Toronto -- Crawford Technologies Inc., the award-winning provider of transactional customer communications solutions, announced today that it is launching a service to provide transactional documents for visually impaired customers in alternate formats. From its New York-based facility, CrawfordTech uses existing customer communications data to produce the requisite alternative formats in a timely, accurate and secure manner for its clients' visually impaired customers. Crawford Technologies' Document Accessibility Services (DAS) delivers English, Spanish and French-language documents in Braille, Large Print, Audio and E-text.

"Having equal and timely access to transactional customer communications is absolutely critical for both blind and sighted individuals," said Ernie Crawford, President and founder of Crawford Technologies, "Beyond the raft of regulatory requirements to provide these alternative formats to their customers, many of our clients recognize that this significant demographic is largely underserved. They have an opportunity to not only reduce their own risk and costs, but to attract and retain the visually impaired as loyal customers by promoting independence."

CrawfordTech's DAS is a flexible service that accepts most common print files, including AFP, Xerox Metacode, PCL, PostScript, PDF, EBCDIC, ASCII Text and other data types such as XML, regardless of the file size. In some cases, clients securely transfer a pre-split file that includes only the visually impaired customers' documents. If needed, however, CrawfordTech can split out the required documents from a complete print file. From this existing data, CrawfordTech produces the required format, including Braille (Grades One and Two), Large Format, Audio and E-text. CrawfordTech's DAS services include printing, insertion and mailing of the documents to their recipients, as well as detailed reporting.

CrawfordTech's DAS provides retail banks, wealth management companies, credit card issuers, utilities and telecommunications companies, as well as government organizations, with the option of outsourcing the specialized alternate format customer communications. DAS provides these companies and organizations with unique technology and expertise that reduces the costs of offering these services. Importantly, it shortens the time to market, allowing organizations to quickly and cost-effectively address these needs by partnering with a knowledgeable, capable and reliable service provider, instead of building the specialized infrastructure and expertise in-house.