When the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) announced the launch of its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in 1997, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web stated that “the power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”
Accessible Documents
Accessible digital documents, which are principally Accessible PDF and HTML5 are a rapidly growing required format and delivery obligation for many enterprises – especially those that deal in any way with governmental entities. There is significant risk and surprisingly high cost in adopting the narrow minimalist “Accommodation Strategy” that many companies follow. This approach exposes companies to unplanned and unbudgeted risk and expense of litigation as well as reactive remediation labor and cost in the effort to make documents accessible as “one-off” exercises.
In the past few years CrawfordTech has frequently referenced our Net Promoter Scores. In 2017, we proudly announced that we had received a +63, in 2018 we announced a great score of +68 and in March of this year, we issued a press release that our latest NPS score is +75! But what does this mean? And why would anyone care? Is a +68 or +75 really that great? After all, when we were all in school a score like that would have meant getting a D, or at best a C.
There is something a foot in Florida. Municipalities and small businesses are under attack from disability activists. In the past couple months, we’ve seen every municipality and a good number of businesses receive demand letters threatening of a lawsuit if their websites and documents are not made accessible.
Look at any modern archive or enterprise content management system and it will include the concept of an Archival Information Package. In legacy archives the concept of an AIP was usually synonymous with a batch – for example an application might generate a file contain several thousand data records (customer statements) and this package of digital documents would be loaded into the archive in one go. In modern ECM systems AIPs are often smaller units, for example a case file related to specific customer activity that has now concluded.
A common theme underscores the major trends happening in customer communications. It’s output production workflow.
The successful mantra of organizations striving for digital accessibility is: “always direct efforts at the source applications” because unless you address accessibility issues there, it will be impossible to keep up as changes propagate throughout content over time. This works swimmingly for website design where you have relatively few source systems, and proven strategies that can be employed equally well across those systems.
As organizations continue to redefine internal and customer driven requirements for enterprise content systems, the importance of managing and delivering digital content has driven decision making and has influenced the move away from traditional content management systems.
If you work with customer communications you’ve no doubt come across complex tables. Conveying information through tables is becoming more prevalent, so it’s important to be aware of the issues that document accessibility specialists face when trying to make tabular content both compliant and useable.
Next week Lucerne in Switzerland will once again welcome around 6,000 visitors from more than 50 countries to the much anticipated Hunkeler Innovation Days, which return to the city for 2019. This prestigious biennial event, where the world’s leading print solution vendors exhibit by ‘invitation only’, never fails to impress its attendees with a dazzling array of product innovations, new solutions and larger than life demonstrations, packed in to two exhibition halls over the show’s four day duration.
