In Cyprus a scanned PDF is now a compliance problem

Part of the service a customer buys is now the document that comes with it. That includes contracts, statements, policies and onboarding forms, and all of them have to be read aloud by a screen reader. Those documents in many offices are scans. A scan is a photograph, and with a photo the screen reader can’t find anything. Getting the text back out is the first step and the cheap one: Convertio’s online convert pages take a text-based PDF of up to 1 GB and return it as DOCX, TXT or EPUB, with the conversion running in the cloud instead of on the machine that uploads it. There’s one more step for a scanned page, and Convertio keeps its OCR on a separate page, which turns a scan or a photograph into searchable PDF, DOCX, XLSX or TXT.

Contents: a study guide nobody could read · why Acrobat calls your file an image · where conversion ends · what Cyprus now requires A study guide nobody could read “I am currently enrolled in a Salesforce course tailored for individuals with disabilities, offered through the Blind Institute of Technology,” Dean Vasile wrote to the WebAIM accessibility list. “I’ve acquired a study guide, but unfortunately, I am unable to read or use it. I’ve received a quote ranging from $5. 25 to $22. 50 per page for remediation, which is a bit out of my budget. ” Steve Green, managing director of Test Partners, offered to look at the file and set out what the answer depends on: “I can’t promise anything because it depends on the size, content and why it’s not accessible. Does it just need to work with a screen reader? Or does it need to work in Reflow mode and support colour substitution too, which would take longer to fix? ” Jim Allan, from the same list, identified the file in one line: “The page in question was a pdf of a scanned (or printed to pdf) of the…