Section 508 Accessibility

Section 508 requires that U.S. federal agencies' electronic and information technology be accessible to people with motor, vision, or other impairments. Agencies — and the vendors who serve them — must be able to show how the documents they publish support assistive technology.

Tagged PDF from structured source

IRen (formerly XEP) is a publishing engine: it has no end-user interface of its own, and its role in an accessible workflow is to produce output that assistive technologies can work with. The engine generates tagged PDF, in which the document's logical structure travels with the file so that supporting software can interpret it:

• Alternate text supplied by the author for images and other non-text elements is composed into the output PDF.
• Row and column headers in data tables are identified, including tables with multiple logical levels of headers.
• Document structure is preserved, so content remains readable and navigable independent of visual presentation.

Because IRen formats from XML, accessibility starts in the source: structure and alternate text defined once in your data carry through to every rendered document. This holds at any scale, from a single form to high-volume runs through IRen InGrid. The XEP 4.31 release further improved the engine's accessibility extensions, and IRen carries that work forward. Product documentation is supplied in PDF, HTML, and XML formats, and alternate formats are available on request at no additional charge.

Assessing compliance

RenderX publishes Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) that detail the accessibility characteristics of our products, criterion by criterion, to help government customers determine their own compliance. The VPAT for the XEP engine line (PDF) is available for download.

Building accessible document output for an agency or a government contract? Contact sales to discuss your requirements.