PDF documents are no good, bad and evil things. Unfortunately, they are still necessary evils that many of us encounter in our daily travels. But as cruel as they are to use, they can be even more difficult to inclusively create. Dennis Quon, Director of Document Accessibility Solutions for Crawford Technologies, took a moment on the Exhibit Hall floor to explain to J.J. that the process of making compliant PDFs can be made less stressful and nearly instantaneous by using services through Crawford Technologies' web portal. Dennis outlines the steps their web based software takes to scan, recommend or make changes to uploaded materials that can make them easier to use by more readers. Listen in, or read the transcript below, to hear how artificial intelligence is taming this task. To learn more, and try the service for yourself, visit the Crawford Technology website
ATIA 2019 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit www.afb.org/aw.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
From beautiful Orlando, Florida, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of ATIA 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology; book reviews; and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free monthly online technology magazine. www.AFB.org/AW.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh
J.J. MEDDAUGH: Down here at the Exhibit Hall, ATIA 2019. I found Dennis Quon. He is the director of Document Accessibility Services at Crawford Technologies. Did I get the title right?
DENNIS QUON: Solutions or services. It’s all good.
JM: Solutions, services –
DQ: It’s all good. It’s all good.
JM: I had the letters, you know. Well, you have solutions, and the solution is mostly a service, so go ahead and tell us a little bit about what you have.
DQ: So yeah. So we’ve enabled an eCommerce tool to do document accessibility, taking PDF files to accessible PDF or HTML5. We’ve democratized it to enable anyone from, you know, somebody who needs a document today and done really quickly to upload it, pay for it, and receive it back virtually in minutes. And then, of course, they can have it fully QC’d because, as we all know, when you’re doing document accessibility, there are a number of things that you have to check for: Read order, contrast, alt text and so on as well. So this service allows anybody out there that has an internet connection to upload that document and make sure it’s inclusive.
JM: So there are certain things that your software could do automatically versus needing that human element. So like, what are some of the automatic things that you could figure out?
DQ: So as long as the document has good structure to it – when we’re talking about a published document, we’ll tag the headers, the P tags, the paragraphs, the – tables as well. When it gets to complex tables, we have to go back and look at those as well. But certainly, things like lists and so on, that’s all taken care of. Really, what we’re capable of doing is quickly doing a document up to anywhere from 70 to 90 percent accurate, and then the balance is done in QA and QC.
JM: Of course, this would work – it has to be a document that is already OCR’d correctly or already has text in it; right? It’s not going to be able to --
DQ: Yeah.
JM: -- image PDF?
DQ: Absolutely. The neat thing is within the next few weeks, we’ll have an OCR engine built into the eCommerce tool itself so that it will actually OCR those documents and then tag it as well. But, you know, it’s only as good as how good those documents are going to be.
JM: So how do you impress upon people, governments, et cetera, that this is a great tool? This is also a great starting point. You can’t just upload this and assume compliance.
DQ: Well, that’s a good point. I mean, a lot of organizations, they are trying to train everybody in their organizations to do accessibility tagging; right? With this tool -- really allows anybody to upload without getting that training so it becomes more inclusive and available to more people. But at the same token, because now, you’re only focused on doing the QA and QC on the back end, you can get a fully compliant document at the back end so that you don’t have to worry about training or getting those resources to get it done.
JM: So the company could choose to do their own QC, or you offer that as a service as well?
DQ: Both, actually. And we have a lot of customers that ask us to do the QC while they still have their own internal staff that’ll also take care of it.
JM: Do you see this as a tool that a blind person or someone who might need this, a document, accessible, they could upload it and help, you know, make it accessible enough so you could use it yourself?
DQ: We definitely scoped it that way. We made the site fully accessible for anybody who is blind, partially sighted or have a cognitive disability to upload.
JM: What’s the price per page, or how does that work?
DQ: Well, it all depends on the complexity, but at the highest point, it’s $5 a page, essentially. With fully QC, it’s seven fifty. But for those that have lots of volume, we can always chat and have a lower price.
JM: You say highest complexity. So how does that work? I upload a document –
DQ: Yeah.
JM: -- and then we’ll – an algorithm can figure out how complex it is, or how does that work?
DQ: Yeah, well, essentially, it is going to be $5 a page for that accessibility, and we do use heuristic algorithms that’s going to look through the whole document. If it’s poorly formatted, obviously, we can’t do too much, and we’ll call you back and say, yeah. It doesn’t have anything that we can tag onto. So that’s a situation where, you know, it’s going to be a pitfall.
JM: If I upload a document and you recognize right away that it’s not going to work, are you just going to say, we’re not going to charge you for this one, or how does that work?
DQ: Well, we’ll usually inform you that this document is not in the proper format. We’ll probably need to go to manual remediation at that point and give you another quote on how best to attack it.
JM: But the system itself is automatic, so I could upload it at 3 in the morning and it’ll work, or --
DQ: You could. Yeah. Absolutely.
JM: Obviously, the QC probably isn’t happening at 3 in the morning.
DQ: No. The QC takes a bit longer, but, you know, it’s going to grab any document, it’s going to go through it, it’s going to give you back that information. So if you give us a document that’s really, really poorly formatted and so on, it’ll still give it back to you, but it may only hit, you know, 20 percent.
JM: How are you working -- one of the biggest areas -- I noticed -- problems with PDFs is dealing with forms and unlabeled controls and things like that.
DQ: So forms and interactive type documents are not part of this. They have to be done using our manual tech capabilities as well.
JM: Okay. I know there’s two types of – you have forms where there’s edit boxes that you can fill in, but then they aren’t tagged –
DQ: Yeah.
JM: -- and then you have ones that are completely not – you know, they haven’t even bothered to make any of that accessible.
DQ: Absolutely. So we try not to distinguish, but we just simply say, unless you flattened out your document on those forms, we can’t deal with it. We have to do it manually.
JM: Okay. So you could generate the output in either PDF or HTML5, or –
DQ: Yeah.
JM: Do you just choose that when you upload it?
DQ: Right now, we have it set for just PDF at this point. It is enabled for HTML, but we haven’t given users those options yet.
JM: Something that might come in the future.
DQ: Yes, it will. Absolutely.
JM: Okay. So how does it work? If I wanted to sign up, can I get an account? Can I get, like, a demo page to see how it works, or –
DQ: Yeah. Absolutely. So when you log into accessiblynow.com, you can sign up and put all your information into it. It’s fully PCI and secure. And you can navigate through the whole site. And only at the end, it’ll ask you to sign up, actually.
JM: Okay. Is there a way to get – to try it out first, or –
DQ: Yeah. Absolutely. You would contact us. There is an 1800 number here, or you can Email us through the site. It would be easier.
JM: Feel free to give that phone number and Email if you like.
DQ: That information is –
JM: As we track it down.
DQ: Yeah. Down here. The 1800 number is 1833-ACSnow1. So –
JM: (1-833) 227-6691. All right.
DQ: Yeah. Thank you.
JM: And you say you have an Email as well?
DQ: To request more information, there is a form that you can fill out here or just simply send it to my Email address at dquon@crawfordtech.com.
JM: Great. Thank you so much for sharing this. We really appreciate it.
DQ: My pleasure, JJ. Have a great show.
JM: Thanks.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
