The Why, How, and Importance of Accessibility in Delivered Communications

Hello everyone and welcome to our joint webinar today. I’m Jonathan Malone-McGrew with Solimar Systems. And, I am really excited today to have CommonLook on with us our accessibility partner. They are part of a much larger accessibility offering that we will hear a little bit about here in the intro. But let me introduce my co-presenter, David Herr and Dave, jump in here and tell our nice audience here what you do for CommonLook what CommonLook does and how you offer solutions to the market.

Absolutely. Thank you, Jonathan. And we’re happy to be able to present today. I’m David Herr, I’m the Vice President of Enterprise Solutions here at CommonLook, which is now part of T-Base, which is also aligned with Accessible360. So, our new company is a full-service accessibility offering organization that can do alternative formats like large print and Braille.

CommonLook especially has always been around accessible PDF and we can do accessibility audits through our Accessible360 partnership. So, you know, all three of our companies have come together as one and we’re pretty excited. We’re going to be announcing a new company name in the next couple of weeks here. So, we’ll be announcing all of that. But for now, they can be as CommonLook.

And, I love that it’s neat to see technologies come together, you know, as a software company as well. At Solimar were doing workflow. We like to think of ourselves as glue that brings things together in the greater workflow. And, actually, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about why accessibility needs to be a part of your print and digital strategy.

It needs to be about what you’re thinking about how you’re growing it. And, we’re going to tell you why it’s important, right, Dave? We’re going to really focus on the value-add, that accessibility can bring along with thoughtful workflow solutions. And, that is why we’re bringing this webinar together together because we see a way to bring technology and integrate it so they can drive value for the market. And, in speaking of that, let’s go over our agenda real quick. We did our introductions, so that’s good. We nailed that. We’re going to talk to you about why we focus on PDF though in the accessibility market and we’re going to talk about digital production. We’re going to give you some terms that might help you as you’re talking to other departments in your organization.

We’re going to talk about accessible PDF, which is really important in that it’s a way to make things inclusive in your environment and your communications to your end customers. And, we’re going to give you solutions. But, you know, we can educate you a lot, but the goal here is to really give you a solution or set of solutions and a set of strategies that you can start to employ. And, then we’ll let you know how to reach out to us if you have questions, because we would love to chat with you and give you more ideas about how you can take this forward in your organization. So, without further ado, Dave, I’m going to turn it over to you and let’s talk about digital accessibility and why it’s important.

Absolutely. So, you know, what is digital accessible? I mean, that’s really the first question here. And, you know, there’s a transition obviously in this market from print communications to digital delivery. We’re all seeing it. You know, everyone gets opt-outs from your bank and your financial organizations and other or your insurance companies and stuff for “Would you like to receive your statement electronically?” “Would you like to see your bank statement or your invoices electronically?” So, as that transition has occurred, it’s got some benefits to it. Obviously, you’re going to have some savings on printing. You’re going to have savings on mailing costs and things like that. But there’s some hidden costs that people are not aware of that are very important, which are going to move to a digital delivery of this type of content.

And that’s digital accessibility. So, what does that mean? And what that means is when you send out an email, you send out an attachment you set up in your portal that your clients can digitally retrieve a PDF of their statement. It needs to be able to be read and used and processed by everyone. And, so just sending somebody a PDF file, if they’re, let’s say they’re blind and they’re using a screen reader, if they get a PDF document that they can’t open up but they can’t read their statement, that’s a problem, obviously, and that’s not being inclusive of everyone.

And in fact, you know, legally you can get yourself in trouble for excluding them by not adding accessibility to the document. So, there’s legal reasons we have to be accessible. There is customer experience reasons we want to be accessible. We want everyone to be able to experience the same thing in the same way, in the same level. So, these volume documents, you know, documents that are generated and sent out need to be created in an accessible format.
And we’ll talk about what that means here in a minute. So, you know, our focus is typically on PDF, so why is the focus on PDF? Well, you know, PDF has really become digital paper in the market. I mean, when Adobe came out with that standard way back in, I think the 1990s when it was first released, you know, PDF has continued to evolve and it has a lot of benefits from a security standpoint and it can be read on almost any device.

You know, everybody has a PDF generation written or developed into their tools. So, it’s very easy to take, you know, anything that was originally going to be printed and then have it saved as a PDF, as a digital representation of what would have been printed. You know, they can be secured, they can be signed. And, it’s the third most used format on the Web now. So, I mean, it’s kind of interesting. Many years ago they had talked about that PDF was really going away and it was going to be replaced with EPUB and it was going to be replaced with other formats. And, that has tended to not be the case. And, in fact, we pulled some information from the PDF Association who’s been tracking all of this, and they go all the way back to 2011, which ironically is when I first got into the accessibility field was around 2011.

And, when I first came in, people were telling us, well, yeah, we know we have an issue with the accessibility of our PDFs, but you know, it’s going away. People are moving to EPUB and that’s much more accessible formats are going to be out there. Well, you know, when we look at this chart and you see PDF use on the web from 2011 until 2021, PDF has stayed steady or increased over the time and really the other formats have fallen away. So, Word and EPUB and the other ones are slowly disappearing and PDF has remained the most popular format for a document on the Internet right now.

And Dave, I mean, I think this is a really good place to insert this. One of the reasons we partner with CommonLook, and CommonLook partners with Solimar, Solimar has been a huge supporter of the PDF standards pretty much since its inception in the early nineties. As you as you mentioned, we made a strategic direction in our workflow software to use it as a pivot point so that we are leveraging an ISO standard that is managed when we do our emulation of older technologies like PostScript and PCL and Metacode and that may not mean anything to the audience, but there’s someone in your shop who’s going to, you know, kind of not their head if they’re getting that kind of data. And, the important thing is that when you get things to PDF, you create a synergy and it’s important not only for your accessibility goals, it’s important for your production goals because what we’ve seen more and more, we do a global business, as does many people and what we see around the world in printing is that people are aligning to the PDF standard not only for their digital asset management and their storage and their presentment and their accessibility, but they’re leveraging it as the key standard in their organization to drive printing production, to drive reprints, to drive long-term storage, because there are so many technologies that can optimize it, make it flexible, make it viewable.

And, I imagine anyone watching this who has children could ask their kids today if they know what a PDF is, and they probably already interacted with them in school or through some sort of E-Textbook over the last few years, especially. So, it really is an interesting thing that has happened with that portable document format, which is what PDF stands for.

Exactly. And, it went away from being, you know, an Adobe proprietary format to basically an open-source format at this point, which helps as well. So, let’s talk a little bit about PDFs and accessibility. You know, many times, you know, we have heard in the past that, well, PDFs can’t be made accessible and there’s some truth to that from the standpoint of what if I just generate a PDF from a traditional application. So, I do print the PDF or if I go to a copier and I make a photocopy of a document and then I save it on the copier as a PDF or emails me as a PDF. Well, that PDF is probably very inaccessible. Doesn’t mean it can’t be made accessible though. So, that’s something that as far as accessibility is concerned.

So, how is a PDF made accessible? Well, were going talk about that here in a couple minutes? Yeah. There are also some myths out there that, well, I don’t have to make my PDFs accessible if there’s another way somebody can get the information. You know, I got a phone number on my website or I can say, Yeah, we can give you an alternative format if you ask me, we can give you word or we can give you something else even that might not be accessible.

So, the way the government has looked at this and the way the Department of Justice has looked at this, is that if you’re providing content on the Web, it needs to be accessible. If you’re providing content to your clients and your digital workplace is a portal that they log into to get their statements, you know that content needs to be accessible to your clients. So, when we talk about accessibility, you know, and then we talk about, well, it’s not a myth that can be made accessible, you know, why is it such a problem then? Why are people doing it? You would think everybody would just adopt this and start doing this. Well, we’re going to dig a little bit deeper into what’s involved in accessibility here in a minute. But, you know, you can go into Adobe Acrobat and you can add the tags.

And, so what are the tags? So, when you look at a PDF document, you’re looking at the physical view, you’re seeing what the document looks like. You’ve printed the document and what you’re seeing on the screen and what you’re going to see that comes out of your printer is going to be the physical view of the document. And that’s the layout, the structure, the way it’s designed that stays static. What the tag tree does is that’s what’s read and consumed by a screen reader or other assistive technologies. So, that tag language needs to accurately describe all the attributes of the document, because that’s what somebody is listening to when they open a document. So, if I was blind and I opened up a PDF document, you know, it’s going to announce the table of contents, it’s going to announce that there is heading levels. Hopefully. it’s going to announce that there’s a list or a chart or, you know, a figure. And, then what the alternative text is for the description of that chart or graph or figure.

So, this is what you’re listening to is the tag tree. And, if the document creation tools are not generating a proper tag tree, the experience of the person that’s going to try to consume that document using a screen reader or another assistive technology is going to be a poor experience and then it’s going to be deemed an inaccessible document. So, adding the tags as part of the process, doing it correctly is very much part of the process. It can be a difficult process if you don’t have the right tools to do it and you need to have the knowledge of how it needs to be done.

And Dave, I think this is a great plug for another webinar we did together with our teams where we talked about inclusivity and you can find a link to that in the description of this video, but it’s also on our various landing pages as partners, but we show an example of it in that in that webinar that we did as well. So, I would invite people to go look for that CommonLook and Solimar inclusivity, where we talk about why communications need to be inclusive and we actually show a demo of what happens when you get a poor screen read document and then we show you the after of how it should be. We’re not going to do that today, but it’s out there for you to consume and it could give you another idea as to why this is so painful for people who are trying to interact with your documents. That’s one of the big, big problems.

Absolutely. So, let’s jump into what is an accessible PDF and what’s necessary to make a PDF accessible. So, what we have here, I have a slide up on the anatomy of an accessible PDF and it’s a very busy slide. It’s showing a lot of content, but I would describe what we’re talking about here, and then we’re going to look at some actual PDFs here in a second.

It starts at the authoring stage. I mean, what’s fonts did you use? What the font sizes did you use? Yeah, there’s another spin off of accessibility, which is usability. And, when we talk about making the document accessible and we talk about working with a screen reader, well, you know, blindness is not the only disability either. Color blindness. There’s low vision. You know, I have my readers around my neck here because I can’t read things that are in small print or, you know, hard for me to read. So, when you’re trying to make a document accessible, you do want to offer it, you know, with usability and accessibility in mind. So, if you use the smallest possible font, you’re not helping anybody, in many regards. You’re going to worry about your color and your color contrast. If somebody is colorblind and you have light gray and dark gray or blue and reds and greens that are against a background that’s similar to that shade of that color, it can be very difficult to read. In some cases, it could just be completely invisible to somebody who’s colorblind.
So, color and color contrast levels are something at the authoring stage you want to put into the design of the document to allow it to be accessible. And, then you get down into the nitty gritty of the content of the document, you know? So, when we talk about styles, we’re talking about, you know, proper use of heading levels and lists and images and bookmarks and tables of contents.

We’re going to talk about reading order here in a second. All of this content at the authoring stage and at the design stage of the document needs to be thought through so that when you actually then tag the document for accessibility, it can be tagged for accessibility because the document has been formatted correctly. So, it makes a big difference.

So, when we talk about, you know, PDF accessibility, there’s kind of eight steps to what’s necessary, what in the content needs to be worked on and looked at to ensure a document is accessible. The very first definition of accessibility, and it’s the one that the W3C, which is the Standards Board International Organization out there that basically regulates accessibility and helps develop some of the standards. So, you’ll hear WCAG or WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.0 AA. You know, these are standards for accessibility that we can measure. And, so I can measure that you’ve met this standard or I’ve met the standard with the content that I’ve developed. So, we talked about eight steps. The first thing is the document has to be tagged. PDFs by default are not tagged, so there are no provisions for accessibility whatsoever in a PDF that’s typically generated unless you’re using a tool that’s tags aware and will generate the tags. So, you have to have PDF tags. And, those tags, as I’ll show you in the next slide, are really describing all of the content. The second thing that you need to have is metadata. The metadata is, you know, like when we look at a document or we look at a directory and we find the file that we’re looking for. Yeah, this is the title of the document. This is who created the document. This is what language, the document is in and all of that information is important, especially if we’re using a screen reader which would announce these things.

So, I could decide, is this the document that I’m looking for? Do I want to open it up and read it and listen to it? Yeah. So, having metadata in the document is an accessibility requirement. You know, as I mentioned earlier, the use of color and how color contrast is put into the document is a critical, critical component and a requirement of accessibility, because without it, we’re going to have, you know, other people that are going to be excluded due to the use of color.

Images that are in a document will need to have alternative text or alt text. So, if I put an image in a document, let’s say it’s a chart of my bank, you know, statement balance over the last two months, if you click on that image and there’s no alternative text, it’s basically going to say figure. And, then we don’t know what the figure is about in a screen reader. So, we’re not going to know what’s in that chart or that graph. So, alternative text is a written description of what’s the important information in that image, chart, graph that somebody needs to understand. But why was it put there? Why did I author put that chart in there? Well, I want to tell somebody what their bank balance was over the last three months. So, that alternative text is very important.

Lists in documents are typically messy when they come out of other tools. And, what a screen reader does when it encounters a list that announces a list and then it says the list has, say, five items, five bullets, and then the person can listen to each bullet within the document without that being properly defined, that list can be very confusing, and you won’t tie the bullets together that are all under a certain heading or something like that. So, it can be very confusing.

Tables are a huge issue with accessibility and when tables are not formatted properly, you know, trying to find my bank balance that’s underneath, you know, average balance for these dates and these times, it doesn’t make any sense when I’m listening to a table and I can’t find here the row headers and the row column headers and then the data that I’m listening to in a certain cell, it’s just going to be complete gibberish and it’s not going to make any sense. So, tables when they’re tagged correctly, will work fine with the screen reader and the person can navigate and find what they’re listening to and looking for.

But, when they’re not done correctly, it’s a big problem. There are then additional components that need to be tag. Let’s say there’s a decorative image in the background of the banks, you know, floral image of something that if it doesn’t have any purpose, there’s no communication, it’s not giving us any important information, it’s just a decorative image of it needs to be archived, it needs to be tagged as not tagged so that it won’t be read by a screen reader that, hey, there’s a decorative image on the background and a watermark on the back of this document. There’s no reason to do that. It just makes it confusing. And, then finally, you know, we add this stuff that you really need to then test your documents for accessibility. So, once you’ve generated all of these components, you need to be able to go in and test the documents and make sure they’re accessible. There are tools to do testing that will give you accessibility reports based on the documents.

The documents can be tested with a screen reader that can be tested by people with disabilities. There’s a number of different ways to test documents. I mean, it’s important as part of your accessibility program to do some testing so that you can ensure that the efforts you’re making are worthwhile. So, the next slide I wanted to show you is really just, you know, what the tag tree looks like in a document versus looking at the physical view of a document.
So, you know, I have this brochure up on the screen and as you can see, there’s a tag tree on the left-hand side and then you can see the physical view on the right. And you can see that I have highlighted the heading of this document and then that’s heading level one in the tag tree. So, if we were to tab through this, you know, first of all, a little bit of education on using a screen reader, somebody who’s blind, that’s using a screen reader does not use a mouse because they can’t visually, you know, move the mouse around to where they need to go on the screen.

So, when you’re blind, you use a computer completely by keyboard and the tab key becomes an important component of that because you need to be able to tab through the website or tab through a Word document or tab through a PDF to go to the various pieces of content, and then the screen reader is going to read what you’re highlighting as you scroll through it.
So, in the case of a tagged PDF, for example, this brochure, the order of these tags needs to be the proper reading order of this document. So, you know, left to right, you know, top of the bottom, you know, when you hit features, for example, in the table here, you know, the reading order should be features announced as the top of a table and then each of these bullets would then be read off as I would tab down through this list of the features of this product. That image on the right-hand side, you can decide that’s decorative, or you could decide that that is actually conveying some information, but its showing people using the CommonLook tool to make their documents accessible.

You know, let’s say I got this document and I want to go to the third page because that’s where my statement, the table content says that’s where my statement balance is. I should be able to read the table contents, go to the third page and go straight to my statement balance by being able to navigate this tag tree and not have to just listen to the entire thing top to bottom.

What a screen reader is not. It’s not something that just reads all of the text in one big stream out just to a user that’s not really usable to somebody, you know, they don’t want to listen to every single component of this document and see the different, you know, places where we have an office and less that what we’re looking for.

So, that’s how the documents work on the tag tree level on the left and then have the physical view on the right. So, for every document you create, there needs to be a corresponding tag tree that’s going to be built into the document. It’s not something it’s seen. It’s another view of the document and that’s where the accessibility is added in it.

Dave, I want to add and so for those people who are watching this, we’re going to jump in here in a second to high-volume production of documents, and I think people watching this are going to be familiar with creating regulated communications or volumes of communications for their brand in their organization that need to go out. Think about this. If you’re in the composition end or you know the people you’re going to be interfacing with, the people who are creating the documents, a lot of volume documents are created by people using keyboards. And, it’s actually something that because I’ve worked on the composition or the pre-production side where we’re creating the templates that people fill in interactively for different industries banking, health care, insurance, they have the same use case when you’re developing how to fill in a template that you’re trying to create these volume documents from because they tab, they don’t use a mouse, it’s too slow.

So, you know, try to relate why this is so important in your organization to other things people also find important, and I think you’re going to find that you have that credibility for why these solutions really need to be taken seriously in 2022. Right, Dave, that these are critically important when you’re trying to produce communications that all of your customers can interact with, with a high-degree of satisfaction and engagement.

So, that’s a perfect segue into where we’re going, Jonathan, and I’ll turn it back over to you to talk about solutions for volume produced documents.
Which is awesome because that is Solimar’s long term, we’re 31 years plus now and counting and we have traditionally focused on workflows or automated software-driven processes, templated processes that will drive high-volumes of information through production processes, whether that be print or a mixture of print and digital delivery, including making sure that things are going out to accessibility.

So, we’re going to talk about what are volume documents. In this case, we are choosing to focus on PDF because we believe that PDFs, as Dave shared from our wonderful PDF Association, that we’re also members of, that they’re the most plentiful out there in terms of structured content that we engage with, right? So, we’re not talking about HTML5 and those kinds of things because that’s not really structured printable content, but still needs to be made accessible and CommonLook has that AC360, the Accessible360 company that can help you with all of that.

So, if you’re interested in web accessibility, make sure you reach out to Dave. But, PDFs their generally when we talk about creating them in volume. So, we’re going to be talking about bank statements, let’s say mortgage statements, anything with a statement in the title, explanation of benefits or you might hear them termed EOB, offer letters, direct mail is created in high-volumes when we’re sending offers out to people, whether that be retail or financial or real estate, all kinds of things.

Education is a huge producer of high-volume because every student needs communications at every university, every high school, every school system in the world, governments, state governments, federal governments, you are getting high-volume communications whether you’ve really sat back and thought about it or not. And, generally, these are created, as I mentioned before, right Dave, by templates. We don’t have people opening a Word-like document and starting from scratch and designing the document every time the statement goes out. They’re templates, they’re regulated and they’re generally highly reviewed and QC’d so that you get something that is only yours. They’re security related to it. And, the important part of this and what you can see on the screen is that mid to large size organizations will use PDFs to do this, and they can exceed volumes of 100 million pages per year.

And, the people who are managing this have a lot of responsibilities to make sure that these things are done correctly with quality. And, now we really, really, really are trying to get people to make sure that they’re accessible, because if they’re not accessible, you have a whole portion of your population who cannot engage with your communications, which means that they may switch from your company and your brand faster. They may call into customer service driving your customer service costs up and our goal in this webinar, in this conversation with you is to let you know that there are tools on the market today that can help you put these solutions in place in a much less painful way than probably ever before in the past. And, we want a chance to talk that through with you, especially given the labor impacts we’ve seen over the last few years. We know people are strained in labor. So, leveraging your templated, automated processes is going to be really important when you look at these high-volume document markets. So, an example that I’ll pull up here for you is a statement. So, this is very specifically a SOLibank statement. It is fake. But, we designed it so that we could talk through what a credit card like statement would be. You can you can move this to an investment statement, a mortgage statement, a health bill, all sorts of things. They work very similarly. Right? They’re going to have very key information like who it’s going to, the address that is on this particular example, you’re going to see the USPS IMB barcode, which becomes a problem. If you go and look at that example that we shared, you can go look at that other webinar about inclusivity when a screen reader reads the IMB, really unfortunate to have to listen to.

But, these kinds of statements are coming every day to people. We probably get one every day, if not at least multiple times a month, because we probably have car payments and insurance payments and bank statements and all sorts of things coming to us and so these are critical to people and it’s their impression of your brand. So, that is why being able to interact with it is so important. And, if I just switch over to an accessibility automation workflow, I’ll bring up this this a visual of how you can bring this to your environment. I’m going to ask Dave to talk through some of the CommonLook interaction points here.

Jonathan before you jump into that. You know, so on a statement like the sample that we’re talking about here, there’s really two ways that can be made accessible. You can do it, you know, prior to generating the PDF or you can do it to the PDF after the PDF has been generated. It’s a great point. And typical tools that let you build the template will allow you to assign accessibility structure to the document when you do the design. So, you know, why don’t people do that and why then aren’t they just solving it at the point of creation, which is certainly an option, and there’s many reasons why that’s not taking place or if it’s taking place, it’s not being done very well. Right. Some of it is you have to be an expert in accessibility. You do have to understand the structure and what’s required to be able to generate it.

You also need to have ways to test it. But probably one of the biggest things is many organizations have thousands of templates, they’ve been generating these over time, and their systems have been built up. They’d have to go back and do you know, accessibility audits of all of their templates, redesign all of their templates and it’s just not feasible to do so. So, fortunately, there’s technologies out today that can actually do the work after the PDFs are generated.

You know those are great points Dave, because what happens is we think about going upstream to where it’s being designed and in a lot of cases like you say that that is really difficult to achieve. So, you can look at doing it in both places, right? You can do net new stuff with new kinds of focus on accessibility. But then, as you say, an organization may have thousands of templates that are even regulated that in order to change them, they would have to get more approval. But, because those are being delivered appropriately through print and mail, you can then deliver the alternative format in an electronic version. You may not be able to save the print, in a lot of cases you can, but in some organizations, we know you can’t because that’s the record, the official delivery of their statement. But, then you can you can do these thoughtful deliveries of electronic accessibility, PDF, accessible PDF, and you can do so in a less painful way today with automation. So, if we bring up the workflow here, think about standardizing on PDF. So, whether your environment prints PDF or not today we can help you get there.

Just know that we won’t cover how we do that a lot today, but we can do it, and that’s part of a Solimar 31 year history and counting, which we’re very proud of. But, if you look at this, once you’re in that PDF format, when you’re going to print, you need to know what your intention is. And, so that’s one of the other reasons, right Dave, that it’s hard to go up to composition and say, oh, we’ll put all of this into the templates you’re creating up in pre-production in the composition area where you’re creating all the documents and templates. Well, those designers don’t necessarily know if that file is going to go to the printer or to the electronic or both. And, when you’re a production manager, you don’t want a lot of that content that’s in the accessibility side coming through your print device, because it slows it down, it makes things a little less manageable. It can cause problems.
So, what you need is an interface, an intermediate system. We call it middleware, we call it post-composition in our world at Solimar, but what it does is it sits between the system that’s creating the PDFs or the output, the composition, the pre-production. Once you get to your production system, then you need to look at this kind of accessibility automation that we have on the screen.

So, you have your PDF file. It may come in to a Chemistry solution, which is our platform. We’re going to pick it up with automation. So, if you don’t need to know the names of all these things in that Chemistry box, but know what happens is that we take a templated, rules-driven approach to making sure that documents with specific intentions go through your workflow the way you want. And, so in this case, what we’re showing is that a PDF file could go to our automation engine. We could have rules flagged based on the customer preference that it needs to be made accessible. At Solimar, we have the ability to do basic tagging, right Dave? We can use our Accessibility Engine to make sure that tag tree that Dave showed earlier is there, and we can re-engineer that document as needed to make sure that certain things like logos and metadata and stuff are inserted where it needs to be. But, that doesn’t mean that is being validated. So, Dave, talk us through the lower half of where our system within, through APIs and technology, pass that information over to the CommonLook system and be able to really make sure that we’re doing the right things.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, there’s a number of different components of the accessibility journey, so to speak, of the document that we’ve addressed through the various API tools that we’ve developed. So, so one is just to do testing. You’re getting documents that are coming in from different sources and you want to be able to test them for accessibility. If they pass, they can then be digitally delivered to the next stage of the workflow. If they fail, then you maybe are going to want to run them through an accessibility tool to add the accessibility work before you move on with the document. So, we have a tool called Clarity that would be interfaced into the workflow here and could be called upon to test files and flag them for pass/fail, and then based on that, that could become part of the workflow. The second side of it is you may have in your, you know, electronic delivery journey, the ability for your clients to opt for alternative formats. You see this very often in banking and in other industries where I can opt for a Braille version of my statement or I can opt for a large print or an audio version.

So, in that case, you’re not going to electronically deliver. You know, you can’t electronically deliver a PDF as Braille because it has to be printed on a Braille printer. So, we have the ability to offload those statements and those documents through a very secure connection that’s, we’re PCI compliant so we can build an interface to retrieve those documents and then have them printed in Braille and then sent to the client or delivered back to the organization to send to their client. So, we can do this through various different methods to provide alternative formats. But, then finally, let’s just say it’s going to stay as PDF and it’s going to be delivered to a portal for the clients to retrieve their statement from this month, last month, month before all as an accessible PDF and we have an AI-based tool that can be called upon via API. So, let’s say the file comes in, it’s tested for accessibility, it fails, it now needs to go to the AI engine. The AI engine would be built to be able to process the various formats of the statements and then add all the accessibility tagging, do the verification, and then set the file on its journey to continue through the workflow. So, with something like this, you don’t have to start with accessible documents. You can keep all your existing workflow design templates as they sit today, and they can leverage this technology to do the work on the fly or do the work in batches, and then they can be delivered to that storage archive or eDelivery portal or you know, or you know, many cases that are going to be printed, they don’t need the accessibility added so you can also divvy it off in that direction. So, the beauty of all this is it can be tightly integrated into your existing system. You don’t have to change your systems. The only thing that’s going to deviate here is as when do you flag files to send to these systems to be able to do some additional processing and then continue on?

And, I think that’s the key, is that you can start in different ways that make sense for your organization. You don’t have to do a rip and replace. Both CommonLook and Solimar Systems believe in modularity, right Dave? We believe in the most important thing is to get started, to start to create a path for your customers to be able to interact with your statements. And, we can give you multiple ways. I love when you said AI, I just want to make sure everybody understands we are talking about artificial intelligence there and that’s so important. One of the things that I’ve learned from Dave over presenting with him over the last couple of years now is that it is so important because it learns as it goes.

So, you’re starting at a certain spot, and then as your documents continue to be learned by the system, you can continue to let it get smarter and smarter to be able to handle those exception files. And, that’s a technology that’s still relatively new on the market. And, as far as I’m aware, CommonLook really has the cornerstone of the artificial intelligence side of this accessibility with PDFs. And, it’s one of the reasons we like to hand off to them as a partner because they are so focused on the quality of their accessibility. As I said, we can put that tag tree in, but what Dave said is you got to have expertise, right? You’ve got to have people that can still do that manual checking for you, do some QC, make sure that the automated workflows are producing what you want and that Clarity validator and the AI engine, that’s a key component of making sure that you have a functional long-term workflow, right Dave?
Now there’s no question, and you know, the term AI is tossed around there by pretty much everybody nowadays. Everything’s AI-driven. You know, the robot vacuuming your floor is AI-driven. I mean, that’s kind of how all this has gotten. But, you know, the differentiate artificial intelligence from machine learning, there are some tools out there to tag PDFs that are basically written around doing machine learning, basically algorithms basically, this is the rule for this, do this when you encounter this, do this, and that will get you to a certain point, but it won’t get you completely there. And, there’s a lot of reasons for that, but it’s very hard to come up with a fixed set of rules for PDF documents because PDF documents are incredibly complex, a lot of information stored in them, and when you’re using just machine learning and machine algorithms written to do fixed functions, you’re very quickly run out of solutions for problems and you create more problems along the way.

Our AI tools is in its second generation and the first generation, it was very much machine learning. It was very much those algorithms and those rules. We realized that was not going to be correct for the market and that’s when we went to our deep neural learning AI tool where we actually would take these statements and we remediate them for accessibility to our standards-driven level, and then that’s what we teach the tool. The tool would take your statements and samples of your statements, and then it’s taught the deviations. It’s taught what to do when you encounter this, and then you know how to correctly tag that. So, that once a tool is taught and then it continues to learn, it’s pretty amazing what the results can be.
Well, Dave, I think that’s a perfect segue way to giving them some steps to achieve this. I’m going to let you take the lead here and lead us through the ways that you look at this from, you know, standards compliance all the way through how to get started. And, I’ll just give you some color commentary as needed.

Very good. So, the first step is really around testing your files for standards compliance. You know, right now you’re generating output and you’re sending these volume documents likely to your client or moving to, or if you haven’t already moved, you’re moving towards electronic delivery. So, you should take and pull some of your sample statements and test them for accessibility. So, how do you do that? Well, you know, the best way to do it would be to take a screen reader and actually listen to the document like we did in that previous recording, as we showed examples of. But, you know, short of that, there’s free tools that you can download to do your testing. There’s a tool called PAC3 that’s freely available to download. CommonLook has our own tool called Validator and it will actually test the documents to multiple standards. So, let’s say you’re Health and Human Services requirements. You have to meet HHS requirements for accessibility. We can test against HHS or if it’s WCAG 2.1 AA, we can test against WCAG 2.1 or PDF UA, which is very common ISO standard for accessibility.

So, you know, if you don’t know where you sit today, it’s a good idea to download a couple of your statements, run them against one of these tools. They’ll generate accessibility reports that will list out what’s good and what’s bad and what needs to be fixed to ensure your documents are accessible. So, that’s the first step is doing testing. So, you know, as I talked earlier about accessibility tools, you know, the PAC3 and the CommonLook tool, automated tools will only get you so far, I mean, they’re going to test for is there heading levels is there a reading order that appears to be correct. You know, is there images that have alt text descriptions and things like that? You can also download NVDA, which is a free screen reader, and that tool is something that you can install on a computer and then actually listen to the document and see what that user experience is. So, that’s another good testing tool to consider, and it also doesn’t have any cost, which is great.

So, the second component of this is, you know, you need to look at where are you going to fix the accessibility issues. What are you going to look at? What’s the best solution? So, we have, you know, that pre-production, you know, which is at the template level. So, when we looked at that Solimar SOLibank statement sample that we generated, that was generated from a template.

So, you know, do we want to fix the accessibility at the template level? Does the tool support tagging, which most of them do? I think they all do at this point. But then, you know, do we have the knowledge to go in and say, we ran those accessibility reports and we looked at those reports and we can see that we’re not using the proper heading levels and we’re not using defining list properly and we’re doing much other things not correct.
You know, do we want to go in pre-production and change the template and then do the testing again to test the results and then see what we’re seeing or listening to in case of a screen reader and make those changes? Or, do we just have too many templates and it’s going to be too much work or effort to fix it at that level? And, we want to look at a post-production solution, which is more along the lines about the AI tool we talked about, where you’ve already done your workflow, you’ve already generated the PDFs, they’re now coming downstream to go to printing or go to archiving or go to eDelivery through a portal. And, if that’s going to be your workflow, there’s the opportunity to insert accessibility before they’re actually delivered to the client.
And, I think that the one thing I just want to interject real quick here is, you know, you might hear it called pre-production or composition, depending on what department you’re talking to. Post-production might also be called post-composition, depending on who you’re talking to. So, make sure you’re listening for these terms so that you can relate to the people who are in the terms that they know and that you can be the arbiter of bringing accessibility across these various departments, because you will cross multiple departments as you’re trying to figure out how to insert accessibility. And, to Dave’s point, when you look at doing it pre-production or in that composition area where the templates are being generated by a system, think about what happens when it gets down to your production floor, your environment, where the production manager is making the decisions or tools or making the decisions. You might have to think about using a tool like Solimar to then remove some of that accessibility if you do it at the template level because you don’t want it to go through your printer. So, there’s a lot of things that we can help you with as you look at this. And, I think Dave is a pretty consultative guy and he’s got a lot of great people on his team. You can talk to CommonLook and they’ll be able to pull people like me and to help you understand the decision points.

And, that might change, Dave, where you want to do it. You might want to do as I said, you might want to do specific things because you have data-driven splits only going to electronic delivery out of your composition system. Maybe that’s a great place to start bringing the tagging upstream, but for stuff that you’re not sure of or where you have to deliver both, you might want to do it down in the post-production, post-composition area because it is more flexible, it’s more achievable and it’s more cost effective. So, we really do want to be consultative with you so that you get the best environment for your delivery needs, for your customers.

There’s definitely not a one size fits all here. And, you know, from an accessibility standpoint, sure, it’s great if you can add the accessibility at the time of creation of the document, you know, through the template, that that all sounds fine. But again, that might not fit your work environment for the reasons that Jonathan has laid out here. It makes perfect sense. On the post-production side or post-composition side, there’s really only two solutions you can do. There’s some auto tagging tools on the market that will add tags to the document. Many cases they don’t get you 100% compliance, and you may need to do some manual touch-up and remediation of the output that comes out of those tools.

You know, because of the high volumes that we’re talking about. I mean, we talk to banks all the time and the 100 million files, a million pages is almost, you know, it’s the standard number. I mean, that’s how much volume of these documents is generated on an annual basis. So, many times It just does not become practical to be able to do so. There’s too many templates and the volumes are so high you can’t do any manual touch-up, you can’t do any manual remediation. This all has to be automated. And, so if you’re going to do this through automation, you’re going to want to use a tool that can allow you to add the accessibility, do the testing, and generate the documents at the volume levels that you’re looking for to move this in the right direction.
So, the third thing to talk about here or to consider is your volume. You know, I mean, if your volume is very low, there’s not going to be a lot of reasons to add an automation solution. You can pull those documents out. They could be manually remediated, which is another process to add accessibility tagging. They’re basically very similar, like we would do with Braille. You would pull the documents that somebody has requested as accessible, and they would be tagged by accessibility remediation people, and then tested, and then delivered back into the stream, and then delivered to the clients. But, if you’ve got automation solutions that are generating high volumes, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of documents, maybe millions of pages of documents, automation is going to be almost your only solution.

And, you know, it’s critical that you find a solution that can do this and keep up with your volume considerations. So, then the fourth thing is, is putting this into production. You know, so many organizations we talk to have this on their radar. To give you a kind of a, you know, without mentioning client names, we’re very active in the healthcare business market of many, many, many clients that do healthcare insurance and know the government has dictated to them during open enrollment, these are the documents, these are the forms, this is the layout of everything. They have to use their cookie-cutter documents that come from Medicare or Medicaid or whichever organization is that drives that. So, they made those documents accessible. They have processes for making sure those documents are accessible to everyone. But, when we talk to those organizations, when we start talking about, well, your directories or some of the other documents that maybe are changed all the time as new doctors are added to the services and things like that. And, we talk to them about automation, they’re like, well, that’s on our radar. It’s something we know we need to do, but we just haven’t gotten to it yet. But, we do know we need to do it. And, you know, I mean, there’s no such thing as partial accessibility. It doesn’t work. I mean, if I’m blind and I can, you know, sign up for my insurance and I can get my policy, you know, as accessible and I can get my explanation of benefits as accessible, but now I can’t get my statement, you know, or my bill as accessible, now there’s a barrier. Now I can’t do business with you or I can’t interact with you because I can’t understand it, because I can’t read it, can’t hear it. So, you need to look at these other systems and the time is now to really start finding out and determining how we can automate and add accessibility into these production systems.

So, it can be added into the workflow. It can be not disruptive. It can be integrated in through API calls and, you know, partners that we’re working with like Solimar are ideal for this because as Jonathan said earlier, you know, having that middleware, being able to take what has been produced by your system, that’s a PDF and now being able to do some manipulation to including adding accessibility before it’s delivered to continue on through your workflow is critical, and we just add the accessibility piece. So, you know, we need to work with companies like Solimar that can help the clients solve their business problems using the tools that they have. And, then the last thing to consider, because we’re seeing organizations that are moving to accessibility, you need to find a way, you know, if you’re going to be truly inclusive to everyone, you know, you need to think beyond just accessible PDFs and have a way for clients, just like you have clients that can opt-in for I don’t want my statement mailed to me anymore, I want to opt-in for electronic delivery, you need to have a way for your clients to opt-in for alternative formats. You know, accessible PDF is great, it works with the screen reader, works with other assistive technologies. But you know, if somebody uses Braille and they don’t have an electronic device, they need to know they’re going to get a printed piece of paper, but they need theirs in Braille, not printed because they don’t use a computer, for example, you need to have a way to be able to send your statement to them for the handful of people that are going to request it. It’s all part of customer service. The same thing with large print. You know, I got my readers as I laughed about earlier, but, you know, you don’t have readers and you need large print to be able to read it, you need to have a way for people to be able to ask for these alternative formats, for their documents as a customer service, as an accessibility feature, as an ADA requirement. These are all important ways to improve the customer experience and to offer the best customer experience to your clients.

I totally agree, Dave. I think that getting started, the number four and five are so, so important. You know, don’t let time or the day-to-day get in the way of offering it because it is so important to the customer experience and we know that there’s a huge focus on that. That people will switch brands based on their experience. But, also you incur a lot of costs if you don’t have ways that people can easily interact with your communications. So, you’re going to see people calling in or the family members of people calling in, which is a whole other problem based on some privacy laws.

So, you really do want to try to solve these problems. And, we are here to help because we’re doing this as an on-demand webinar. We can’t really take your questions, but we will. If you email us, we’d love for you to get in touch with Dave or I. We’re happy to answer any questions. We really play the role in our organizations of market educators, of solution facilitators. And, as you get more interested, we can get you to team members that can give you more details, right Dave? But, we’re here to provide education, to provide information to help prove to the market that this is achievable today, that it’s easier than ever. And. one final thing I’d like to offer just as we wrap up, Dave, is that, you know, we also talk about in some of our other webinars that you have to plan for the cost of this. This is a true experience that someone’s going to have. So, it isn’t free. And, just like postage and envelopes and paper and ink, if you turn off the print to deliver the accessible PDF, you want to make sure that you’re not just assuming you’re saving that money, that you’re, you’re making sure you’re investing in the accessibility because it’s important to the experience. So, I always like to mention that, Dave, I’m sure you have a couple of thoughts on that because it’s important that this is for the benefit of the customer, but it’s also something you have to invest in.

It really is. I mean, I know they say that the cost, I mean, you lose a customer, you know, the cost to find a replacement customer is a high cost in any business. So, you don’t want to have customer attrition. So, you to find ways to make sure you keep the customer experience the best that it can be. And, in providing accessible content and making that client experience the best that it can be, this is, you know, this is all necessary to be able to do.
And, some other ways that you can think about, once you find the way to put these solutions in place, people like Solimar can help you do things like put QR codes on your printed statements that let people know that they can easily opt-in to these accessible PDFs. You can create a true brand statement about it with your marketing teams once you have it all in place, once you’re confident of the process. And, that just goes even further to drive the importance of it, right? It shows that your brand is inclusive. And, so we can help you with all of that. We can help you add things to messaging, to the print, to then drive people to the accessible, and we’re excited to offer this with our partner CommonLook.

So, hope you’ll reach out to us. Dave, I want to thank you for your time. I Know we’ve done this presentation live at different events like the CSUN event for accessibility, and we will continue to do so. But, it is so great to make sure that this is available whenever someone has time to interact with it. So, thank you so much.

Thank you, Jonathan. And, we love working with Solimar and we’re excited for where this is going in the world of accessibility because we’re seeing more and more companies adopt this every day.

Well, with that, we will end our webinar for today and we hope you reach out to us. And, just remember, accessibility is inclusivity, so we will hopefully talk to you soon. Thank you, everybody.