Important Factors to Help You Choose the Right Document Remediation Service for Your Business
When it comes to improving the reach and reputation of your business, you cannot ignore document remediation services. 508 Accessibility Compliance and Digital Accessibility have become the need of the hour. The legal risk that accompanies inaccessible websites and documents is quite high, not only in terms of costs but also in terms of brand integrity. Also, the market segment that gets excluded owing to inaccessible websites, documents, and PDFs is quite large.
Thus, digital documents like notices, emails, websites, etc. used by companies need to be built in such a manner that the content contained in them can be interpreted and reproduced by technologies properly. Section 508 Accessibility Compliance takes care of this by ensuring that electronic information and technology become accessible to everyone, including individuals with disabilities.
508 Compliance helps create equal opportunities for people with disabilities to ensure that technology gets leveraged to bridge digital gaps. Document remediation includes the process of taking existing documents like Word files, PDFs, PowerPoint, etc., and making them compliant with accessibility standards. Whether or not documents are attached to emails or websites, they need to be disabled-friendly. Thus, 508 remediation services have become mandatory for businesses.
Why Do You Need a Document Remediation Process?
It is important for organizations to foster cultural diversity and inclusivity. For this, they need to make sure that their documents are built in such a manner that assistive technologies can interpret them and that the context is easily understandable for people with special needs. Document remediation is the process that converts existing documents into accessible ones.
The process includes adding descriptions, tags, and other features to make documents user-friendly. Document remediation is easier said than done and getting it done in-house might not be a feasible option for a majority of businesses. You’ll have to go through a tiring process of recruitment and also meet the operational expenses in terms of technology implementation, infrastructure, sales, etc. Thus, managing it alongside your key business areas will be an uphill task. The best option here for you is to outsource remediation services.
How to Choose the Right Document Remediation Company?
The digital space is crowded with companies that claim to provide excellent document remediation services or provide tools to help you remediate your documents in-house. It is important that you do your research while choosing a remediation company for your business. If you’ll just form your decisions based on what a company claims itself to be, you can face huge repercussions in terms of our immediate documents. You’ll not only lose your money but also risk your business reputation.
Problems like strict time constraints, limited budgets, and logistical issues faced by many businesses result in them going for services that can get their work done on time and within budget. This leads to remediation outputs that only meet the bare minimum requirements of the business, mostly proven by verification tools and automatic tagging. When organizations look for an affordable and quick 508 Compliance Service, they suffer from low-quality issues. The low-quality services in turn lead to lawsuits for businesses for offering poorly remediated documents. Thus, it is vital that you choose the right remediation company for your business.
Here are some important factors you need to consider to choose a reliable remediation service:
- Expertise
Document remediation is a resource-intensive and time-consuming process because it involves multiple small and critical details that need to be taken care of. Hence, it is vital that you select an experienced company for yourself that is adept at catering to the minute details of remediation on an everyday basis. Expert companies understand the essentials of remediation projects, whether complex or simple. With the right blend of expertise and skills, these companies provide the best quality remediation outcomes in a timely manner.
- Approach
There are multiple outsourcing firms that provide businesses with 508 Document Remediation services. It becomes easy for businesses that have already used remediation services to negotiate better and get expert partners at reasonable prices. Nevertheless, for first-time businesses, it is often tricky to try their luck with accessibility and select the right service provider for themselves. Thus, it is important for such businesses to do some groundwork and make an informed choice.
- Turnaround Time
Document remediation is a long and tiring process that requires a lot of attention to detail including bullet lists, graphs, charts, images, and other text formatting details. When a service provider cuts corners on important details to provide a faster turnaround time, your business suffers. While there are tools available to quicken the tagging process, they have their limitations. Thus, it is beneficial to ask for timelines so that providers of document remediation services do not end up chasing unrealistic deadlines and you are equipped with quality results.
- Technical Knowledge
Document remediation is a complicated process and cannot be completely automated. Even though automated tagging tools do a good enough task of identifying text formatting and generating a lot of tags, these can do things incorrectly when used with multiple styles of formatting and writing. To avoid this, make sure that your service provider has a dedicated QA team that conducts thorough tests to uncover multiple accessibility gaps in the document.
- Past Remediation Projects
To get a clear picture of your service provider, it is important to check the quality of past document remediation projects that they have delivered. This will help you get an idea of the way your project would be handled by the provider and you’ll also get to know about the internal processes involved. As a result, you’ll be able to determine whether your chosen professional is a good fit for your business.
- Talent Pool
Service providers are generally equipped with a team of professionals for 508 document remediation services hired from all over the world. These professionals introduce to the projects their skills and expertise from various niches. Since no two businesses have the same needs, it is important to check if your outsourcing company caters to your particular niche. This will help you make the right choice.
Conclusion
Owing to the complex nature of document remediation, it is important that businesses pay close attention while choosing a remediation service provider for themselves. Failing to comply with Section 508 Accessibility Compliance can result in huge damages to the brand value of a company, not to forget the financial losses that are incurred along the way. The most advisable thing that organizations can do is to opt for the right document remediation services and save themselves from a lawsuit.
When you collaborate with a service provider for your remediation process, you move closer to attaining the industry standards and adhering to accessibility compliances. However, you can only reap these benefits when you choose your outsourcing company wisely by considering your specific business needs.
