Toronto, ON—April 7, 2020—GrackleDocs Inc. today announced that Grackle Suite™ unlimited site licenses are free to June 30, 2020. The offer applies to all K-12 school districts, community colleges and universities using G Suite, now suddenly challenged by the COVID-19 crisis to quickly transition to remote learning and publish curriculum or other materials online—accessibly. Register here.
Grackle makes it easy to create accessible output for educational materials produced in G Suite™ (Docs, Sheets and Slides) for blind and visually impaired people who use screen readers.
The institutional benefit? Easily and quickly mitigate the risk of OCR (Office of Civil Rights) complaints due to accessibility non-compliance with Sections 504 & 508, ADA and Title II in the U.S., Ontario’s AODA and the UK Equality Act. Such complaints can frequently result in negative publicity, government scrutiny, costly litigation or large fines. Plus, it’s just the right thing to do.
Grackle Suite is comprised of the only Add-ons that check, remediate and create accessible output from G Suite: Grackle Docs™, Grackle Sheets™ & Grackle Slides™. They sit alongside any document you’re editing to easily and quickly check and remediate accessibility concerns. With one click Grackle tells you what’s wrong and where to find the error. Then it tells you how to fix it—remediation at the point of creation— against established WCAG 2.0, Google’s own accessibility guideline and PDF/UA standards.
In K-12 education, Valerie Hull, Webmaster/Photographer at Barbers Hill ISD, Mont Belvieu, Texas said, “As our K-12 District Webmaster, I am responsible for performing accessibility compliance remediation on many non-compliant PDFs. I desperately needed a user-friendly solution to enable staff to help. Grackle Suite exceeded my expectations. With complex documents, it not only identified errors, but it took me directly to them and showed me how to correct them. I was impressed, but I wanted further proof that Grackle would be user-friendly for staff who are not compliance-savvy. I asked a co-worker to try it, and within an hour she emailed me saying, “I’m in love!” There was no turning back. We had to have Grackle!”
From the Higher Ed perspective, Dr. Terri Gustafson, Director Educational Media Technologies, Northwestern Michigan College (NMC), Traverse City, Michigan commented, “At NMC our faculty, staff, and students are power users of G-Suite tools. Our Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Policy applies to websites, digital content, and software created and used by NMC for organizational and academic activities. Grackle Docs is an important tool for creating accessible G-Suite documents to help us reach our accessibility goals and maintain compliance with W3C WAI WCAG as required by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It is an affordable solution for a small institution to move forward with creating accessible documents and remediation.”
Jeff Mills, Co-Founder of GrackleDocs, added, “We’re known by our visionary customers like Barbers Hill District and NMC for both innovation and amazing customer service. Other users have told us Grackle Suite provides the easiest solution for faculty, staff and students to learn and implement accessible document practices, directly from the classroom. With the advent of the COVID-19 crisis, when educators are required to quickly publish curriculum materials online for remote learning, it’s also critical to take this opportunity to make content accessible for screen reader users and thereby minimize the significant risk of Office of Civil Rights (OCR) complaints.”
About GrackleDocs Inc.
GrackleDocs is a pioneering Canadian-based virtual software company with advanced accessibility Add-Ons for Google’s G Suite. With Grackle Suite’s Add-Ons, webmasters, faculty, staff, and students can easily check and flag issues, then remediate and create accessible output from Google Docs, Sheets and Slides documents to ensure they comply with accessibility standards. As well, Grackle Suite enables the creation of alternative accessible formats such as PDF/UA. Our users have made more than 3 million documents accessible in over 100 K-12 districts, colleges and universities in 20 countries. As a trusted Google for Education Integrated Solutions Initiative Partner for increased accessible output from G Suite, Grackle has years of experience with its G Suite integration and working with Google teams.
The American Consortium for Equity in Education, publisher of the "Equity & Access" journal, celebrates and connects the educators, associations, community partners and industry leaders who are working to solve problems and create a more equitable environment for historically underserved pre K-12 students throughout the United States.
