- [Mike] Thank you for joining the webinar today. We'll begin momentarily. Thank you for joining the webinar today. We'll wait one minute, let people sign in, and we will start soon, thank you. All right, good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mike Mooney, the digital marketing manager at TPGi. Wanna thank everyone for joining us today for an introduction to PDF accessibility with Evan Burnett. Before we get started, we just wanna go through a few housekeeping items. First off, this session is being recorded, and we will email everyone the recording after the event. We have captions available, so feel free to use those as needed. And lastly, if we have time for live Q&A, Evan will answer those at the end of the session, so please use the Q&A box to ask you questions. With that, I will let Evan introduce himself, Evan? - Thank you, Michael. Hello, everyone, my name is Evan Burnett. I am the document accessibility lead here at TPGi. Today we'll be covering the introduction to PDF accessibility, giving us some starting points for accessibility and how it ties into PDF and just giving us a good foundation so we can then build upon that. We're not gonna be covering everything, as mentioned, this is an introduction, but you will still leave this session with a good understanding of how to remediate a document, and any more advanced techniques you may need, we also offer those trainings as well. But, without further ado, let's get started. So what is an accessible document? A accessible document is a document that can be easily read and understood by a person using assistive technology. A lot of times it will be a screen reader, but all assistive technology still accounts. WCAG standards have been produced to outline what actions need to be taken to create an accessible document, but you can't just outline. With the standards, is the document still usable? We can achieve those standards. We can look at our checker and see that all of the green check marks are there and everything looks like it's good to go, but then the document now may not be usable. For instance, we can have reading order issues. We can have color contrast issues. We can have mislabeled labeled headings. We can have plenty of things that will maybe get past the checker, the automated checker, but it takes you and I to be able to go through these documents and make sure that they're actually usable for the user, and that could be in spot checking, all sorts of techniques that we can use to make sure that our document is fully accessible and does not just satisfy the WCAG standards, okay? So let's talk about what is incorporated within an accessible document. So this is a broad overview of the requirements for document accessibility. We have Document Properties. We have our Title, Author, Language. We also have Subject, which is just a couple sentences explaining what the document is about. We have Keywords as well, which is great for search engine optimization, SEO. We also have document title. There's a couple other things we have in Document Properties, but these are gonna be your, I would say, most important when it comes to accessing a document: your Title, Author, Language. We have our headings. We have alternative texts for images, accessible links. We have accessible lists. We have sufficient color contrast, excuse me, accessible tables and accessible forms. Unfortunately, due to this being an introduction, we will not be going through accessible forms because that is a training all in itself, so we're just gonna focus on all of these other concepts aside from forms. So, once again, you can definitely reach out, and we can provide that training to you as well. All right, so let's get into how to remediate an existing PDF. Now this is gonna be based on a document that maybe came from Word or came from another software but did not have any accessibility features applied to it, so we're starting from scratch. Usually when you convert any type of, let's say, Word document, InDesign document, PowerPoints, you'll have the option to be able to apply tags or have Adobe apply tags to that document upon conversion, but this is based on a document that has nothing applied to it, and we're gonna add our accessibility elements into it, right? So first we're going to add our tags. Our tags are going to be the lifeblood of our document. Without tags, our document is virtually inaccessible. Okay, so if it doesn't have any tags, we're gonna add tags to the document. How we will do that, we will... I wanna make a caveat as well. So tags can only be adjusted and modified in Acrobat Adobe, oh, sorry, Adobe Acrobat Pro, okay? So if you have a reader, you will not be able to access the Tags panel as well as some of the other accessibility features we'll be talking about today. So this is only if you have the Pro version of Acrobat that you'll be able to access a lot of these features that we're gonna be discussing today. Okay, so we're gonna go to our Tags panel, and you'll be able to find the Tags panel in this white space. I believe you can see my cursor. This white space here, if you right click on this white space, it'll actually give you all the options you can add for panels that you can show on the left side, and the Tags panel is gonna be one of those options. So once we have our Tags panel shown, if your document does not have any tags, you will see there's No Tags available here. So what we can do is just right click, go down to Add Tags to Documents. That's going to autopopulate your document with tags. Now this is not going to be correct. I've been doing this for, wow, over a decade, and I can tell you that I have yet to see a document, unless it's just purely headings and paragraphs, that the automated tag structure will be correct upon adding them. That's just not gonna be the case, so we're gonna talk about how to fix those tags, but that is going to be our start. Let's let Acrobat do some of the heavy lifting by adding tags to the document automatically. So once we have our tags added, once again, we right click on the No Tags available and come down to our Add Tags to Document. Once we do that, from there, we're gonna have to fix them. So as mentioned, they usually aren't correct, but we can edit them to reflect the right information. There's a couple ways to add tags or modify tags. You have your Touch Up Reading Order Tool. I'm going to be saying TURO for short, so T-U-R-O. Touch Up Reading Order Tool is gonna be TURO for short, and then we have our Object Properties. All right, so let's talk about how to utilize both of these tools. So first with the TURO tool. First, we want to find this tool, okay? The way you can find it is that there's gonna be tabs up here. You're gonna have a Document tab, you're gonna have a Home tab, and a Tools tab. You're gonna click your Tools tab, it's gonna give you an array of tools that you can choose from, and you're gonna select the Accessibility tab here. You're gonna see that option, select Accessibility. Once you so, this pane on the right side is going to show, and you're gonna select the last option, Reading Order, and that's gonna be the Touch Up Reading Order Tool, aka TURO. So once we have our TURO tool selected, you'll see this window show here, and this is gonna give you all of the options that you can use to adjust or modify or even add your tags. So we have our Text, which is gonna be, it's gonna be mapped to our paragraphs, so any paragraph text we have, we're gonna use that Text button to apply a Paragraph tag to it. We have our Figure. Our Figure is going to be for images, right? That's really the only time we'll use Figures for images. We have our Form Field, right? That's gonna be for tagging form fields, of course. Figure Caption we don't really use too much. I've actually come across some accessibility issues with that, so we don't really touch that. We have our Heading Level 1 through Heading Level 6. As you can see, there's a cap at six. We don't wanna have too much of a heading hierarchy 'cause that could be cumbersome for the user. We have our Table. Then we have our Cell and our Formula and our Background, which is artifacting. We may touch on that in this session, but we could use our Background button to basically hide content that's in our document from screen reader users or assisted technology users. All right, so in this particular example, we have our "Facts About the Panda Bear," and we want to tag that as an H1 because that is the title of our document. So how we'll do that, we will have our TURO tool open. We will click and drag, and once we click and drag, you'll be able to see a box that will appear basically at the point of your cursor, and that's going to allow you to select, whatever's within that box is gonna be selected. And then, from there, you can select which button you wanna choose to create that tag. So in this instance, we're gonna click, say, right about here, click and drag to right about here to select all of this content, avoiding this bottom content here. So only this is selected, and then we'll hit our Heading 1, which will apply our Heading 1 tag, right? So once we have done that, it will populate within our tag tree. This is gonna be our tag tree here, right within our Tags panel. So this is going to populate within this tree, and we'll be able to apply that to all of our tags within the document. Once again, they're gonna be automatically generated, but this will allow you to also, say, change tags, or say there's a tag or a piece of content that wasn't tagged for any reason, you can use this TURO tool to then apply a tag to that piece of content. All right, so that is going to be how we use our TURO tool. And, of course, all the questions that you have for this, I will mention at the, or I will a answer, excuse me, at the end. All right, we also have our Object Properties. This is another option we can use to modify tags. We can't add tags with the Object Properties, but we can modify, all right? So let's say we tagged it as a H1, but for some reason we want to change it to an H2 or a Heading 2, right? So from here, we can actually do that in the Object Properties. How we'll do that, you will first right click on the tag that we want to change, right? We'll right click on it. That's gonna give us a list of options. The last option, I want to say, pretty sure it's the last option, is gonna be Properties. Once we select Properties, you're gonna see this Object Properties window show. From here, we have our Type, Drop Down, within our Tag tab. So in between Content and Color, we have our Tag tab. Once we select that, our first drop down, our first field, is going to be our Type, right? And that's gonna be a drop-down menu. Once you open that drop-down menu, there will be tons of different tags you can apply to this piece of content. I highly doubt we'll use all of them. I haven't used all of them, but they are there for your choosing if you wish, but there are some that don't have any accessibility rewards, put it that way. So once we open up our Type, Drop Down, we'll have the option to change our heading level to, say, a Heading Level 2, 3, et cetera, or just a P tag, which is gonna be paragraph. So that's gonna be another way that we can alter tags in our document outside of the TURO tool. I personally use a combination of both. If I need to, say, change content to an artifact that may use... Artifact, when I say that, I mean making it hidden from screen reader users, I will use that Background button within the TURO tool, or if there's content that is not tagged, I will use the TURO tool to tag it. If I just wanna change tags, I'm going to use this Object Properties tag or Object Properties function. All right, so here's gonna be your two options for modifying and/or adding tags, all right? So from here, we'll move on to, oh, we'll explain some type of tags that you'll see. So, of course, we have our Paragraph tag. This is how it's gonna look. Here we have our heading levels. It's just one H1, but H1 through H6 is gonna look the same way. The only difference is gonna be the number. We have our list structure here. We're gonna talk about this, how to create a proper list structure within your document. We have our List tag here, our List Item. That's LI for short. We have our Label tag, which is our label, and LBody, which is gonna be your List Item Body tag. Little bit of contention between whether a Label tag is needed. We still add it, but there's arguments to not have, but we're not gonna get into that, obviously. Images, we have our Figure tag, as I mentioned before, we have our Link tag here, and then we have our table structure. That's gonna be our table structure, Table tag, our Table Row tag, and then our Table Header, and Table Data tags, all right? So that's exactly how it's gonna look. Now if it's a column header, then it's gonna be all table headers, but this is most likely a row, a table row. That's gonna have a one TH, and then the rest gonna be TDs, but I'm getting into the rabbit hole already. Let's move forward , right? There's some tags missing here. Of course, we have our Form tags, Form Fields tag that's missing, a couple other tags that are missing, but this is gonna be your main tag that you're gonna be dealing with, all right? So Document Properties, we talked about before that we like to have certain elements added to our Document Properties. We're gonna discuss that now. The shorthand way of getting to your Document Properties is to do Control + B, or Command + B for Mac, but if you wanna go the long route, which I recommend for beginners, is going to File and selecting Properties. That's gonna give you the same window we have here. So first thing we wanna do, go to our Description tab. We're gonna have pretty much all of the general metadata for our document here. We have our Title. We have our Author. We talked about that before, right? So these are gonna be very important. Technically, technically, according to just the guidelines, the Title is the only field that needs to be populated, according to the guidelines, but we talked about how standards aside, is a document usable? Is it the most accessible it can be, right? Is it offering the most information? You would like to provide as much information as possible to the user regardless of what the standards say. So we have our Author, and excuse me if you're training, honking in the background. That's very inconsiderate. I think I totally blew the training here, but, nonetheless, we have a Author here, which is gonna be Interactive Accessibility, which is really TPG. Actually, that was bought out by TPG, so just look at that as TPG. And then we have our Subject here, which is, once again, just offering a little more of a summary of what the document is about. Then we have our Keywords, as mentioned before, which is going to be our search engine optimization to allow us to find a document a lot easier on any search engine, right? In our Advanced tab, which I don't believe we have a screenshot, but that's going to give you the option to change the language. And then our Initial View tab will give you the option to show Document Title, okay? So those are gonna be two other things that we'll be able to add to provide more clarification to the user of what the document is about. All right, so this is gonna be your main things that you'll need to add to your Document Properties to provide the metadata necessary for a user to access prior to actually accessing the document if they choose so. All right, so, from here, let's talk about adding alternative texts to informative images, all right? So when I say informative, that can also be complex images, so that can be charts, graphs. In our other trainings, we go a little more in depth of how to, I would say, handle each one of those types of images 'cause complex images are maybe handled slightly differently than just regular informational images, and, of course, it'll be handled differently than decorative images. So right now we're just gonna focus on informational, but a lot of those concepts in terms of this can be applied to complex tables or complex images as well. So for here, let's say we have our document already tagged, we did our tagging and everything. We're fixing that at this point. We have a figure. We have an image that's tagged as a figure. We want to add our alternative text to it. We're gonna open up our TURO tool, and then from here, we can actually just right click on the image itself and then go to Edit Alternate Text. Then from there, you will then see this window here that will give you the option to add your alternative text in there. We talk about this in a more in-depth training for PDF accessibility, but what I will say is that we do not want to be too verbose. We do not want to be too wordy in our descriptions of an image, reason being is that users will not be able to navigate alt text, and that's short for alternative text or alternate text, when I say alt text. That's what it's shorthand for. There's not much navigation that a user can utilize when it comes to alt text, so keeping it concise but descriptive at the same time if that, that is a contradicting, will give the user the best experience when it comes to accessing alt text. So I recommend try to keep it short and sweet, but, at the same time, explain the purpose of that image so the user knows exactly what's going on without having to hear a whole paragraph, right? So for here we have a giant clock perched on the side of a bridge. That's perfect. Does a user need to know what the actual time showing on the clock is? You can add it if you want. I doubt there needs to be any clarification on the railing or the kind of day it is. Certain things you'll be able to omit 'cause it's not necessarily adding to the purpose of that image. So always consider the purpose of the image and the best way to convey it. I recommend even jotting it down in a Word document just so you're not adding it directly in there to get your thoughts together. All right, so that is how we add alt text to an image within PDF. So from here, let's talk about creating links, okay? So if your link has not already been created, well, during the auto-tagging, then we'll just create one from scratch. How we'll do that, so first we'll have our cursor and our Selector tool, which will be, within the PDF will be a black cursor. I have a white one here, but it'll be a black version of it in the toolbar that you can select to then be able to highlight text within the document. So we're going to select that tool, select the tool which is in the toolbar. We're gonna find our text that we want to highlight, or the link text that we want to highlight to then make an accessible link, right? So in this instance, we have international union for cetera, et cetera. So we have all our link text highlighted. We're gonna right click on that text and then go to Create Link. All right, so from here, you're gonna have this window show, and once we have this window shown, there's plenty of things you can do here, as you can see. We have our Link Appearance. That's going to be, of course, how the link appears. So we have Link Type, Visible Rectangle, Line Style, Solid. You can actually change this to an underline. Typically the designation for a link within text would be an underline. That's gonna be the common distinction between body text and link text. So we use an underline, right? There's a way to provide an underline. Actually, I think it's here. Line Style, excuse me. That's gonna be where you can select Underline here, but Visible Rectangle is going to be the option for the Type. And then Highlight Style, Invert, I don't really care about these two. You can change the line of thickness if you want. That's more so up to you. As long as the underline is present, then you should be fine. Also you could change the color to match the link text or to make it whatever color you want it to be as long as it is color contrast compliant. Next we have our Link Action. This is the actual reason we're here. So there's three options we have here. We have our Go to page view, Open a file, Open a web page. Open a file, we're gonna ignore, reason being is that if a user accesses this document but they don't have access to the directory where the file is located, the link is useless, okay? So that option will really be used for people that have access to that file and access to the directories and archives that allow that system to reach that file, and usually that will not be the case, so we're gonna ignore that. Go to a page view, that is going to be for your internal links. Think of this as a Back to Top link. Think of this as a Table of Contents links. These are gonna be where the Go to a page view is gonna be necessary. So you're gonna use that a lot, depending on the documents that you have, especially if there are Table of Contents in it. That's gonna be a link action that you're gonna be using if it's not already, if it hasn't already been created in your source document. Next we have Open a web page. That's gonna be for your external links, right? Going to external sites to be able to access that information. So for this option, or for this example, we're gonna be talking about opening up a web page. So once we have our web page option selected, we are then going to see this window here and just adding your URL. Couple things here, add in the entire URL. I would not just start with dub dub dub dot et cetera, et cetera. I would actually put in the https:// just to be sure that you're getting the correct URL in there. I've seen where if that's not added, there have been times where the link will actually try and find a file on the system, and there'll be times where I've seen where even the two slashes are missing and only the https: is there, and then, of course, that will break the link. So you wanna make sure that the entire URL is in there, just to make sure there's no issues, right? But once we have our URL in there, we hit OK, and we have created an accessible link, but, of course, we'll have to test it to make sure it works. So use your Tab key on the keyboard. That will be able to tab to your focus for elements, and these are the elements that can carry out an action, right? The links are gonna be an actionable element, so we want to be able to use a Tab key to then be able to access that link. Maybe 10%, not even that, of the time, there may be a chance where the Link-Object Reference, which is the functionality that allows for keyboard users to access the link, sometimes that may not be present. Majority of the time, it is. If it's not, there are ways to find that link. We can't get into that just due to time constraints, but majority of the time, I would say 95% of the time, the Link-Object Reference will appear. Everything will work flawlessly, all right? So we're just gonna use our Tab key to tab to the link, use the Enter key to activate the link to make sure that everything works how it should, the same way a user with a mouse will be able to access that link, right? So we have now created an accessible link. From here, we'll actually, oh, so excuse me. We actually have a quick tidbit on Link-Object References. So this, what you see here, Link-OBJR, that's short for Object Reference, we wanna make sure that is present, right? If we make sure that's present in our tag tree, then we know that we'll be able to tab to it within our document. Now, of course, you can actually just tab on your keyboard to see if you can gain focus to that link. If you can, then you'll know that, that Link-Object Reference is present. If you can't, then you'll know that it's not. That's a good way to tell, but also you can go within the tag tree and be able to see if that is, that the Link-Object Reference is present, and if it is, then you know that you're good to go. All right, so now that we have our links, let's move on to tables using the Table Editor. So the Table Editor can repair tables and ensure that the correct information is being conveyed to assistive technology users. This is how our Table Editor, oh, excuse me, before I get too far ahead of myself, this is not how the Table Editor looks. This is actually how it would look when we had our Touch Up Reading Order tool open, our TURO tool open, and, actually, if we have this Show tables and figures option checked, this is how our table's gonna look. It's gonna have a big X through it. I'm not sure why that's the way that they chose to visualize that, but this is going to show that there is a table here. Now if it's not tagged correctly, if you notice that the table's just full of Paragraph tags or something like that, it's not actually in a table structure, you can then go to your TURO tool, select the entire table, including the lines, all the structural makeup, all of the data, everything that the table has aside from the table title. So outside of the Exercise 7 here, everything else is gonna be selected. And then you'll hit this Table button here, and that's going to apply table tagging to the best of its ability. There may be times we need to adjust the table tagging a little bit 'cause it may not get it completely right. Especially depending on how the table was created in the source document, it may not be able to tag it correctly, and you just have to apply a little bit of manual fixing, whether it be changing certain cells to header cells, et cetera, but we're also gonna talk about that within the Table Editor. So once we have our table tagged, you will then be able to open up our Table Editor. So we're gonna go back to our table that we just tagged. We're gonna make sure our TURO tool is open. We're gonna right click and go to our Table Editor option. And you can also, excuse me, you can right click and go to the Table Editor, but you can also pick the Table Editor button here and our TURO tool as well. So there's two ways to go about it. I typically do the right-click option, I'll select the table, or I can just click anywhere inside the table, right click it, and go to our Table Editor option in there. But, once again, you can also go within the TURO tool and find it there. All right, so once we have selected our Table Editor option, this is how our Table Editor is going to look. It's gonna have red outlines that's going to depict each cell, okay? This is how Acrobat is seeing our table. As you can see, you see how the structural lines are extending past the Table Editor 'cause that's not how Acrobat sees it. Acrobat sees it as how we see it here when we open up our Table Editor. But, of course, it is all situated correctly. All the lines, all the cells are correct in their designation. So from here, let's say we want to add some features or some properties to our table cell. Most likely this is going to be our header cells that we're going to be applying these properties to. So we'll find one of our header cells here. Right click, go to our Table Cell Properties. Once we select that, you will see this window or dialogue show. So from here, we'll be able to do a lot of adjusting. First thing we want to do is select the type of that header cell or that cell. It could be a header cell. It could be a data cell, right? But majority of the time we're fixing our tables and opening up our Table Editor, it will be to assign header cell designations. So I will do that, of course, and select our Header Cell button, radio button, and from there, that will then change that cell to a header cell. Then from there, we wanna apply scope to our header cells. Scope is basically going to tell Acrobat, and therefore tell the user, that this header cell is the parent of all of these data cells under, depending on the scope designation. So if we have a scope of column, that means that header cell is gonna be the parents of all of the data cells within that particular column. So same concept when it comes to a scope of row. If we have a header cell within a row, and that's gonna be within the first column of that table, we'll then designate that particular cell as a header with the scope of row. So now Acrobat knows, I'll tell the user, or I will communicate to the screen reader, which will then tell the user, that, okay, this cell is apparent of all of these data cells within this particular row and/or column, depending on that cell designation. So that is why we apply scope to our cells. It's not, I wouldn't say, as important in HTML, it still is important, but it's especially important in PDF. So we have our Row Span here, or Attributes. So we have our Row Span, our Column Span. If we have a regular simple table, and this is an example of a simple table, just one row of header cells for the columns and one row of header cells for the rows, that would be considered a simple table. A complex table will have more than one header row, whether it be for columns or for rows. That would make it complex. But since we're simple, we can just keep our row span and column span one to one because all of our cells are going to be all equal in terms of their dimensions. Now there are times where you'll have merged cells, so then you'll have a row span of two or a column span of two with a row span of one. That's going to be you doing your adjusting within that table for it to have the regularity that it needs when going through your document. But if you have a table that has one-to-one cells, then make sure that this row span and column span is one to one, and you'll be fine. Getting into the ID and Associated Header Cell ID, these are complex table concepts that we will not discuss in our introduction, but, of course, we do have trainings that touch on this aspect of complex tables as well, and, of course, we will offer that to you if you so please. All right, so now that we have our header cells designated and we have applied scope to our header cells, from here, it's just a matter of repeating those steps for each header cell. Now the great thing that at least Acrobat has done for us is that we could select multiple cells at one time and do it in one go, right? So if we have Salesperson, 2013, 2014, these are all going to be considered a header row for the columns. So we'll select all of them, and how we'll do that, we'll have our Table Editor open, and we'll just click and drag. The same way that we use our TURO tool, we'll do the same thing within our Table Editor. So just click and drag, and you'll be able to select all of the header cells, and then apply your scope of row and your header cell designation. Same for the row headers, right? So we have our Susan, Roger, and Amy here. These are going to be all of our row headers. And from here, we're gonna do the same thing, select all three, right click, go to our Properties, and then have a header cell designation within a scope of row. Excuse me, so now that we have all of our header cell designations and all of our scopes applied, we have now tagged and remediated our table, our simple table. Once again, complex table is gonna have more steps, but if we have a simple table like you see here, those are gonna be the steps you need to take in order to create an accessible table, all right? So that is going to be it for tagging and editing simple tables using your Table Editor. All right, now let's move on to our checker. You've done a good amount of, or implemented a good amount of accessibility features, and now we're gonna go to our checker to check our work. If you've gone through your document, you still have issues, do not worry about that. I've been doing this for a while, and I still don't catch everything. That's why we have our automated checks here, and this is why we rely on them, because they can find things that we may have missed and allow us to go back and fix that. All right, so to launch our checker, we're gonna go back to our tools here. We're gonna go back to our Accessibility tool. We're gonna have this pane show up again. Now this is gonna be the option we're gonna choose to create our, or it's for Acrobat to check our work. Now once we click this, you're gonna see a window show, which is gonna basically ask, what things do you wanna check within this document? Everything will be selected by default. It'll just be a matter of if you want to adjust anything. I recommend you don't. I recommend just check everything. That would give you the most accessible document, of course. So once we have everything selected, we'll then hit Start Checking. Once we hit Start Checking, that is going to show your results, all right? So it looks like a lot of errors here, and there are a lot of errors here, reason being is that this looks like a scanned image or a scanned document. Scanned documents are the bane of our existence when it comes to documents. We do not want to deal with scanned documents. You can use something called optical or optimal character... It's OCR, yeah, OCR, recognition, excuse me. I couldn't say the word. Optical character recognition. That's going to allow for Acrobat to try and scan the document to see if there's any readable characters. The problem with scanned images is that half the time they're not readable, it's just a bunch of mumbo jumbo, so it's gonna be difficult for Acrobat to then figure out exactly what's going on in the document, and reason being is that due to also this document not having any tags, all of these issues are shown, and these issues are just really letting the user know that there's no tags. So because there's no tags, I'm going to fail everything, right? 'Cause the automated check doesn't know what to check for if there's no tags to base the checking on, right? So it's gonna say, well, everything's wrong because we don't know if there's anything wrong in the first place, right? Which makes sense. So this is clearly a document doesn't have any tags. A good way to also tell is that, hey, Tagged PDF, this has failed, right? So we know that, okay, we need to add tags to the document, We also have Primary language here, that's failed. The language was not selected. The title is failed. That means either there's no title at all or the document title is not shown, so that's obviously failed. Usually when it's bold here, that means that there's some fails here as well. Of course, they're not extended, so we can't go into more much detail with that. What I want to point out is we have our Color contrast and our Logical Reading Order. They say they need manual checks, so you're gonna have a blue check or a question mark here. That doesn't mean that they failed. It just means that they need us to check it, so luckily, the robots haven't figured everything out yet. We still have a fighting chance. So we want to use our manual checking, our own eyes, to be able to figure out, okay, are there any issues going on in this document in terms of color contrast or in terms of reading order? Reading order is gonna be the check that you can control the most, but color contrast, unfortunately, cannot be rectified in PDF. So, slightly. You can change the color of the text, but if there's a background color that you need to change, you can't modify that in PDF. You have to go back to your source document, change that, then re-export the PDF, so be very sure that you have your finalized version before converting the PDF to then carry out your accessibility implementation within PDF, because if you realize that, oh, I missed something, and I need to add that, it's hard to add things in PDF. You can. You can add text. You can even change the font of text. There's certain things you can edit within the PDF, but in terms of color, that's where you're very limited. And also adding and deleting text within PDF can actually damage the tagging as well. It's a lot that goes on, so I recommend that you finalize your document, make sure you have it reviewed, peer reviewed, whatever you need to do, so that when it does go to PDF to be remediated, you wouldn't have to go back and make changes 'cause they do most likely have to restart that accessibility path, and we don't want that. All right, so this is gonna be how the checker is going to look. Make sure a time check. I think we're good. And once again, this is gonna give you an idea of what you'll be seeing. If you have tags in your document, you're not gonna see this many errors, I promise, and if you do, then maybe you weren't paying attention to this webinar . I digress. So this is what you're gonna see here, all right? So this is actually an example of a checker that is fully passing. As you can see, we have one of our checks here, but, of course, we still have our question marks. These are not errors. These are not errors. So I want you to understand that just seeing these are not gonna mean that it's wrong. It just wants you to double check to make sure that it's right because the automated checker cannot distinguish that, between being wrong and right, all right? So that's just a matter of you doing your own due diligence to make sure that it is right. One thing I will say, if you want to see all green check marks, and it's better for you, I'm a little bit that way as well, you can actually right click on this and then manually pass it, right? So that's something that you can do within PDF or within the checker. You can manually pass these checkpoints. I recommend only doing that if you know that it actually passes. I don't want you to be dishonest, so make sure that all of the reading order and the color contrast is correct, and then from there, you can actually pass them manually if you choose to, but having these question marks is not gonna hurt anything. So let's talk about some document trainings that we do offer. This essentially wraps up the training in terms of talking about all accessibility features. So we have Word Accessibility training, PowerPoint, Excel. Excel, unfortunately, there's not many features within Excel when it comes to accessibility compared to Word and PowerPoint, so you're not gonna get much out of it, unfortunately. There's some things you can do, but overall it is not gonna be the best, and that's if you're staying in Excel. If you're converting to PDF, then you have a way better go, as you can see with the training we just discussed. You have InDesign, which is great training for understanding how to prepare your InDesign document for PDF remediation. It'll cut down a lot of time, honestly. Accessible Source Document Fundamentals. This is more so a combination of these just give you just basically everything in one, in a sense, but it may not go as in-depth as having the specific trainings. We have our PDF Accessibility, which is just extending more on what we talked about today. Then we have our Advanced PDF, which is going to be concepts that we may have not covered today but are going to help with creating an even more accessible PDF. What we talked about today is really for remediating documents that are not too complicated, that are fairly simple, 'cause usually those documents may have a table or two that are simple. May have some lists. May have some paragraphs or some heading text. So it is not gonna be too in-depth, right? So these are gonna be the trainings that we do offer here at TPGi. And last but not least, do we have any questions? I see we have, oh, we have a lot of people in the chat, a lot of Q&A. I will say, if there are any questions that I can't answer live, they will definitely get back to you. Just please reach out to Michael or any point of contact, any references, to be able to ask any specific questions, that we'll get those answers back to you. But we have about 15 minutes, so, Michael, if you'd like to hop on and delegate some of these questions, that would be awesome. - [Michael] Yeah, for sure, one of the things I wanted, there was a couple things going on in the chat specifically around being a screen reader user, and you might know the answer to this. I didn't. So basically the question was, as a screen reader user, is there a training or some kind of training offered by TPGi or another resource that helps screen reader users remediate PDFs for accessibility? - That's a great question. Unfortunately, we do not offer that, but that is something that I would like to look into 'cause obviously here at TPGi, we also have screen reader users that do web accessibility. So I would definitely like to reach out to them to see how they feel about that and if there is something that we can create in terms of a training that we can offer, but, unfortunately, at this time, we do not in terms of having a screen reader used to remediate documents. I know that's gonna be a little bit tougher in terms of actually being able to do the remediation process, but, once again, we'll have to get back to you on that to get a better answer or provide another resource outside of TPG that can give you that kind of information. But as of right now, we do not have anything that would offer in regards to that. - [Michael] Okay, so one of the questions, I'm just gonna work from the top, and we can answer as many as we can. So first one is, how do you ensure PDF accessibility when you're dealing with PDF production at scale? - That's tough, that's tough. Now you can create templates if you have a source software that you used to create both documents. You can have a template that applies as many document accessibility features as possible prior to conversion. We also deal with a lot of banking institutions that also create bulk documents, bulk statements, and they'll have a proprietary software, some type of software that they use or where they implement the accessibility features into that software so that when it is converted to PDF, it is accessible, and if not fully, it's basically there. But that is something that's very tough because we train on an individual level in terms of each individual documents. I shouldn't say this, but there are services out there that do handle bulk document remediation. I'm not at liberty to say the company names, but that is something that you can search to see what other companies offer bulk remediation, in that aspect. We really deal with the individual document because they all can be unique in their own way. - [Michael] Awesome. When converting from PowerPoint to PDF, PowerPoint pass the Accessibility Checker and checklist, but PDF is still not accessible. How do you create PowerPoint and ensure accessible PDF conversions? - See, well, unfortunately, there is not a, Microsoft Office has not been able to add enough accessibility features so that when you create a PDF from that PowerPoint or that Word document, that it's going to be fully accessible. There's still gonna be a couple of things that would need to be changed. It's not much, it's not much, but, at the same time, there are certain things that need to be added within the PDF to then make that PDF fully accessible. That's one of the things when converting to PDF, is that there are gonna be some additional steps that need to be done because that's an entirely different platform. Therefore, there's gonna be some different tweaks that need to be made to then adjust to that platform. I understand. I know that could be frustrating if you did all of your accessibility add all your accessibility features within the PowerPoint, and you go to PDF, now there's more errors. That's really just because it's another platform, so there's other accessibility features, and, to be honest, Acrobat has a more robust number of features than Microsoft Office when it comes to accessibility, so that is one thing that you would have to handle on the PDF side. That's why we talk about PDF remediation, because usually people are gonna convert to PDF from their source documents, so we wanna make sure we cover that over everything, but, unfortunately, yes, there's gonna be a couple other things that need to be done in PDF as there's no software that creates a fully accessible PDF yet. I'm sure it'll happen. It'll happen, but not yet. - [Michael] Awesome, what are the PDF remediation options for people who don't have Acrobat Pro? Few people here are able to get licenses. - So there are a couple other companies out there that offer software for PDF remediation. Unfortunately, that is going to cost as well. When it comes to PDF remediation, just accessibility in general, there's gonna be some type of upfront cost to get access to those features, whether it be getting Pro. There's another company that's pretty leading in terms of PDF accessibility and document accessibility. Once again, I'm not at liberty you to say the name, but a quick Google search, you'll be able to find that company, that you can also get a license for, that will allow you to then be able to remediate documents, and it may be easier to get that license than it would be for Acrobat Pro. But, unfortunately, there's really no free software that I know of that you can remediate an entire document from scratch. Not that I know of. Maybe there is something out there, but I am an Adobe Acrobat person, so that is what I use, but who knows. There may be software out there that's free that doesn't need any license, that you can still achieve a lot of these accessibility features and be able to implement them, but I do not have any resources for any free remediation. - [Michael] Can you touch on Save As PDF versus Export To PDF from Word or MS Office, or, I guess, it was slash MS Office, in terms of the best starting for tagging in PDFs? - Yes, great question, so Save As PDF is going to be your best bet. You can do Save As, and then go to the, I guess, the Format Drop Down and then Select PDF. You can do that, but if you have a Save As a wPDF option directly within your Word window, I would go with that. You can also, and we talk about this in our more in-depth PDF session, that there's a Create PDF button that you can access. You can do a quick Google search and be able to figure out how to get that button to show on your toolbar. There's actually an Acrobat option within Word that you can actually show, and then you'll have a Create PDF button accessible to you easy, like right there, right in the toolbar. You can adjust the preferences. There's plenty of things you can do. And if you have that Save As a wPDF function, you most likely have Pro because that function is actually an extension of Adobe Acrobat Pro, which then kind of implements itself into Microsoft Office. It's a little bit convoluted there, but if you have that option, then I would definitely use that option. The second option would be to, you can do Save As, and then find the format for PDF. You can do that. The one thing I recommend against, strongly recommend against, is doing Print to PDF. That's not gonna give you anything. That's not gonna add any tags. It is gonna be the worst way. It's basically start from scratch, as we just discussed. You wanna do that, you can, but I recommend doing a Save As a wPDF or do Save As and then find the format for PDF before doing any print. But, yes, if you have that option, I would use that for sure. - [Michael] Okay, awesome, It's good to know. All right, so next one, if you click and drop to correct tags, is this process accessible using a screen reader to be able to fix the PDF as a blind user? - Click and drop to? Or can you repeat that one more time, please. - [Michael] Yeah, so it says, if you click and drop to correct tags, is this process accessible using a screen reader to be able to fix the PDF as a blind user? - From my experience, I don't believe so. I have to be transparent with you. Unfortunately, Acrobat does has have his limitations. There are things that, and part of that is I think Adobe, for some reason, I just feel like they have, the last thing I'll say is abandoned Acrobat, but they don't have any incentive to make it better, it seems like, and that's the unfortunate part of it. So I can't say that there's too many options for screen reader users to remediate documents, but, once again, as for the first question I was asked, I would definitely like to get back to you on that to see if there is any information or resources out there that can give you the right information for screen reader user to remediate documents. And, once again, I'm going to talk to a couple colleagues of my own that are purely screen reader users to see if they have the ability to remediate documents as well. But, once again, from my experience, I have yet to truly see how robust the ability is to remediate a document solely using a screen reader. That's definitely going to be a challenge. But, once again, please reach out with that question, and we'll be able to get back to you with a proper answer, but I can't answer off the top of my head right now. - [Michael] Yeah, that makes sense. All right, we have five minutes left, so we can probably do a couple more. Is it possible to remediate PDF documents from a, I guess we just kind of answered that one, as a screen reader user with tags. So I think we just answered that one actually. Are there specific resources you can recommend for JAWS users who need to learn PDF remediation? I think we're gonna research that. We're gonna ask our colleagues internally. If using Acrobat to remediate, can you tag everything first and then go back and adjust the reading order afterward? - No, I wouldn't recommend it. Now when it comes to reading order, and this is actually another back and forth within the industry, the tags are gonna be the main source of reading order for majority of screen reader. If you're using JAWS, if you're using NVDA, a lot of these leading screen readers, they're gonna be referring to the Tags panel, really, for the reading order. Now I recommend still adjusting the reading order, and that's something that we didn't discuss in this particular session, if you're going to adjust the reading order, do that first. The reason why is because if you go through all your tagging and then you go to the reading order, which is the Z-order, and then you adjust that, it's going to destroy your tags. So in terms of changing the reading order, the Z-order, that could also be considered the content order, these are kind of like the under-the-hood kind of concepts, then I would recommend doing that first and then adjusting your tags from there. 'Cause, like I said, if you go the other way, if you tag everything correctly, everything looks beautiful, and then you go into your Z-order and change things around, you're gonna destroy the tags that you just created or just modified, et cetera. So yes, dealing with the Z-order/content order, with the content order, you can change that around all you want and that won't destroy the tags. It's really the Z-order that's going to destroy the tags when you move that around. But the content order, that's something that's going to be, it's kind of like the, it really is the controller of the content, and that's why it's the content order, because you can change things around in there while keeping the integrity of the tags. And, of course, you'll want that order and the tag order to be identical, but the Z-order's gonna be dangerous if you already have fixed the tags 'cause, once again, that will destroy them. That's something that would be, we can talk about content order in our more advanced trainings, but we focus on tag order because that is the main panel and the main structure that screen reader is going to be referring to. - [Michael] Awesome, all right, I think this will be the last question. How do you test or check the accessibility of a document? Is it tested on the browser or is it tested on Adobe? I often get a weird result on the browser Firefox with my screen reader, NVDA, even if the document is correctly tagged on Adobe Pro DC. - Yes, that is one of the cross, I won't say cross browser, but going from local to browser, there's gonna be, unfortunately, some things lost in translation there. I wish it was better. I don't have a complete answer as to why the browser can't handle the accessibility features the same way as Adobe can, and I think it's just based on a, it's probably a browser-to-browser basis, but, yes, I have noticed enough come across issues of trying to access a document in the browser and noticed that it is not gonna be as accessible as it would be locally on your own system. That is one of also the shortcomings, like dealing with documents hosted on the browser, trying to access them within the browser. And that's why we all, there's usually an option to download the document onto your local system to then access it, 'cause that's going to be your best bet in terms of utilizing all of the accessibility features that have been implemented. But yeah, there's gonna be a browser-to-browser case how verbose or robust or how little accessibility features have been implemented in browser viewing of PDFs. So that's something that I think browsers are working on constantly, on how they could make their browser more adaptable to PDFs when it comes to regurgitating the accessibility features that have already been implemented locally right before being hosted on the website. So, yeah, that is something that you're gonna find mixed results on, and that's just a industry-wide issue that I'm hoping browsers are putting a lot of effort into fixing. - [Michael] That makes sense. Awesome, well, I know we're over time here, but wanted to thank you and everyone for joining us today. We'll follow up after this session with all the, people had requested some of the information in the chat, so we'll send out the chat log for everyone, send over any answers we have for the Q&A with the recording, and any other resources that I can send along. And if anyone has any additional questions, obviously, feel free to reach out to us, and we'll help you as best we can. But with that, thanks Evan for the time and the awesome presentation, and we look forward to talk to everyone soon. - Thank you all, have a great day. - [Michael] All right, awesome, bye.