The optimal offer to your website’s accessibility needs & compliance is a click away!
UA is one of the leading companies in Israel in the field of website accessibility and one of the first to have operated in that field. We do not sell accessibility plug-ins but offer a comprehensive process for adjusting your website to the effective accessibility standardization, of which our proprietary accessibility plug-in, Andi UA, is only a small part.
Andi UA was designed to comply with the Israeli standard 5568 and the global standard WCAG 2 (level AA). It is a product of many years of intimate familiarity with the world of digital accessibility and equally rich practical experience that includes servicing over 1,000 websites and more.
As a company that has developed and was immersed in the world of digital accessibility in Israel since its beginning, we have built for our clients the optimal accessibility package at the product/service levels as well as pricing. Our clients know exactly what they get from us and why. We do not offer flashy features that have no use other than deeper penetration into the client’s wallet. At the same time, we utilize cutting-edge technology for maximizing and stabilizing accessibility levels on our clients’ websites.
The technical process is simple and requires our clients to perform a single simple act: embedding a line of code, nothing else! From then on, we install the accessibility platform on the website and probe its pages and content using assistive technologies such as screen reader software, designated keyboards, specific switches and so on, in order to make sure that all the relevant content has actually been made duly accessible. Andi UA does not interfere with the website’s source code and subsists as a layer above the website.
Our accessibility services include our built-in proprietary accessibility statement with proper instructions for accessible navigation along the website. We further provide detailed instructions regarding the general accessibility statement that must be published on the website, which also refers to accessibility arrangements at the physical premises of the business, contact information, and more.
Once the work is completed, we provide an adequate accessibility certificate, testifying that the website was provided with accessibility adjustments in accordance with the law and the instructions of the Commission for the Equal Rights for People with Disabilities, which is the regulator in the field.
Implementing accessibility adjustments upon the website is not the end of the story. Websites are dynamic and ever-changing products. That is why we have developed monitoring and control systems that continue to ensure that the level of accessibility on the website is maintained on an ongoing basis and to update us whenever adjustments or repairs are necessary (due to changes in design or content supplements at the website, for example). We sell and provide long-term service, and the guiding criterion is our clients’ security and content.
Document Accessibility is another aspect of ensuring that whatever appears online is also accessible to people with disabilities. In essence, it is a complementary requirement to that of equipping the website itself – as a platform for various kinds of content – with the necessary accessibility adjustments.
Adjusting a website to the needs of people with disabilities is effective to all the content the website displays: live text, photos, videos, text files and more. Hence, document files (PDF, WORD, PPT etc.) which are uploaded to the website must also undergo accessibility adjustments. These include official and/or commercial announcements, brochures, professional articles, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use documents, published tenders, reports, e-books and various other official and/or private publications.
Implementing accessibility adjustments to such documents, which may contain dozens or even hundreds of pages, is a subfield of digital accessibility and it is executed through designated methods based on the same accessibility principles set forth in the legal standard for website accessibility.
For example, some websites include their Privacy Policy or other “Terms” docs. as live text in the pages of the website. These are made accessible as part of the general accessibility adjustments of the website. Other websites, however, upload these same texts in the form of links to PDF or other documents. These documents must undergo separate accessibility adjustments in order for the website to comply with the legal requirements. Another area where that service is imperative concerns public institutions such as municipal authorities, community centers, governmental agencies and other institutions whose websites contain documents (tenders, various announcements) intended for the general public, as well as public companies. Having raised money from the public, the latter are obliged to publish their financial reports and other announcements regarding their ongoing activity and results, which also have to be accessible to people with disabilities.
We specialize in accessibility adjustments to Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel). We combine proprietary technology with built-in Office accessibility tools in order to process large documents in short timeframes and provide ongoing availability for our clients. Our accessibility methods are based on automation supplemented by manual tests and QA by trained professionals in adjustment to the Israeli standardization, using advanced tools and subject to scrupulous quality control.
We provide document accessibility services to municipal authorities as well as more than 150 public companies in a variety of fields (energy, real estate, holdings, retail, high-tech, fintech, pharma, etc.), including leading companies in the Israeli economy, whose financial statements and ongoing reports to the stock-exchange we process for accessibility. We are available 24/7, 365 days a year. We have no ‘inconvenient time slots’, and the needs of our clients, whether they have to upload a tender, an announcement to the stock-exchange or any other short or long document, come first. Our clients’ feedback speaks for itself and is our greatest pride.
Our services are provided at a fair, reasonable and very competitive price, for which you will receive document accessibility services at the highest level. In obtaining our services, you will meet the requirements of the law and at the same time fulfill your institutional, corporate, but most of all – moral, duty as institutions and/or public corporations towards the population of people with disabilities who consume the content you publish online.
Any kind of document that is not an “organic” part of the website pages, but rather opens as a document file (PDF, WORD, Excel, PPT or any other format) through a link in the website. The guiding rule is that every piece of content in the website should also be available to people with disabilities. Therefore, every textual or visual file that is reachable through a link on the website should be accessible like the organic texts and images on the website’s pages.
Yes. The legal standard explicitly states that a document should be processed for accessibility using the accessibility tools available in the software in which it was created or edited. Hence, processing for accessibility documents in Word (text) or Power-point (presentations) formats using the accessibility tools of the Office software (complemented and upgraded, in our practice, by our own proprietary techniques), is fully endorsed by the law.
No, provided you save/convert the Word file to PDF using an adequate PDF application such as Acrobat Pro, for example. There are many applications/software online for saving/converting Office files to PDF format. Only a few of them support the preservation of the accessibility adjustments made in the original document. The software which is pre-installed on the computer or is available online for free download usually does not support that option. Therefore, it is important to make sure that the PDF application installed on the computer supports that feature. If so, there is no need for any additional action and saving the Word document to PDF format in the ordinary way will preserve the accessibility adjustments applied to the original Word file.
Yes, provided the saving of the Word file to PDF format was done properly and that the only step that is performed in the PDFSKY system is the locking of the total file intended for upload on the stock exchange or the ISA websites. The PDFSKY system, in which the locking is made, also contains an option for saving Word files to PDF format and combining separate PDF files into a single document (for example, combining the different parts of a financial statement into the final complete document which will be published online). Performing these operations in PDFSKY often disrupts or even neutralizes the accessibility adjustments applied to the document beforehand. The proper procedure for avoiding this is as following: 1) save/convert the Word file to PDF format in an adequate PDF application, such as Acrobat Pro; 2) Where the final document consists of separate files – merge/combine them to a unified document using the same PDF application (Acrobat Pro, for example, includes easy and efficient editing options, including combining files), and 3) Lock the unitary, final PDF file in PDFSKY.
The accessibility adjustments applied to the documents are designated mainly for people who suffer from blindness or visual impairment and cannot read the contents that appear on the screen. Hence, they use assistive technologies like screen reader software in order to “hear” the content online. The accessibility adjustments applied to the document take the form of arrangement/editing at the level of the software settings underlying the written content, in order to ensure a fluent, coherent and accurate vocal reading that will replicate as closely as possible the way a human eye depicts written text (paying heed to headings, lists, tables, diagrams etc. and interpreting them as such). Hence, these adjustments are not visible to the naked eye (and should not be since people without disabilities should also be able to read the accessible document in its original form). Each document – Word, PPT and PDF – includes a ‘document map’, which displays a part of the accessibility adjustments. Other parts are only explicable through acquaintance with the methods by which they are performed and can be illustrated only by an instructed comparison of the original and the accessible versions, which is another reason for entrusting that task to experts who know their job.
One of the main advantages of Office documents over other formats from the accessibility perspective, is that it’s possible to modify an Office document that was already processed for accessibility without impairing the existing adjustments and without a need to apply them anew. As a rule, corrections and changes within text paragraphs or tables do not affect the accessibility level of a document that has already been processed. Other, more substantial changes to the structure of the document, such as adding new chapters or titles or tables or diagrams to an accessible document, require inspection and can sometime require complementary adjustments, as the case may be.
As a general rule, corrections of text or numbers within text paragraphs and tables do not impair the accessibility level of an accessible document. However, we accompany our clients up to the last moment before uploading their documents online, including last-minute inspection and real-time support on the spot.
Yes. The Power-Point software includes tools for accessibility adjustments just like the Word software, and we use them in conjunction with our own proprietary methods (the same way we use the accessibility tools in the Word software) to process the presentation in accordance with the accessibility principles of the legal standard.
UA provides ongoing counsel to various corporations and institutional bodies. Toovya Sheinfeld, the company’s CTO, is a renowned and highly regarded authority in the field of digital accessibility, and he engages, among other things, in ongoing preventive consulting, accessibility reviews/testing of websites which face legal proceedings on accessibility issues and in providing expert opinions and opposing opinions for legal and pre-trial proceedings.
Toovya Sheinfeld is one of Israel’s most renowned and respected experts in the field of digital accessibility. He took an active part in the legislative changes in this field from its earliest stages, cooperating to that end with the Commission for Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities in the Ministry of Justice, the Internet Association, Access Israel (NPO) and the Israeli Standards Institute. He led the formation of the digital accessibility service-platform at Access Israel, and had built, in collaboration with Access Israel, the basic courses for training developers, designers and content editors in the basics of digital accessibility. In total, Toovya had trained hundreds of digital accessibility agents/experts on behalf of Access Israel. Toovya’s extensive expertise in the world of digital accessibility make him a highly sought-after lecturer in the field, and he frequently gives lectures and holds webinars on various aspects and interfaces of the field to companies and other institutions in Israel and worldwide.
