Abledocs
Enabling Compliant PDF Creation and Accessibility

In a high-tech realm, there are tried-and-true technologies like PDFs that have been pervasive and are still at the core of digital lives. Right from the ages of the internet and the world wide web, PDFs are vital in meeting personal and changing business needs, be it– accounting, finance, and insurance. However, companies and individuals fall short of creating compliant and accessible PDFs and other digital formats. Followed by its continued adoption and usage, standardization has necessitated the essence of PDF creation by adhering to the universal web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) and international PDF/UA standards. This calls for a scalable and unified PDF accessibility solution to ensure compliance, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility.

Enter AbleDocs– a global provider of digital accessibility products and solutions that helps individuals and organizations create, validate, remediate the most accessible digital content and educate on compliant content creation. The Ontario-based company is a conglomerate of the world’s leading PDF accessibility experts.

In a recent interview with CIO Applications, Adam Spencer, President and CEO of AbleDocs, shares his insights on the company’s inception, client onboarding process, and value proposition.

“With a best-in-class technology and deep category expertise, we are here to guide at every step of the way in being compliant,” begins Spencer.

Could you give us a quick overview of AbleDocs?

Having been in document accessibility since 2009, I have had great connections with people over the years. I realized the need to push the limits across service businesses in making digital content accessible for people even with print disabilities. This allowed us to brainstorm and bring our vast experience and knowledge under one umbrella at AbleDocs in 2019. Today, we are operating globally around nine countries with an unparalleled team, in my opinion. We make accessible PDFs that are fast, easy, secure, and compliant every single time. In addition, our services support compliance audits like SOC2 and ISO 27001, thereby de-risking our clients with data security.

Could you walk us through AbleDocs’ portfolio of offerings?

We offer a wide range of products and services for PDF accessibility. This includes four key functionalities, namely, creating, validating, and remediating digital content and then educating clients and individuals to produce accessible content.

For creating accessible content at a click, we have axesWord with built-in tools. We offer validation tools such as axesPDF, ADScan, and ADWeb to fix compliance issues adhering to laws and guidelines. When it comes to remediating PDFs, we deliver ADForms, ADLegacy, and ADGateway for fast and reliable form creation, historical file access, and barrier-free file sharing, respectively.

Further, our ADTraining delivers product-specific training from our experts to help clients’ internal teams create compliant PDFs.

We also offer the largest service bureau to fix clientmade PDFs by seamlessly connecting to their existing infrastructure. With our enterprise-level products–ADStream and ADService, we can make every high-volume transactional PDF file like bank statement procedures and airline ticket confirmations fully automated and compliant. For the most part, we ensure these PDFs with a $10 million liability guarantee.

Who are your typical clients? Could you elaborate on your client onboarding methodology?

We serve extensively across all three levels of government, from federal, provincial, and state to local government. Apart from them, most of our services include banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, transportation, and educational institutions, even from K to 12.

We initially perceive the way an organization engages in its journey and build a relevant digital accessibility strategy. We are committed to ensuring safety and easiness across transactions, be it- a single document, a document library, or multiple assessments of their website. To this end, we make a quick engagement in making their PDF content accessible. Our service models are based on volumes or annual or monthly subscriptions. For the high volume accessibility of files, we engage in a multi-year contract. On every single page produced, we see ourselves as a partner to provide the best service model in the industry.

Could you cite a customer success story that you’ve had in the recent past?

We have worked with more than 5500 clients worldwide over three years. For instance, a huge insurance company was stuck with a siloed working procedure and eventually affected by a huge employee turnover. We stepped in with a multi-pronged approach nearly ten years ago and built out a digital accessibility strategy. On running ADScan, our experts prioritized the files with their web properties and found all the lost documents. We thereby remediated the ruined content on an ongoing basis. And again, the client started leveraging ADService, ADForms, ADStream, as well as our training services to automate their statements. Currently, they are one of the most leading accessible insurance companies in the industry, and we are proud to create longterm strategic success along their journey.

What differentiates AbleDocs from other players in the market?

With a legion of experienced professionals, we leverage the power of the ECM model, and so clients take us as their last-mile solution. We differentiate from big-game players in the PDF space like Adobe, iText, and Foxit by being an assortment service provider to get their clients over the line with full digital accessibility. I feel fortunate in building a complimentary partnership with a big name in PDF like Adobe. Our employees work in different Adobe businesses and are trained on their products, such as Acrobat and InDesign. This ensures that we use them right while creating accessible content for our clients.

Moreover, we provide the maximum knowledge transfer to make them recognize their capacity to service independently. Even we do it in-house on behalf of our clients whenever needed. This makes our clients flexible to engage in our PDF accessibility services.

What does the roadmap look like for AbleDocs?

Marching ahead, we draw an expansion blueprint across our products and service offerings with the latest and the greatest in the coming year. We have at least three new product launches and updated versions to bring into the market. While constantly listening to our client’s feedback, we look forward to investing in a global support model in helping clients instantly. We also hope to expand our training team to serve our clients better in their language of choice. Drawing special attention to our customer-centric approach, we have an exciting time for our team, clients, and the industry.