Crawford Technologies announced the availability of a service to provide transactional documents for visually impaired customers in alternate formats. Crawford Technologies uses existing customer communications data to produce the requisite alternative formats for its clients’ visually impaired customers.

This is a clear example of how intelligent content delivery technology can be used to re-purpose content for a variety of business purposes.

In the case of Crawford, the value of the content is increased and customer loyalty and satisfaction is increased to a targeted audience (the visually impaired), without much added effort.  Content is not re-authored, but re-purposed, published in alternate formats to meet specific business needs.  CrawfordTech’s DAS accepts most common print files, including AFP, Xerox Metacode, PCL, PostScript, PDF, EBCDIC, ASCII Text and other data types such as XML, and produces the required format, including braille (grades One and Two), large format, audio and e-text.

Said Ernie Crawford, President and founder of Crawford Technologies, “Beyond the raft of regulatory requirements to provide these alternative formats to their customers, many of our clients recognize that this significant demographic is largely underserved. They have an opportunity to not only reduce their own risk and costs, but to attract and retain the visually impaired as loyal customers by promoting independence.”

Mr. Crawford is right on, and his logic and proposition is easily expanded to fit any number of other targeted communication paradigms.  And yet, as a recent study showed, most organizations are not leveraging content delivery functionality to any significant manner, despite the availability of many technology options.  This is an issue I have blogged on many times. What Crawford Technologies provides is an excellent example of one approach to intelligent content delivery – but it is just that – one example.  The ECM industry has done a poor job in educating the market on the value associated with intelligent content delivery. Intellignet content delivery technologies and services potentially represent the next big movement in ECM.