Are you searching for a PDF document remediation service? When you compare document remediation services, it’s important to evaluate not only the cost but also the quality of service. You will frequently get a price per page ranging from $5/page to $15/page. Why the large range in price? How do you evaluate the price vs. value?
To evaluate the price vs value, you need to establish your goal in remediating the documents. Is the goal of document remediation to meet legal standards for accessibility compliance? Is the goal a highly usable and accessible document? What is your priority: Quality and full compliance, speed, or budget?
Here are four questions you should ask a PDF document remediation service to ensure they deliver the quality and value you need.
What standard are you remediating the document to?
WCAG 2.0 is the standard for Section 508 compliance. If you want accessible documents, you need the documents to conform to PDF/UA 1.0.
What is their QA process to ensure the documents meet these accessibility standards?
Is the vendor going to use automated or manual remediation?
PDF remediation services frequently use automated testing and remediation software. Automated testing and remediation is attractive from a cost and speed perspective. The lower-cost remediation services will often stop after putting a document through an automated process.
Unfortunately, automated document remediation often does not result in a document compliant with accessibility standards, and does not provide an equal or usable experience for people with disabilities.
Automated remediation tools are a useful first step towards document accessibility. The reports that they produce guide remediation experts to quickly evaluate and fix accessibility errors.
However, even after all the errors found by automated tools are fixed, an expert must find accessibility errors that no automated checker can pick up.
Leslie Janek’s article Ten Accessibility Errors Automated Tools Miss on PDF Documents covers accessibility errors frequently missed by automated tools.
The additional manual QA process frequently raises the remediation price from $5/page to $12-$15/page. Is it worth it? Well, that depends on the reasons for remediating the document.
How complex are your documents?
Do you have documents that include tables, graphs, pictures, and fillable forms? Are your documents scanned images? Are they colorful? All these elements play a role in the complexity of your documents and the success of any automated solution.
Will the accessibility service:
- Work with your team to add alt text to documents?
- Check color contrast of images and work with your team to resolve issues?
- Make sure that fillable forms in the document are accessible?
- Make sure that tables in your document are accessible?
Each of these processes is important to achieve a fully compliant document. Automated systems do not resolve these issues. Each of these issues requires collaboration between your team and the remediation team. Typically, lower price services will exclude these items.
Where are the documents going to be remediated?
Many vendors send their documents overseas to be remediated. That’s fine if you don’t have internal or external legal or security requirements that prohibit documents from being sent out of the United States.
Again, PDF accessibility remediation in the United States is more expensive than outsourcing them overseas. Is it worth it? Only if you have legal and security requirements.
Getting these questions answered, as well as having precise success criteria, will help you successfully get your documents remediated to the level you need.
What federal agencies need to know about document remediation?
Microassist’s document remediation team helps Federal agencies achieve compliance with Section 508, 504, and 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Get your questions answered.
Microassist Document Remediation Service
Our US-based team offers a high-quality document remediation service that uses automated tools and manual remediation to create compliant documents. We can work with your team to remediate Adobe PDFs, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint.
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