Deque Systems Inc. announced two new applications on Thursday: Deque Ramp Personal Edition, which helps ensure that Web sites comply with U.S. rehabilitation and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility guidelines; and Deque Undoc for PDF, which takes the content of PDF files and turns it into HTML or XML code. Both were released as public Betas.
“Our goal is to make accessibility ubiquitous,” Deque Systems president Preety Kumar said of Deque Ramp Personal Edition. “The Web must be for everyone, and we’re pushing the industry in this direction.” The application, which is a scaled-down version of the more robust Deque Ramp, tests single Web pages for accessibility and issues an analysis of possible problems, both under Section 508 of the U.S. guidelines and Priority 1, 2 and 3 of the W3C standards. The analysis includes feedback to help the designer correct any problems.
Deque Ramp Personal Edition will be available in late spring, according to the company. Pricing will be US$79 per user, with free editions available for college students and non-profit organizations. The Beta is not available yet for download from the Deque Systems Web site but should be ready soon. A Web page for the product was not live either when MacCentral went to press with this article.
The company notes that Deque Undoc for PDF also satisfies U.S. Section 508 rehabilitation guidelines. It can transform PDFs into HTML or XML code either singly or in bulk, automatically processing all documents in sub-directories too. All styles, images, graphs, tables, sub and super scripts, captions, metadata and links are transformed during the process.
Deque Systems says that the Deque Undoc for PDF Beta program will begin during the final week of April, so it should be available for download from the company’s Web site soon. The software will be released in late spring with a $695 per user price tag. System requirements call for Mac OS X, an 800MHz or faster processor, 512MB RAM and 20MB hard drive space.