Automating PDF Accessibility for Thousands of Customer Documents

Brokers sued over accessibility

Digital accessibility lawsuits can happen to any company. Banking giants like Morgan Stanley and TD Ameritrade both faced lawsuits due to inaccessible digital content.  The plaintiffs, who are blind, were unable to access their digital account information and statements using their screen-reading technology.  Morgan Stanley was even sued twice, for a total of more than $10 million. TD Ameritrade settled with their plaintiff for an undisclosed amount including attorney costs. These lawsuits can be avoided- and customers can have a better experience- with accessible digital content.

PDF documents must be accessible, too

It is imperative that all digital content, especially account information, be accessible to all consumers. That information is often provided in PDF format. Many institutions produce thousands of PDF documents for their consumers every month in the form of billing statements, financial reports,  explanations of benefits, physicians directories and more. Remediating every PDF to make them accessible for thousands or even millions of clients can be time-consuming, costly, and require ADA compliance expertise. 

Automate PDF accessibility instead of outsourcing

Because of the immense volume, some companies outsource PDF accessibility because they don’t have the time or resources to tackle it in-house. The manual work required to tag thousands of PDFs is time consuming, expensive, and inefficient. And the risk of human error still leaves the company at risk for lawsuits. An automated solution could remove the need to outsource the project. Equidox makes that automation possible. Our high-volume solution is custom-built to automatically tag your templated, high volume documents for accessibility. Keeping PDF accessibility in-house gives you more control over project timeline, budget, and quality by removing manual remediation work.

Equidox High Volume Solution automates accessibility

David Freelan, Equidox’s Artificial Intelligence Developer, says, “We currently have the ability to detect specific headings and text in repetitive, large volume documents as part of our automated high-volume PDF accessibility  technology. It is effective for documents with predictable, repetitive elements.  These might include bank statements, insurance claims summaries, statements of benefits, provider directories, utility statements, billing and customer data reports.”

Equidox developers use artificial intelligence to build a custom solution for your high-volume documents.  The process produces documents that are accessible and 508 and ADA compliant for all consumers.

Analyze, Format, Output

Using artificial intelligence and secure servers, our developers analyze the format of your reports , statements, directories, or any other templatized document..  This includes headings, tables, and repeated elements. Once analyzed, the solution is “trained” to properly tag every subsequent document so that assistive technology such as screen readers can understand the data being read.  All reports can be output securely and ready for publication and distribution. .  

You Can’t Afford Not to Make Your Reports Accessible

2022 was another record year for accessibility lawsuits. With more than 3200 digital accessibility cases filed, you can’t afford not to take steps to protect your organization, and you can’t afford to lose customers who cannot access their information. Avoid the damage to your reputation and a lengthy and costly legal battle. 

Have 30 minutes? Call us at 216-529-3030 or contact us to schedule a time to discuss how Equidox can automate your project to make PDF accessibility more efficient.

Tammy Albee

Tammy Albee | Director of Marketing | Equidox Tammy joined Equidox after four years of experience working at the National Federation of the Blind. She firmly maintains that accessibility is about reaching everyone, regardless of ability, and boosting your market share in the process. "Nobody should be barred from accessing information. It's what drives our modern society."