an okay document but not a compliant document. And the standard is compliance. A lot of these places will offer an instant turnaround. You can be assured they're not manually checking. They don't have the time to do it in that. And then they're using overseas resources.

Watch for that because a lot of contracts have restrictions in them saying you can't use overseas resources. And one of the latest tricks in the industry is to set up a server in the U.S., have an overseas resource to log in to that server and didn't do the work there, claiming, it's all done right here in the U.S. on a technical level, maybe.

But watch for that. Again, there's nobody regulating this. So you have to be careful. Put your vendors to the test. And this is what we always encourage people to do when you're shopping for a vendor, create a 3 to 5 page document a PDF document with complex components. You want tables, you want lists, you want poor color contrast, you want links in there, you want things that they have to go check.

And if they don't go check them, you're going to know it. You're going to know it pretty quickly. Send that document to your finalists, the people that you say, Hey, okay, I'm down to these few and have them remediated. It's a service that we provide. I know most companies will offer to provide it. Don't send them a 200 page document to be remediated.

You know, that's not fair to the vendors. Make it a small document, but a small document with complex components. And then we're here to help. You know, obviously, we're here presenting some things for you to watch out for. But a lot of this is self-serving. We have a team that is dedicated to PDF document remediation. They train, like I mentioned in the beginning, around on the video from from tier one, level one, remediate or up to a subject matter expert.

It takes years to get there. So on our team, what we'll do is if you're still unsure, send us one of the documents that you have had remediated. And hey, they say it's remediated. Let us take a look at it. We do this all the time and we end up doing a lot of work that was already done by other companies.

But we'll check the document. And I will say there are quite a few times where the document is compliant and we send back good news. This was great, but we want to we want to help you get through this. It's not you said it's partially self-serving, but our mission is to make the world a readable, more readable place.

One of our owners is totally blind, relies on assistive technology, relies on these tools to read the documents. So we do have a passion for this. This is is obviously a company situation, but it's not just purely a it's all profit. It's about getting these things. The documents, into the hands of the people that need them. So for this, we're offering a free PDF for mediation quality check.

There is a QR code on the screen. You can click through to that and upload your document to us or contact us and we can get in touch with you. We'd be happy to talk to you about it and any way that we can help, we are more than happy to. And I think I'm at the end of my.

Yeah, I am. There you go. That's our contact information. So after all of that, I'm going to ask Jess and our team what's next.

Jessica Sanders

Yep. If anybody has any questions, please put them in the chat. We'll be happy to answer them. But aside from that, that is the end of our presentation. All right. Yeah. It doesn't look like there's any questions. maybe there is more than. All right, So that's when we've had or when I've had. gosh. Since moving, when I've had PDFs or media before I received a test report from the PDF Accessibility Checker at WCAG AA.

I know it's free. What are your thoughts on this as far as reports go? And I'm going to turn this over to our subject matter expert Courtney to answer the newest fact checker is a pretty complete product product. If it passes those those checks, you're probably on the right track. Like Glen said earlier, there's going to be a bunch of manual checks that are still going to have to be done, but is probably headed on the right track.

In that case. All right. Next question. You talked about complexity of PDF form remediation. Can you discuss this more often.

Glen Schubert

Or do you have. Yeah, why don't you take that?

Jessica Sanders

Yeah, sure. PDFs can be had a large range of complexity. There can be it can be anything from a basic white background with black text on it, which would be a very low tier level, is what we call them on our end up to. Like Glen mentioned before, hundreds and hundreds of forms on the same page. So, so that tier level page would be a much more complex page and it would take much longer to remediate, much longer to test and so on and so forth.

Glen Schubert

So this is Glen, on that subject of storms and we've talked about it, we've talked about tool tips, we've talked about, you know, setting the range of items that can be entered in a form, feel the things that announce the forms to the individual. Can you talk a little bit about each of those components and how when you're creating that form, you know, they add they just add tying everything we do.

Jessica Sanders

Yeah. So compliance wise, you want to make sure that your tooltip is matching your the label that's on the document. When you auto generate forms, I can guarantee that it's not going to be complete. And in a lot of cases it will actually be incorrect. We go through and we test every single form as far as the tooltip goes and we actually type in every single form field to make sure that the letters are fitting inside the form field, that maybe the font hasn't been selected those too big.

So it can't be seen inside the font field. And then we also go into Jaws and we will listen to every single field to make sure that it's announcing properly to the end user.

Glen Schubert

Excellent. Excellent. There's the next question on forums. What is the best way to making a PDF form billable and is this compliant to use Adobe Pro to make the forms available?

Jessica Sanders

The short answer that is going to be it's going to take a combination of products. You can generate forms in Adobe on the tagging process in Adobe is very tedious, so that's really the big amount of time it's going to come. You know, it's, it's, it's going to be a combination of products, to be honest with you.

Glen Schubert

Okay. Okay. There's a question further down. I think I can take it. Since how do you deal with huge volume requests, Do you always rely on manual processing? We we have a process here that depending on the type of library, so forth, and I see that sort of as a qualified answer. If the documents are consistent things like statements, notices, things that have a fixed structure, those processes can be automated and rely on an automated tool because we do all of the groundwork in advance.

All of the manual work is built into a process for that specific document design. When we're doing a very large library and we've done a number of them, we'll work with the client on determining which of the documents are in priority order. We do have a combination of automated tools and manual checks, but in order to certify the document, some checks have to be manual.

There's not a way around that. So when we check documents, we're looking for things like color contrast, we're looking for you URLs, we're looking for things that to to us as a sighted reader, may not be that difficult. But to somebody who's using assistive technology, it is. So it's again, not just a11 size fits all. Not everything is is tagged on a manual basis.

We look at some health care documents in particular, and we have a document automation team programing team here as well, who can work with those consistently structured documents like provider directories, pharmacy directories, formularies, all of these list type documents have a similar structure from month to month as they release new versions, and those can be automated. So it's a combination, but there is going to be a manual step at some point in the document to confirm certain things.

Jessica Sanders

Great answer, Glen. We have another question. If asking if we can recommend products, we use proprietary in-house software. So we really don't have any products that we can recommend, but we are happy to take a look at your PDFs to let you know where where they need correcting.

Glen Schubert

Yeah, if I could add to that, one of the misnomers out there in the world is there are, you know, I get this software and suddenly I can remediate documents and we deal a lot with companies you know large corporations, municipality is big organizations that send their team to a remediation seminar on a weekend and they come back and they think these people should be able to just start tagging documents.

And as as we mentioned, as Jenny mentioned in her presentation, there's a steep training process for this. It's not something somebody learns and knows the depth of it overnight. It much in similar fashion. It takes months for people who are in our team to get to be a level one or remediation team member. And it takes, like I said, a couple of years to get to that subject matter expert.

So don't rely just on a product. It won't give you the guidance you need necessarily. It is an education that's needed. And then using various tools, like Jessica mentioned, we have tools that have been developed specifically by our programing department that makes things much faster and much easier for our team. But you still need the knowledge.

Jessica Sanders

Thank you for that.

Glen Schubert

Yeah, there's a next question is would it be better then to convert PDF forms to web forms? I really think that's that's more a decision at your IP level. They both have their benefits. You know, the benefit of the PDF form is that somebody can download that form, you can share that form email by email without them needing to go to your website.

They both have their place and it really depends on the application.

Jessica Sanders

That's great. So, well, it looks like that might be all of the questions that we have.

Glen Schubert

Could be.

Jessica Sanders

All right. We want to thank everybody for, there's another one.

Glen Schubert

Yeah. yeah, it does. It does. And it is. There is a whole knowledge base here and really appreciate that input. You know, we CAG is a great standard and following it is, you know, provides a great reading experience, a great user experience and knowing a few things, it's that old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

And as a corporation, if you want to have a remediation department, that's great. But I can tell you here, it's very detailed work, it's very tedious work. We are in constant training. What we've got here. Are you hiring? The answer? That is typically yes, because it is something that people do work their way up and we do have a significant number of people working their way toward being a subject matter expert.

But we find that there are people who are attuned to this kind of work and there are people who are not just like everything else in life. And you find those people that are very detail oriented and they really like lining things up and it works great. But if you bring that or try to bring that in-house, where you're not a dedicated department, it's very difficult to maintain very time.

Yeah, I see your thing really that you do remediation in-house and it is hard to get folks to understand why it takes so much time. It's very detailed and that goes back to the watch out for the flat Patriots for everything, because as you know from your experience, paragraph tag's great all day long. You know, complex tables not so much.

So we watch for that and I think that's it. I appreciate all the positive comments, guys. We're here to help and feel free to reach out to us. Our contact information is on the screen or you can go to real work school. There's plenty of places to fill out a form to get in touch with us, as we mentioned before.

And if I scroll back, let's see if this will actually work. And now it's not going to go back to the page I want. There we go. There's the QR code. If you'd like to send a document, we're not going to do thousands and thousands of pages, you know, for the free remediation check. But send us a couple of documents.

Send us some some things that you've had remediated and we'll let you know. And we're happy to let you know if it's remediated properly. This isn't about, you know, telling you something that, you know, nit picking a document, but we'll tell you where it where it fails if it fails and if it's a success and to stay with that vendor.

So thank you very much. We really appreciate this opportunity and look forward to hearing from you.

Jessica Sanders

Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.