In today’s world where most business documentation is becoming digital, ensuring that your documents can be accessed by everyone, even those with disabilities, such as visual impairments, is essential.
With different types of business documents ranging from simple templated documents like bank statements to visually rich brochures, your business needs effective and efficient tools to ensure these documents can be designed easily and at scale.
In this blog, we will be covering accessibility challenges associated with high-volume transactional documents, the role of automation in solving those challenges, and also share our recommended tool to make these documents accessible.
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- Understanding high-volume transactional documents
- Common challenges in ensuring document accessibility
- Role of automation in overcoming these challenges
- Benefits of using automated solutions
- CDPcom: A Solution for Accessibility Automation
Understanding high-volume transactional documents
These documents follow a repetitive, standard structure, and are created using enterprise document composition automation (CCM). Typical examples of these documents include bank statements, report cards, and invoices.
Ensuring these documents are accessible is essential to ensure inclusivity. Imagine you receive your bank statement one day but are not able to understand its content. How difficult would your life become? These are the struggles people with visual impairments have to go through when such high-volume transactional documents are not designed in an accessible manner.
Additionally, you may face legal complications if your documents are not accessible. Laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act demand that public digital content is accessible.
Common challenges in ensuring document accessibility
While there has been some progress in ensuring in achieving document accessibility, there are some challenges that make it hard to achieve complete document accessibility.
Errors in document structure
People with visual impairments rely on screen readers in order to understand document content. However, in documents like report cards, there may be a lot of tables. Tagging them incorrectly will hamper the entire reading order for the screen reader making it almost impossible for the person to go through the document.
Formatting inconsistencies
Many organizations use different systems and data sources to create their documents. This can lead to slight variations that might occur in the document formatting like different font styles, and different ways of tagging different elements. These inconsistencies make it difficult to achieve accessibility at scale.
Volume
Thousands of documents like bank statements and invoices are generated every second and sent to customers simultaneously. Manually remediating these documents at such a fast pace is impossible. Hence, automated solutions are required.
Role of automation in overcoming these challenges
Automation helps us use machines to do tasks that humans would find tedious as it would require a lot of manual effort. Here is how we can leverage automation to achieve accessibility at scale
Automated accessibility checks
Without automation, a human would have to perform various accessibility checks like missing tags, improper heading structures, and incorrect reading order.
However, with automation, computer software can easily look for accessibility issues and highlight errors.
Automated remediation
Just identifying issues is not sufficient as high-volume transactional documents are generated and distributed almost immediately.
Automated solutions today not only identify accessibility issues but also remediate them. They are capable of automatically tagging elements like Headings, Paragraphs, Images, Tables, etc., and setting the correct reading order.
Benefits of using automated solutions
Implementing automated accessibility solutions makes it easier for your organization to ensure all your documents are accessible without a lot of manual effort.
Consistent application of accessibility standards
Automated solutions reduce variability which might happen in a manual process. These solutions are effective in maintaining compliance and providing a uniform user experience
Speed and efficiency in processing large volumes of documents
Automated tools can scan, identify, and remediate accessibility issues in a fraction of the time as compared to a team of humans. This speed is very beneficial for organizations dealing with high-volume transactional documents, where the sheer number of documents can be overwhelming.
Reduction in human error
Even the best of the best human beings are prone to making mistakes, especially when tasks are repetitive and tedious. Automation minimizes such a risk by ensuring a standard set of processes is applied. This also frees up your workforce for more strategic tasks.
CDPcom: A solution for accessibility automation
One of the tools that we recommend for automating your PDF tasks for high-volume transactional PDFs is CDP Communications’ ADEPT UA.
ADEPT UA offers the ultimate solution for automated, high-volume, document, accessibility remediation. It addresses all types of enterprise transactional digital documents such as bills, statements, notices, policy contracts, tickets, and passes before being released to the public. This ensures universal accessibility for all users, making it ideal for organizations that require an on-premises, secure enterprise solution. ADEPT UA’s modern, robust architecture is designed to accommodate dynamic documents eliminating the need for ongoing intervention.
In Summary: Automation is the key to achieving accessibility at scale when it comes to high-volume transactional documents
Accessibility at scale for high-volume transactional documents is a challenge due to the sheer volume with which they are produced and the formatting and tagging inaccuracies that can occur because of different data sources and human intervention.
Automated accessibility checkers and automated remediation services can help you correct accessibility issues in real time.
To know more about how you can implement CDP Communications’ ADEPT UA solution in your organization, click the button below