NetCentric's CommonLook PDF Accessibility Wizard Unveiled at The Interagency Disability Educational Awareness (IDEAS) Showcase
Washington DC, IDEAS Conference, October 5-6, 2009
An add-in wizard for Microsoft Word that allows users to easily create PDFs that are accessible to people with disabilities was announced today by document-compliance-management company NetCentric Technologies Inc. The PDF Accessibility Wizard (PAW) for MS Word is an add-in that builds on NetCentric's widely used PDF accessibility tool CommonLook, and will be available through the company's web site at net-centric.com/paw/ starting October 5, 2009.
Our goal is to make accessibility rendering of PDFs as simple and as commonplace as spellchecking a document,
said NetCentric Technologies president Monir ElRayes. With PAW, we are simplifying the functionality of our successful CommonLook software to take it to the author-level and tying it to the most popular desktop applications on the market. Rendering a document accessible has traditionally been an arduous task undertaken after the document has been authored. With PAW, NetCentric is making accessibility a part of the authoring process, an advance that should greatly increase both the quality and quantity of accessible Word and PDF documents.
NetCentric is the market leader in innovation with the most complete suite of tools in the PDF accessibility and Section 508 markets addressing the author, quality assurance and compliance management layers. For 14 years, its CommonLook brand of products have been providing customers with the means to make their websites and individual PDF documents accessible. NetCentric has helped many government agencies and organizations meet their compliance needs, including those required under Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act. Extending this functionality to MS Office is the next logical step.
Enacted in 1998, Section 508 requires that federal agencies make information technology accessible to people with disabilities. The software section of the act asserts that provision of data to people with disabilities be at an equal level to that available to everyone else. While it's a federal act, many state and municipal governments, as well as educational institutions and corporations, have adopted Section 508 as the baseline for accessibility standards and best practices.
Section 508 standards are consistent with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines and provide an achievable, well-documented target for organizations seeking to make their electronic documents accessible. For a PDF document to be accessible, it must be readable using devices such as screen readers and PDAs, while providing consistent views for all devices. The underlying structure, along with the high number of poorly formatted documents, makes the manual creation of accessible PDF documents complex, time consuming and error-prone. Automated tools, especially author-level ones, are needed to help overcome significant cost and complexity barriers.
The author should see this (adding accessibility to the Word document) as a normal part of the process rather than an extra, and potentially unexpected, workload and distraction,
said Peter Abrahams, practice leader, Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research. By making the process much easier and less stressful, PAW should make the creation of accessible PDF business-as-usual for any Word document. It eliminates any excuses of time, deadlines or complexity that have been used for not creating accessible PDF up to now.
Users don't need Adobe Acrobat to use PAW. Rather, the add-in acts much like Acrobat PDF Maker, easily saving a document in PDF format from within Word itself. Supported on the Windows Vista or XP platforms, PAW is compatible with MS Word 2007, with versions for Excel and PowerPoint soon to come. Through PAW, content authors provide accessibility information at the time of a document's creation, with accessibility thereby becoming part of the standard authoring process. This lowers the cost of compliance with accessibility standards. Comprehensive verification applies all PDF-relevant Section 508 checkpoints and identifies instances of non-compliance, allowing for easy remediation.
The software is easy to use, as the wizard automates most tasks and provides easy-to-understand detailed instructions. No prior knowledge of accessibility is required. Quickly mapping MS Word styles to appropriate PDF tags and fixing complex tables, an average five-page document takes less than five minutes to make accessible.
NetCentric Technologies will be demonstrating PAW and exhibiting at The Interagency Disability Educational Awareness Showcase (IDEAS) in Washington, D.C. on October 5 and 6. Company executives will be on hand at Vendor Table D, and are available for briefings on site.
About NetCentric Technologies
Established in 1995, NetCentric is a document-compliance-management company that provides solutions specifically designed to help government and corporations ensure the accessibility of electronic documents and their compliance with a variety of standards. NetCentric works with many government agencies and private-sector organizations to provide compliance solutions, both through its software offering and its professional accessibility services. The complete suite of CommonLook standards compliance products includes CommonLook PDF Accessibility Wizard for MS Office, CommonLook Section 508 for Adobe Acrobat, CommonLook Section 508 for the Web, and CommonLook PDF Enterprise Compliance Management Framework. For more information, visit net-centric.com.
The names of actual companies or products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. CommonLook is a registered trademark of NetCentric Technologies Inc.
Media contact: Linda Forrest for NetCentric Technologies, Phone: (613) 983-3300, Email: , Twitter: @lindaforrest, LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lindaforrest