Toronto, Ont. – Crawford Technologies, provider of innovative document solutions that streamline, improve and manage customer communications, adds AccessibilityNow® Validator, a new tool for testing document accessibility compliance, to its comprehensive AccessibilityNow platform for the creation and management of accessible documents. With document accessibility regulations increasing, AccessibilityNow Validator brings to market a highly detailed automated solution for fully checking PDF documents to determine a document’s level of compliance to WCAG 2.0/2.1 and PDF/UA requirements. Purpose-built with an open architecture that makes it possible to integrate within an existing workflow, AccessibilityNow Validator can be used as a stand-alone tool or in combination with any of Crawford Technologies’ document remediation solutions, as well as with other remediation tools.

“The World Health Organization reports that globally at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment. This means there is high demand for delivering accessible and compliant content,” said Ernie Crawford, president and CEO of Crawford Technologies. “Simply running files through a document remediation process is not enough. We have built this solution to address the need for a tool that is quick to learn and easy to use in order to keep documents compliant with accessibility regulations and better serve customers. Everyone who has seen it is excited by what AccessibilityNow Validator brings to the market.”

With its ability to integrate within an existing workflow, AccessibilityNow Validator makes it possible for all documents to be checked before they are shared or uploaded to a website, saving time and mitigating risk. Many PDF checkers on the market provide the ability to check PDFs for compliance. However, they were not created to be integrated into workflows or to provide a link into an existing process. Typically, current PDF checkers will test one file at a time, checking for only WCAG or PDF/UA, but not both, and cannot be run automatically. AccessibilityNow Validator offers the opportunity to run either manually or automatically, has settings to check for WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and/or PDF/UA and settings for generating a certification report to show compliance. AccessibilityNow Validator can be used in transactional workflows to automatically check large volumes of PDFs, such as mobile phone bills and financial statements and it can also be used to check static documents, such as letters, brochures, announcements and more.

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