What is OCR and why does it matter for accessibility?

Optical character recognition turns pixels into characters, and without it a scanned document is an image as far as any software is concerned. Nothing can search it, no screen reader can announce it, no retrieval system can return it, and no remediation can be applied because there is nothing addressable to remediate. Estates routinely hold substantial proportions in this condition and underestimate it, because the documents look fine to a sighted reader opening them individually. For accessibility the consequence is absolute rather than partial: an un-recognized document fails every requirement simultaneously. Centralpoint performs recognition and structural conversion during ingestion, so the content enters the governed estate as text with declared structure. The same pass serves full-text indexing and metadata enrichment, which is why the transformation is worth doing once properly rather than separately for each obligation.