This month, Roger sat down with Toronto-based UKAAF member Crawford Technologies, a supplier of document accessibility solutions whose customers include some of the world’s leading banks, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and utility companies.
Sharing the Crawford Tech story is one of the company’s UK-based Accessibility Specialists, Jane Black. Jane gives us an excellent potted history of the Canadian company’s first 27 years, starting from its eponymous founder (and still CEO today) Ernie Crawford cooking up a way in his basement to help clients convert printed documents from one print language into another so that they could be printed on large production presses.
Though a lot has changed, with a lot more functionality today than first came out of Mr Crawford’s basement, as she says, the central idea of helping organisations that produce high volumes of documents who want to get them out to their customers in the most efficient way and in the most optimal format hasn’t.
Jane says Crawford has a number of solutions, but for UKAAF purposes the main area of interest will be, of course, its AccessibilityNow platform—and how accessibility is in fact the fastest growing area of its business these days. If you’re not familiar, AccessibilityNow is a complete platform for the creation and management of accessible documents. Taking advantage of numerous technologies including AI and automation, as she tells Roger it includes within it a range of software solutions and tailored services that are designed to meet the different document accessibility requirements of different types of organisations, she says. Outputs include multiple accessible formats which can either be digital, such as accessible PDF and accessible HTML and also what the UKAAF community might call traditional formats such as Braille, large print or audio.
‘Understanding what’s possible now with the new and emerging technologies we’ve got’
Jane and Roger then have some back and forth on how that works in practice and how users tend to want to employ it, with Jane also noting that SMEs are as likely as bigger organisations to use AccessibilityNow these days. The spotlight then moves on to Jane herself for a bit, with a very interesting CV and what motivates her in her role at Crawford:
“I think what made me so interested in our accessibility solutions were a combination of two things. I think, first of all, you have my inner geek– I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work, understanding what’s possible with them; within this particular area, it was wanting to understand what’s possible now with the new and emerging technologies that we’ve got,” she shares.
“But also [accessibility] was something that I’d always been interested in, my whole life–even as an angry teenager—in causes, that fight for equality and for fairness, and I guess what these days might be called social justice.
“This seemed like it was the perfect way to combine both of those factors–and could be my actual job!”
Ms Black then details how Crawford works with UKAAF and other accessibility standards organisations, as it is seen as a major corporate priority for the brand. Then, Roger puts her on the spot a bit and asks her, as an accessibility expert, to peek into a figurative crystal ball and give us all some predictions.
The good news is that Jane is pretty optimistic here. “I really do have a belief that, as digital services and communications are so important for the global economy more and more is going to be done over the coming years to ensure that everyone has equal access to these–for economic reasons, if nothing else.” This could lead, she hopes, to her ultimate vision of what she calls “barrier-free communication”—which she defines as, “to borrow from the UKAAF tagline”, that soon every document is an accessible one.
Finally, some interesting questions get asked and answered around Crawford Technologies’ interest in EPUB, the vendor’s approach to customisation, and how committed it is to constantly updating its solutions, including AccessibilityNow.
All in all, this episode is a really good insight into the approach of a very key accessibility tech vendor—and a chance to meet a very passionate supporter of that mission in such a global brand. I got a lot out of it, and am sure you will, too.
The webinar is available on our YouTube channel with the previous webinars please go here to access free
