Okay, so, it's just about two o'clock I'm showing on my clock here so, let's get started.
Thank you everyone for joining us today for another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesday.
Today we're going to be talking about Getting it Done: the options that you have for PDF
accessibility. We realize that there's a lot of organizations of different sizes and different
verticals, with all kinds of different needs and limitations… Whether that be your budget,
your staff size, the deadlines that you have, or maybe just your general, you know,
sort of technical expertise when it comes to digital accessibility. So, the Equidox team, we
offer a lot of different options for helping you and your organization kind of work through these
challenges when it comes to digital accessibility. So, we want to make sure that everyone's aware
of all of these different options that you have, and how we can kind of tailor
some of these different options for you to best serve your organization and all of your needs. So,
just as always, to mention if you'd like to reach out to us directly feel free to
at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com. Our website is www.Equidox.c. You'll also be able to find
a lot of other webinar recordings from different topics that we've covered over the months at that
website. And like I said feel free to reach out to any existing contacts that you have here if
you have any questions, or if you'd like to see a specific demo or have a more tailored discussion
around your organization and your needs. Please feel free to reach out to us at any time.
So, before we begin, I just want to briefly introduce our parent company which is Onix. So,
Onix is a cloud consultancy that's most notable for our long-standing partnership with Google,
and Equidox is the software product that is owned and developed by Onix.
(sorry about that I just jumped on it)
(I'm sorry I was getting some feedback there from someone else) But so,
Equidox is a software product that is owned and developed by Onix. We also have a lot of
other professional services that are based mainly around PDF accessibility, and our
mission is to ensure that digital information reaches everyone via accessibility solutions.
(Whoever's talking can you please mute yourself? I'm not sure who the panelist is that's talking)
Okay, so, sorry about that. So, just to mention a few of our clients. We work
with notable names of different sizes and across all of the major verticals... and in education,
government, and enterprise. So, the same sort of concept applies to the organizations who deal
with accessibility challenges, regardless of the size or the vertical that your organization is in.
There are steps that need to be taken to ensure that the content that you are
distributing is accessible to everyone. So, just keep that in mind as we work through
this slide deck today, as you know accessibility is not going anywhere, and it's definitely
something that all organizations need to be focused on moving forward.
Okay, so, I just wanna… Let's just lay some groundwork here and talk a little bit about the
laws. And the laws can vary depending on where you are located. So, in these laws,
these digital accessibility laws, they do apply to your websites, to your mobile applications,
and of course to the documents that you have posted to those websites and applications.
So, these are a list, here, a short list of the most commonly referred to federal laws.
But also, keep in mind that additional state and provincial laws can apply, depending on where
you're located or where you are conducting your business. So, for example, if you're a
California-based company, but you conduct business in Canada, well, federal law, California law,
and Canadian law can all apply to you. So, but the good thing is that many of these laws do refer to
the same set of standards, which is most commonly WCAG 2.0 AA. So, it's just best to familiarize
yourself with these laws and how they apply to you in your organization. And also, making sure
that you're aware of the standards that you need to meet, and what are some of those standards
that are going to be changing up coming on the horizon. So, just making sure that you're aware
of what laws are applicable to your organization and the steps that you need to be taking to make
sure that you are meeting or exceeding all of these standards that those laws are referring to.
Okay, so, now that we have we've established the laws that we are referring to, and all of
the litigation that all these organizations are trying to avoid, of course, the next thing I want
to do is mention a couple of different approaches for addressing PDF remediation as it pertains
to those laws. So, depending on a number of factors, as I mentioned on the very first slide,
which could be a combination of the staff that you have available, and the bandwidth that they have,
the time (if you have very strict deadlines that you need to adhere to),
the technical know-how of your staff... You know, does your team have any sort of experience in
digital accessibility? Do they need to go through different training boot camps to get up to speed?
And also, another important factor is the budget that you need to be aware of. So, I'll go into
more detail in upcoming slides about each of these bullet points, and the different approaches
that are listed here, and kind of how Equidox specializes in each of these different areas.
Okay, so, slide six here. So, just about every organization in every vertical is generating PDFs
or they do have in many cases legacy PDFs that are sitting in a backlog from the previous years.
So, we have experience working, again, with all of these different types of verticals.
And really it's important to keep in mind that, as far as we're concerned, a document is a document.
They can of course come from different sources, be of different levels of quality and complexity,
but regardless of where that document came from, which vertical, and what the content of
that document is, we can find a way to make it accessible so that it does in fact comply with
the WCAG 2.0 AA standards. As I mentioned before, just one of the main verticals that we work with
in a use case that may be pertinent for people on this call today.
So, government agencies. Government agencies have a tendency to generate a truly staggering amount
of PDF documents. And many of these documents are intended to be part of public record and to stay
in circulation for a very long time. So, in many cases, taking the approach of, you know, a couple
of dedicated experts that are in that specific government agency going through each individual
document one-by-one, one page at a time… This is a pretty unsustainable model. There are far too many
documents being produced on a daily basis to be able to keep up with that sort of demand. So, many
times when we're working with government agencies, we would offer a combination of both software
services as well as templated solutions for the more repetitive type of documents.
So, we'll get into a little bit more... a couple more use cases for that as we move forward.
Now another vertical that we work with a lot is education. So, higher ed
education institutions in particular also tend to generate massive amounts of documents.
So, these documents can be a number of different things. Course content for example… So, documents
that are intended for use in the classroom, you know, syllabi, tests, quizzes, handouts,
articles, textbooks, you name it... Any type of content that's being distributed in that class,
especially with so many schools going to online-only or a hybrid approach to different...
to learning in the classroom. This need for digital accessibility when it comes to education
is really skyrocketing. So, there's a lot more interest in making sure that all of this content
that's being distributed for the purposes of coursework is made accessible. But beyond
that... There are also, you know, annual reports, course catalogs, marketing flyers, administration
information like resumes, other CVs, and also, tons of different forms for applying for different
things. Housing applications, signing up for meal programs, you name it. There are there is probably
PDF documents floating around in just about every educational institution for that particular topic.
So, similar to government agencies it's really unsustainable to have a handful of people around
an entire campus that no digital accessibility front to back… and are able to kind of handle all
of the remediation efforts for the entire campus. This creates a serious challenge when it comes to
bottlenecks. You are going to have more content creators creating documents every single day
and all of that work can end up piling up on the desk of a couple of different people that
might know how to use certain software tools to remediate documents. You know,
one-by-one, one page at a time, which can be very tedious... very slow... and very technical.
So, I have spent a lot of time working with higher education institutions where I might be talking
on the phone with the very one person at the entire university or the community college that
knows how to use these accessibility tools. And is basically responsible for remediating
hundreds and hundreds of pages every single week. And still cannot keep up with the demand.
So, as I said, it's just an unsustainable model to have, you know, one person or a couple of
different experts for an entire organization of that size to be responsible for the accessibility
of all of the digital content that's being created by potentially hundreds of different people
on a daily basis. So, when it comes to education, oftentimes we sort of recommend a combination
of both software to be used by those content creators… So, sort of a self-service remediation
approach, where our Equidox remediation software is easy enough to use. It's simplified,
it's something that can be easily trained into people that don't have a wealth of accessibility
experience. And they're able to use our tool, to be able to work through documents on their own.
So, they can be responsible for the documents that they're producing on a daily basis.
Now also, we can offer a templated solution for documents that change
regularly, but only have sort of minor adjustments that are made. If you think of, like, you know,
course catalogs, or annual reports… Where it's basically the same template every single year.
Maybe just the dates and some data within the document changes, but it's essentially the same
outline. We do have a technology built into our software that allows for almost instantaneous
remediation when you run into instances like that. Where it's basically the same document
year-over-year, or semester-over-semester. Just a few little minor adjustments are needed. So,
we can offer a solution that really can help workaround that. Where you can apply
the remediation effort you did to a previous iteration of that document to a new version.
And of course, you know, when you're dealing with education institutions that in many
cases have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of documents piled up in their backlogs,
another option is of course to outsource those documents. So, sending them off to an Equidox
remediation service, for example. Where we can actually remediate those documents and get them
back to the clients fully accessible, fully validated, even checked with screen reading
technology to replicate exactly how an end-user will be interacting with those documents.
Okay, so, the last vertical that we'll mention here is enterprise. So, you know, just to kind
of walk through a general example… We recently had an enterprise client that did a self-audit
of their PDF backlog. And once they finished that, they uncovered roughly two million public-facing
documents. Not two million pages… Two million public-facing documents. And a document,
of course, could be...it could be one page, or it could be a thousand pages. Who could really say?
So, the number of pages of PDF documents that are presenting a liability for this company
is a truly staggering number. So, this company has again hundreds of content creators that are
creating content... really without a sort of defined workflow to ensure that it's accessible.
So, when you have hundreds of content creators producing documents coming
from different locations, using different design templates, using different publishing techniques,
you can really produce an extremely large amount of PDF content. And for varying levels
of accessibility that will require a lot of different approaches to making sure that it's
all accessible... and you are mitigating that risk of litigation by having like I said, two million
public-facing documents that are inaccessible and unusable by people with disabilities.
Also, a lot of these documents as they pertain to you know different laws and regulations in
different states... A lot of those documents of those two million are updated on a regular basis.
So, you have a PDF version of a document and it is referring to laws or something that is sort
of only pertinent for a month, or a quarter, or a year... And then you know a few months later,
it gets updated and a brand new version of that document is produced. And then that has
to be remediated as well. So, there are... it's really sort of a mind-boggling amount of work
that can go into it to trying to manage that many documents. But in this case, we offer the
solution of deploying our Equidox software to those many hundreds of content creators.
And that is a way of mitigating the remediation of that newly created content. So, we wanted to
make sure that those people that are producing those documents on a recurring basis... That
they understand how to use the Equidox software, that they understand sort of the steps that they
need to take to make sure before they post that document... before that document gets distributed
to their various clients or internally... that it is, in fact, accessible and usable.
And then it won't be adding into that backlog of millions of documents that need to be remediated.
Now that was for documents that were moving forward. In this particular use case, they also
leveraged our outsource services. So, they were able to send us a large quantity of that backlog
content for our team to remediate here internally. And then of course validate it and make sure that
it is fully accessible, fully compliant, and then we're able to send that those documents back to
that client. So that they can post those documents knowing that they have been made accessible. And
just to mention, we recently did another webinar that was more about Developing a Remediation Plan.
And it kind of covers these approaches in a little bit more detail. And we talk a bit more about, you
know, training staffing of a tool, the different methodologies, and the tools that are required.
And so, please feel free to take a look at that webinar. I think it was from either
last month or the prior month. But also, feel free to reach out to us for more of a
one-on-one consultation. We're more than happy to chat and walk through
our different approaches to remediation and how they might be able to help you.
Okay, so, we do want to get into these different approaches. I've kind of mentioned three or four
different approaches that we have so, we want to kind of walk through in a little bit more
detail as to what these approaches are. So, with our Equidox software that many people on
this call might be at least somewhat familiar with, maybe you've seen a previous demo, or
maybe you're an existing user, or maybe you know you've seen one of our past webinars.
But with the software, if you have the staff, and that staff has the bandwidth to sort of work
on their own content, making sure that that new content that they're producing is accessible...
As well as if they have the time to work backward and kind of remediate through that backlog of PDF
content, that is something that, you know, Equidox might be a great solution for you if you have
that type of situation, where you have the team in place that is capable of remediating on their own.
One of the advantages of using Equidox software is the speed of the turnover. So if you have a
document that you've just produced... you know, maybe it's a Microsoft Word document you hit “Save
as PDF.” Well, you can immediately pop that document straight into the Equidox software
and remediate it, export it from Equidox, and know that it's accessible. And then you can post
that document straight away. So, you don't have to ship that document off to an outsourced service,
you don't have to wait around for it to be remediated and validated, and sent back.
It's truly remediation on demand. If you want to work on that document right away,
you can produce that document and have it posted the same day, knowing that it's fully accessible.
The other great advantage of using the Equidox software is the ability to kind of budget around
the cost associated with using software. Because we work on an annual subscription
and a concurrent user model... so, with our concurrent user model, let's say you want to buy
10 concurrent licenses. That means 10 people in your organization can be logged in simultaneously.
And the annual subscription allows for an unlimited amount of documents to be remediated.
So, you have sort of a fixed cost when it comes to addressing your PDF documents for that entire
year. You know exactly what you're paying up front for that year, and you can remediate documents to
your heart's content. So, there's no limit on how many documents that you can remediate. It's just
a matter of how much time do you have to commit to these types of projects. So, it's a great approach
if you have sort of budget constraints that you're concerned about. Because when you get into the
services side of things, that's typically being charged on a per-page basis. So, that's something
that if you're in that situation of the enterprise client of ours that had two million documents in
a backlog, it can kind of become a runaway train when you're charging upon a per-page basis. So,
it's something to kind of balance. Find sort of a, you know, happy medium somewhere. If you have
a tight budget you might look into software to kind of help you work through those documents.
I also want to mention our PDF... our professional remediation services. So, if you are, in this
case, you know, if you're short on staff... If you don't necessarily have the technical know-how…
Or you don't have the time to commit to learning a new software tool… Or to just working through
hundreds of thousands of pages of PDFs, there's no technical knowledge required to use our services.
There's no learning curve to getting over a new software. You don't have to put your staff
through training and you can have the confidence that it's been done correctly. You know when
you're outsourcing it to us, to our professional remediators and validators, you know that you're
getting back a fully accessible, fully compliant document. So, you don't have to worry about… Did I
do this correctly? Have I made mistakes along the way using software? You can confidently post those
documents knowing that it is, in fact, accessible. So, it's definitely another approach to consider.
And typically this is charged on a per-page basis. Now I also want to just mention that
a hybrid method between the two, so, a software and services hybrid approach,
is very popular amongst our clients. So, the complex documents, the technical documents,
or just... if a tight deadline is looming and you don't have time to get it done...
Those clients can often send us documents while using our Equidox software when they have the
time to work on those types of documents. They're able to use the software for that
sort of self-service remediation. I also want to mention our templated and high-volume solutions.
So, one of the features that we have built into Equidox is our Zone Transfer technology. So,
this is for ( I mentioned an example earlier) if you have documents that kind of follow the same
templates. Maybe it's documents that are produced in different languages... So, you have an English,
a Spanish, a French version of the same document. Well, you can use Equidox and
our Zone Transfer feature to actually remediate the document one time in one of those languages,
and then you can essentially lift and copy those exact reading zones (or the PDF tags) to different
versions of that same document. So, you're able to very, very quickly address situations like that,
where you might have documents that are produced in different languages.
Or like I said before if you have documents that have very small edits or maybe there's been typos
and you need to correct those typos, and you produce a new PDF document from the source file,
you can use that Zone Transfer technology to really mitigate the amount of time that
you're having to go back and remediate from scratch on those new versions of that same PDF.
So, another one of our services that we offer is, we like to call it Batch Processing. It's for high
volume on-demand and human interaction-free remediation so, there's no human involvement.
Basically what we do is we use a combination of machine learning and computer vision, and
we are training models to basically identify the different elements that make up your documents.
And they're able to apply accurate tagging to these documents in fractions of a second.
So, examples for this type of use case would be invoices or statements that are being generated
by banks, or utility companies, or healthcare institutions where it's following the exact
same design, except the client name, the account numbers, the dates. You know,
some of the line items are changing from example to example. But every version of that document is
exactly the same. We're able to produce accessible versions of those documents completely on-demand
with no human interaction whatsoever. And I just want to get into a case study here with one of
our clients that we've been working with for a couple of years. That's Cornell University. We
were approached by Cornell when they had around, well they have well over a hundred different
subdomains within their website. But they identified about 80 of their websites that
pertain to different departments and different colleges within the university that were a top
priority due to the vast number of accessibility deficiencies that they had. There were tens of
thousands of PDF documents posted to these various websites and their initiative was to of course fix
these websites. But also, the PDFs that are posted to those websites. They needed to be remediated.
They didn't feel that they had the staff or the time to get all of this done internally
so, they wanted to outsource these documents to our team. So, various website managers for
these different departments were sending us documents that needed to be remediated.
And based on a three-tiered pricing system, we were basically ranking the documents as low,
medium, or high complexity... and charging on a per-page fee based on that ranking system of low,
medium, or high depending on how difficult and time-consuming the remediation effort would be.
And then we are also able to remediate and return those documents to Cornell within less than a
week of receiving them. So we're turning these documents over on a weekly basis. They're sending
us files, we're sending them back, they're able to post it knowing that those websites
are… or knowing that those documents on those websites are accessible and no longer a liability.
In addition to the content creators and website managers sending us documents on a weekly basis,
they also use a campus-wide license of our Equidox software for that self-service remediation as I
mentioned before. So, in most cases, the Equidox software is being used for course content type
of materials. So, like I said, the textbooks, the articles, the course handouts, you know, tests and
quizzes that are being used in class… They're being remediated by the professors... by the
specific content creator... or maybe department staff that are dedicated users of Equidox. So,
that's the way that they're partnering with us to address their accessibility needs.
And they've been a great client of ours for a couple of years now and, you know, moving forward,
we hope to continue working with them. But it's been a... it's been a perfect use case
for how we recommend a higher ed institution to work with our Equidox services offering.
Now we have a few minutes left, and I actually want to introduce Pat Needles, our Director of
Sales for Equidox. And he's going to talk through a couple of different case studies from clients
that he works with. So, Pat if you're...if you've got your microphone on, I'll urn it over to you.
[Pat] I am here. Can you hear me okay? [Dan] Yep I hear loud and clear.
[Pat] Excellent. Thank you, Dan. Very good presentation. As Dan mentioned,
we are not industry-specific so, I'm going to show you a couple of different use cases. We'll have
one in the higher education, government, as well as the enterprise world. So, what you will see on
these slides (and I will not read them to you) but you see the case is on the left, and the solution
is on the right. So, how these organizations come about their needs, and how do they solve
whatever issues that they may have. So, with this first case study (and I'm going to keep the
organization's name out of it just for privacy sake), but one of the largest
college systems in the world with hundreds of thousands of students. You can only imagine with
that many students, the number of students with disabilities that need accommodation.
So, how do we go about, you know, taking care of them, you can only imagine the amount of...
massive amounts of documentation that they have considering the amount of students in
the hundreds of campuses that they have. People are creating content on every campus every day.
So, what you'll notice on some of these slides (and Dan talked about it earlier) is a backlog
of documentation. And in this case, archives. And regardless of the size of your organization,
you are going to have documents. Whether you're small, medium, or large. You need to have a
plan to make those documents accessible, and more importantly, usable, for folks with disabilities.
So, what the college decided to do was to put Equidox out there for content creators. So,
any new course material that was being made, and needed to be sent out to students, was going
through Equidox to make sure that it was 100% accessible and usable for the students. So, how
did they do that? Well, they bought a campus-wide, organizational-wide license of Equidox, where they
deployed over all of their campuses. And the nice thing about that Equidox license is that it can
be used by students and by faculty alike, as it's a very easy product to use, as Dan
mentioned. In addition, on that, because of the number of users they have, we continuously provide
training for new users or refreshment classes for experienced users. And there might be new
features and functionalities that are introduced in the application that folks need to know about.
An organization this large, again, has hundreds of millions of pages. Most likely, I should say,
millions of pages of documentation considering the number of campuses. So,
handling those from a hybrid method, as Dan had mentioned earlier, using the software and
the service to combat that type of backlog is probably the best way to go about it.
And there's one last bullet point that I'll mention there. That administration features
a lot of oversight of large projects. Since Equidox is a software as a service
a web-based application, it can be deployed very easily. You're not stuck on a single machine.
As long as you have an internet connection, you can work anywhere and remediate documents from any
location, as well as share those documents with co-workers. Okay, Dan if you want to move on...
Okay, so, this is another entity in California. A large healthcare organization came to us
with a very large need. Again, there's that big backlog of existing documents
that need to be made accessible and usable for people. And how to go about that... I know we're
kind of running down on time so, I'll kind of fast-track some of these things. Because you're
going to see a lot of the organizational-wide software license and remediation services as part
of our offerings. Dan, you want to move on? [Dan] Sure.
[Pat] Thank you. I think Dan had mentioned this account earlier in the presentation. I think
millions of pages of documents that, you know, need to be dealt with. And this
agency is a national company that has offices in every state. And every state, as we know,
has different laws. But there's documentation nonetheless. And that's one of the use cases
Dan had mentioned earlier about the Zone Transfer tool.
They also are going to deploy an on-premise server for Equidox where they can remediate
more... well... non-public-facing documents. So, any sensitive data that they might want to
keep in the house, they'll use that on-premise solution as well. As Dan mentioned earlier as
well, batch processing bank statements, utility bills, health care statements,
that sort of thing. Dan, you want to go on? Thank you. So, again here’s another enterprise company,
a national bank. Again, they get a big, big backlog of documents that need to be dealt
with. But again, they're constantly creating new documentation. And this... here's an another
example of a potential batch process high volume bank statements repetitive type documents that was
mentioned earlier. And you see the remediation services agreement on most of these solutions,
because most organizations have just simply too much content that they have to deal with, and
the easiest thing for them maybe is to do some of it themselves and send off the more complicated
documents to an organization like Equidox, to make sure that they're remediated and validate.
Okay, then you know, as I mentioned earlier, there are small, medium, and large size
organizations. Some of the small organizations that we have dealt with, you know, it's kind of a
lonely situation for some of them because it might just be one or two people doing the remediation.
That was brought up earlier, and they have, you know, potentially no training or full
understanding of PDF accessibility. And so, again, that's, you know... you can send that off
if you wish. Or, you know, if you're a small organization, acquire a single license and do
it yourself. It's that easy to do using Equidox. So, we work with organizations
of all different sizes. And I know I'm over a little bit Dan, so I will hand it back to you.
[Dan] Great! Well, thank you, Pat, for kind of walking through those different use cases and
case studies there. So, yeah I do apologize. That was a little bit long-winded in the beginning
of the webinar. So, let's wrap things up. We’re a couple of minutes past. But just
as a reminder, feel free to reach out to us at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com if you have any questions
or would like to set up a sort of one-on-one consultation to talk about your organization
and your specific needs... As well as visiting us on Equidox.co. We're also,
very active on LinkedIn. So, please follow us on our social media to stay sort of aware of
what's upcoming with the Equidox team. But with that said I appreciate everyone for attending
today and we hope to see you on next month's webinar when we'll be talking... I'm not sure
if we have a topic fully defined yet... But we hope to see you all there. We'll definitely send
out correspondence to make sure that everyone gets the invite. So, thank you again, everyone. Have a
great rest of your Wednesday and we'll chat soon. [Tammy] I just want to interject. I had a bunch
of people asking whether this was being recorded. And yes it is. It will be sent out as soon as it
is captioned. Everybody who signed up for the webinar, whether you attended or not,
will get a copy. And we'll also be sending around a small survey (like two minutes to fill it out).
If you could help us out with that, it'd be great. We just want to keep current with your needs for
our topics so that we're providing you information that you can actually use... that's going to
help you do a better job with accessibility. Thanks for coming everybody! See you next time.