Conversion For Regulatory Compliance
To make documents comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, IMC also worked with Prime Recognition to add special identification, indexing and other functionality to render documents usable by persons with physical handicaps. As a result, IMC is one of the few companies qualified to do 508 remediation using market-leading Prime software.
Simple, volume automatic document enhancement of documents for physically challenged persons leverages 508 compliance functionality already embedded in PDFs. We convert documents to PDFs then create index templates for similar documents (say, travel expense reports) that provide required data (name, address and department of the creator of the report, date, etc.). Based on default settings in the PDFs, Adobe Acrobat readers can read aloud all text in the document in the order in which it appears in the original (if the document does not have jumps, sidebars, etc.) as well as the templated indexing data. For different types of documents, we create index templates appropriate to each type and process them in batches according to type. When users access documents, they experience the text in the right order on the page with appropriate descriptions of graphics (for instance, a voice-over saying, "the empire state building at night" for the visually impaired) in alternate modes. Our enhancements to Prime software let us index documents automatically from templates or OCR them for full-text searching. Typically, customers outsource this process, but IMC can also provide an in-house solution.
We can also do complex document enhancement for documents in different formats in addition to PDF with text in varied order (jumps, sidebars, etc.). In this case, we manually zone areas on each page and apply intelligence that indicates the order in which the text should be read as well describes the graphics, etc. that best-of-breed readers can interpret. We have modified Prime's OCR software allow custom and automatic indexing as well as OCR for full text searching of these types of documents in alternate mode.