Accessible High-Volume PDFs: A need waiting for a technology answer

As the population ages, accessibility has been an increasingly prevalent concern. To date the focus has largely been on addressing physical access to buildings, devices or equipment. More recently however, the accessibility challenge has made its way to the realm of electronic communications, in particular the needs of visually impaired and disabled users when navigating websites and online documents.

Although Government mandates exist for the public sector, there are no enforceable legislative requirements for private sector dictating document accessibility for the visually impaired. That is expected to change in the near future. A number of organizations are already extensively involved in developing standards for online delivery, and it is only a matter of time before legislation will be in place to demand that websites and online documents be accessible to this ever-growing sector of the population.

Most financial services firms already provide information via large-print or Braille statements on demand. This is typically done through outsourced document accessibility services. While this may be an acceptable short-term approach, it poses risks, only addresses very limited volumes, and creates additional and growing costs over time.

Specialized statements can take up to an additional 48 hours to process, while tagging individual PDF files to work with assistive technologies can take up to four hours or more per document or more. This is hardly a tenable proposition for large volume producers such as financial institutions, where monthly demand for accessible documents is well into the thousands, and continues to grow. By way of example, assuming that 1% of a financial institution's 2.5 million customers have a visual impairment, it would have approximately 25,000 users that require accessibility services, and would have to generate over 2 million accessible documents a year (based on one statement per month per client).

Technology specifically designed for large volume applications will play an integral role in ensuring that financial institutions can cost-effectively and efficiently meet future regulatory requirements as well as the needs of customers with disabilities over the long term. These needs will only become more pressing as the numbers of visually impaired and disabled customers grow.

Seeing the numbers

There are numerous studies on the state of vision loss in today's aging population. For example, approximately 3.3 million Americans over the age of 40 are blind or have low-vision - a number that will surpass 5 million within the next decade. In addition, over 21 million Americans have profound visual impairments that require large print documents; every seven minutes someone in America becomes blind or visually-impaired. For Canadian's in 2008, the cost of vision-loss related to loss of employment and productivity was over $4 billion. In the UK, 4% of the population has vision-related problems. Given that a vast majority of these individuals have bank accounts, credit cards and savings in various investment vehicles that require monthly statements, it is essential that they have the ability to access information and/or purchase products and services.

Many of these visually impaired individuals use assistive technologies to access information on a computer. These range from screen readers, which read documents out loud, to text-only browsers and websites to Braille printers. In order for these devices to work, documents and websites have to be built with accessibility in mind.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed guidelines for technology products called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These state that websites, software products and electronic documents should be built to work with assistive technologies. In the case of PDF files, pictures need alternate text and read order has to be defined, along with any special tables, forms and language selection.

Despite the fact that PDF is the most commonly used document format in electronic statement presentment, it has presented one of the most problematic accessibility issues. This is in large part due to the historical lack of common standards and the fact that many PDF export programs do not currently support a tagged PDF format.

A number of organizations, such as the PDF/UA working group, have been working with vendors and standards bodies to outline the appropriate tagging requirements. These include:

• Read order - Financial statements are generally not read in a typical left to right format. Information such as account numbers, overdue notices and charts can interfere with a reader's ability to clearly state the contents in an appropriate order that is useful to the consumer.
• Language specification - Tags should tie to the screen reader to allow it to revert to the appropriate language.
• Alternate text - Links, logos and graphics make it challenging for standard readers to interpret. In some cases, they will read lengthy details on links (narrating them character by character). A PDF should be tagged to provide alternate text that is useful to the user.
• Tables - Tables and graphs can present major challenges for readers, since they do not understand how to read and interpret boxes and charts. The right tagging will notify readers of the fact that information is presented in rows and columns so it can be properly delivered.

A technology proposition

Adapting PDF tagging for accessibility is not as daunting a proposition as organizations with large volume requirements may think. A server-based, on-demand technology approach can be applied to enable PDF migration that does not require an infrastructure overhaul or costly outsourcing. By enabling all documents to be accessible on demand, financial institutions can easily and effectively keep pace with customer needs, regardless of their disability.

A server-based accessibility solution enables organizations to capture data from high-volume print streams and transform it into accessible PDFs for the visually impaired. Creating accessible documents from the print stream stage offers a number of measurable benefits. First, it addresses the challenge of regulatory compliance for blind and low-vision customers by automating the creation of accessible PDFs without having to contract to outsourcers. It also allows organizations to address an ever-growing need to service an underserved portion of its customer base, while offering a competitive advantage over other providers. Finally, enabling data transformation on demand is a highly scalable approach, since any document can be made accessible to any user, without the need to significantly increase storage requirements or manage separate systems or processes. What's more, the visually-impaired and disabled communities look for inclusionary processes that treat them the same as everyone else, without having to be recognized as someone with a "disability".

Accessibility should be part of the planning process for financial institutions moving forward, especially given the trend towards increased regulations and enforcement. It is important for financial institutions to not be overwhelmed by the perceived complexities and challenges when addressing accessibility strategies, and delay taking action. There are viable, easy to deploy and cost-effective accessibility solutions that can work with existing technologies to address any high-volume document requirements.