>> You go ahead and start the recording.
Just let us know when that's going.
>> I can see that's open.
All right, so welcome, everybody.
We're really happy to have you here today
at the AEM Center's webinar on Inclusive PDFs by Design.
We'll be starting the webinar and in just a minute, I'm going to give you a little bit
of introduction before we start, so a little bit about the Zoom.
And-- But today, if you haven't downloaded the materials already,
you can download the materials for today's webinar, you can download the presentation,
as well as the digital handouts and they're found at bit.ly, bit.ly/InclusivePDF0918
and that's inclusive with a capital I, PDF capitalized, 0918.
And Leslie has put that into the chat window if you want to click
on that link and get those materials.
And so we go to the next page.
It's just a little introduction for today.
We do have live closed captioning.
And so if you want to follow along with the closed captioning,
take a look for the closed captioning button where you have your Zoom menu and go ahead
and turn that on and you'll be able to see that.
And we thank Stacy for her joining us today and providing
that very valuable service for attendees.
And while you aren't-- your microphones are on mute, we absolutely want you
to contribute to the conversation.
So if you do not have your chat window open, now would be an excellent time to open
up that chat window, make sure that you're-- in the two fields on there,
there's a little pull-down, and make sure you have all panelists and attendees.
Otherwise, it will just come to those up here.
And just a background on that, I'm here to help you today hosting this webinar
and we have Leslie O'Callahan as well.
And both of us are here to be monitoring the chat window,
answer any questions that you have as well.
Leslie is on at the AEM Center but rest assured, it is Leslie and we're both here
to help you with this webinar today.
And if you are also using Twitter, please feel free to shout out using the #AEMforALL.
All right.
And so today, we are recording this, as you heard at the top of the hour,
we are fully recording so that presentation will be available as soon as it's done.
It's normally within one week, we'll post it on our AEM Center website and so look
for that coming up, so definitely, you'll be able to find that very soon.
And I think that's it, so before-- sorry, let me just please introduce Luis Perez.
I'm so excited to be here with Luis and I'm pronouncing his name wrong
so I apologize for that [Laughter].
I'm going to need a little lesson in that.
But if you have not heard Luis Perez speak before, you're in for a treat and if you have,
you probably know that's one of the reasons you came back.
He's very knowledgeable.
He is a tech-- What is your title, Luis?
>> Technical assistant specialist at the National AEM Center at CAST.
>> We are just so-- We are so thrilled to have him on the AEM Center today.
And so, we'll be having a-- Oh and coming up, we have a couple of presentations,
but it actually is my presentation next week.
Luis and I will be with you again next Tuesday at 2 o'clock, talking about your website
and so we'll have very interactive sessions.
So, if you want to join us again for that, that would be terrific.
The online course Module 2 started on August 30th but that continues,
we're in the second part of that Theories module,
so you can look for those events on our AEM website.
But please do look for those if you're interested in more events with the AEM Center.
>> And?
>> I'm going to hand it over to you, Louis,
for your presentation today, Inclusive PDFs by Design.
>> Thank you so much, Lynn, for that great introduction
and for getting us situated here to the Zoom environment.
Hello, everybody.
I'm so glad that you're joining us today for this presentation.
So, what we are going to be covering this afternoon, first,
just a quick overview of the PDF format.
So we'll explore some of the benefits, some of the challenges of using PDF
to share information, then I'm going to walk you through a PDF workflow.
So beginning with a good source material, good source document as the foundation,
and then going through how do we export that, how do we clean it up in Acrobat so that we end
up with a PDF that does the best job of, you know, putting out our message,
putting out the information that we are interested in sharing with people.
So we're going to look at some practices related to images, related to the structural markup
in our source documents and tables.
By no means, this is an expansive area, PDF design and accessibility.
So, we're going to cover some of the basics here, but we're going to focus on some
of the techniques where you can have a lot a bang for your bucks, right?
So if you make these changes, you will greatly improve the accessibility of your PDF documents.
So just a little background on the PDF format, PDF stands for Portable Document Format.
It is, at this point, I guess, a legacy format.
It was really intended to retain the fidelity of documents that were
on the screens when you printed them out.
So a little bit of background, it's been open standard since 2008, so that's a good thing.
That means that a lot of different tools now include the option to export to PDF.
Unfortunately, they don't always export with the same level of quality.
So depending on the tool that you're using to export to the PDF format,
you will get a document of varying quality in terms of the tagging and so on.
And we'll talk about tags in just a little bit.
And the benefit, another big benefit of PDF and aside from being an open standard,
is that it preserves a lot of a visual formatting.
And so if you have a document where you have a lot of callouts, you have a very complex flow
to the content, then PDF is perfect for that because you're going to preserve
that visual layout, that formatting when you export.
But there are some limitations, right?
One of the things that we say within those of us who practice universal design for learning is
that no single format is perfect.
And so with PDF, we have some limitations as well.
Probably the biggest one for me as somebody who consumes a lot of content in PDF is I
like to access it on my mobile devices, whether it's my tablet
or even more so on my smart phone.
And so when you have a PDF, it can be a little bit difficult
to navigate within a mobile environment.
Obviously, you can pinch in and out, but what happens when you do that,
pinch in and out to zoom in and zoom out, it then becomes a little bit more difficult
to follow the content because you have to scroll in order
to access the additional content that is hidden.
And then, you know, the support for it can be uneven sometimes.
So, an example that I found is on the Mac, the default PDF reader is called Preview.
And when I open PDFs in Preview, I don't always get the full navigation
that I get on all the readers.
And so, even though the content is there, I don't have the same flexibility in being able
to navigate by headings for example.
And that may have changed but that was my last experience with PDFs in Preview.
And then another issue is usability.
So a lot of times, a PDF will open in a separate window
or it will open up a new tab in the browser.
And when that happens, then you're back button breaks,
or that capability of being able to go back.
And so for some users of assistive technology like screen readers,
that can be a little bit confusing because now you've changed context,
you're on a different page or a different tab.
So those are just some things to be aware of.
One of the best practices, and we're trying to incorporate this as much as possible
within the AEM Center, is to provide alternatives.
Because, again, like I said, no single format is perfect.
So HTML, it's a great alternative, HTML is very robust and as long as you follow a lot of--
you know, some of the accessibility and best practices, many of which we're going
to be mentioning today, HTML has really good support for a range of assistive technologies,
whether it's our screen readers, text-to-speech, switch out devices, where--
for people with motor difficulties.
So that is a great option and then EPUB, with EPUB 3 has features like reflow or being able
to access a table of contents so that provides you with many options for navigation.
I especially like the reflow.
What that means is when I open up an eBook in the EPUB format on my tablet
or on my smart phone, I can resize the text and then the content will reflow.
So if there's an image, that image is going to move along with, you know,
that location where it was added in the flow of the document.
But I can continue to make the text bigger and I don't have to scroll as I make that text bigger.
So an example, if you know want to look at one on our website, we created a document,
Five Things Educators Can Do to Buy Accessible.
And I included that example for two reasons, to get you to go to the AEM Center website
and explore some of our resources, but also to explore this idea
of buying accessible from the store.
So in that page, when you get to that page, you'll see that we have the content in HTML,
we have it in PDF, and we also have it in EPUB,
so you can choose which format works best for you.
But it's always good to provide some options.
All right.
So the main thing to know about PDFs is not all PDFs are created the same.
So, some of the options that you have for PDFs are scanning a document,
and then unless you check the box in your scanning software or in Acrobat
if you used Acrobat to digitize an analogue document, unless you check box
for optical character recognition, and we've provided a definition of that in the chat,
it will take you to Wikipedia where you can learn more about OCR.
Unless you check that box that performs that OCR,
then the document is going to be scanned as an image.
And for somebody who is blind, that would be the equivalent of handing them a stack of papers
where all the pages are blank because the assistive technology can't go in
and recognize the text and to read it out loud or to navigate it.
So a step up from that, we can scan with OCR and now I'm going to relay date myself here.
I still have a few cassettes hanging around here.
So when you scan the document with OCR, it's almost like trying to find information
within a cassette, trying to listen to your favorite song within the cassette
where you can rewind, you can fast forward, but there is no way to get
to a specific point within the content.
You have to sort of listen to it from the beginning and then skip ahead a few times
until you get to the exact location.
And again, I'm going to date myself but the next best option, so we have scanned an image,
scanned with OCR, and really what we're aiming for is a tagged PDF.
And so if a scanned document that had OCR was the equivalent of a cassette,
a tagged PDF would be the equivalent of a CD, where I get a listing of tracks
and then I can go to specific parts of the document depending
on what information I would want to access.
So in a PDF that has been tagged, the headings will perform that functionality.
You can bring up a list of headings in most assistive technology and then you can skip ahead
to different parts of it very easily.
Or so that I don't date myself too much, if you're using podcasts,
a lot of the podcast players now have built in chapters.
And so you can skip around the podcast using chapter markers.
So it's the same idea as that you can access the information in a little bit more flexible way.
>> So, I was just wondering.
do you want me to interrupt with a question--
>> Let's hold off a minute, I'll leave some time for questions.
I also want some interaction from the audience as well in terms of your ideas and experiences.
So in terms of what are tags, so the way that I think about tags is in terms
of a house and the construction of a house.
So there's what we see on the outside, right, there's the walls that have had stucco applied
to them, there's the landscaping, and then there's what we don't see,
and which is the foundation of the house, it's the structure, right, the beams that kind
of give the house its shape and its structure.
And so, behind-- basically a lot of accessibility
with PDFs takes place behind the scenes.
It's part of building that strong foundation, having a strong structure.
And then the looks, it's a separate thing, just like our houses can look a lot different.
What's important is to have that strong foundation for accessibility.
So here is an example.
I'm going to do it visually first and then show you some of the tags.
So, here's an example from a report that I worked on recently.
This is the executive summary.
So visually, we can take a look at it, we can see that there's a heading
that says executive functioning, we then have a paragraph of text,
and then we have an image off to the side.
So that's what it looks like visually.
Now, if I were to look behind the scenes, I can see that the heading, executive summary,
that's marked up as a heading level 2, it's a second level heading,
first level heading would be-- that's the main idea of the document.
This particular heading indicates this is one of the major sections of this document.
And the paragraph is marked up with the paragraph tag.
And then for the image, we have a figure tag and then we have some alternative text.
So the alternative text is a description of that image to somebody who can't see it.
So in this case, the alternative text is a group of children raising their hands as they sit
around laptops in a coding class.
So again, the beautiful thing is a lot of this accessibility for PDFs is behind the scenes.
You can even make some changes to the tags and it won't impact what your design looks like.
So, it's a best practice in accessibility to try to separate the presentation
from the structure of the information.
So that's what you-- you know, what I'm going to keep coming back to as we go through here.
So, in the interest of having some interaction with you, what are you using PDFs for?
So in the chat, go ahead and just let me know what are you using PDFs for?
You know, there are some popular uses are reporting, so when you report out,
you want to make sure that everybody can open it on different machines so that's a benefit
of a PDF, is the fact that it's cross-platform.
Just about every computer has a PDF reader of some form.
Training handouts, so yes, the supporting resources
for a presentation or training just like this one.
So I you go to the page for it, you'll see that we have the handout
in both Microsoft Word format as well as PDF.
Electronic brochures and flyers, data reports, new student information that comes
to us electronically, so it looks like handouts, reports,
these are a lot of what we're using them for.
Somebody mentioned syllabus.
So again, with the syllabus, I can't emphasize this enough, if you can,
have it available on a variety of formats.
So, if you have a learning management system, maybe include it as HTML
and then provide the PDF, that's just another option that the students can download
and print out or access electronically.
Bibliographies for scholarly articles, oh, you're bringing back some memories for me
of working on my doctorate and managing those bibliographies.
So lots of different uses, so you can see PDF is the, you know, format that's been around with us
for a while and it's really popular in terms of how we share information.
Oh, right, so again, like I said, a lot of this is in the background.
So, some of the things that we can do, and this is what I am going to spend some
of our time this afternoon, adding those descriptions
to the images, which we call alternative text.
So here's that image again and then we have a description, and I didn't put the whole text
of the description there, but just to give you an idea.
So, in terms of alternative text, that's the description that--
it's available when someone is using a screen reader to listen to the text.
Now, let me pause here and just talk about captions, captions and descriptions
and when would you use, you know, each of those, because there's a place for both of them.
The caption is text that's going to be underneath the image or somewhere
around the image that's visible to everybody.
And so I think an important decision that you need to make is the information,
is there information about that image that would be helpful to everybody else or to everyone?
So it could be that the text adds some additional explanation about the image
that would help everybody understand the image better.
And so, if we think about it from that perspective which is a universal design
for learning perspective, then that caption is really making
that image more usable for everybody.
Whereas the alt text, that's only going to be available to use to sort
of assistive technology, typically people who are blind and who are listening
to the information with a screen reader.
So it's just important to know the distinction between the two
and why we would want to use one over the other.
The next item, so we have alt text or alternative text
for images, having a good heading structure.
So here's an example of that where this document has been split up into different sections.
Those sections have been marked up with heading tags.
And so in my assistive technology, I can press a keyboard shortcut
and it will present the list of all of those headings.
Or I can just skip ahead using a similar keyboard shortcut and go from one section
to the next and then start reading from that point.
So, the headings, you know, we see the appearance
of the headings the way that they have been formatted.
We don't actually see the heading tags.
Those heading tags are in the background, just like the alternative text.
And then if I can find my cursor here, be patient with me, I'm visually impaired
so I can't see my cursor very well.
And then tables, tables is another great example, again,
of how a lot of this takes place in the background.
Visually, you can scan this table, right,
and you can tell for each cell what header is associated with it,
whether it's a column header or a row header.
So for instance, if I look at the copyright, the cell that begins with copyright,
owner has the right to control the copying and dissemination of an original work, well,
I can scan up and understand that that's talking about flexibility,
and I can scan to the left visually and understand that that's talking
about individually purchased digital instruction materials.
So we do that very quickly visually but somebody who's using assistive technology, you know,
needs to rely on a different set of features.
And so that's where our table tags come in.
So in the background, again, there are tags that indicate which parts of the table are a header
and which part of the table are a data cell.
And then we can make that association.
So when each header or each cells is announced or spoken out loud,
it also announces the headers that correspond to it.
And so it makes that table much easier to navigate and understand
if you're using assistive technology.
All right.
So let me see what we have here.
We have a comment from a J. Wilson.
Let's see.
>> He's talking about when do we have to use alt text versus not using alt text?
So--
>> I will be-- Yeah, I'll be talking about that in this presentation.
So thanks for queuing me up, J. Wilson.
You're kind of looking ahead to what we're going to be discussing,
because I do have some information on that.
So, we already kind of hinted at it when we talked about captions versus alt text.
And if you want the information to be available to everybody,
then a caption may be more appropriate, but we'll talk about also what makes good alt text.
All right.
So, that's kind of a little bit of background about PDFs and tagging and why that's important.
But the next thing that I want to talk about is a PDF workflow.
So these are the four steps that I go through in my own workflow.
You may have a different workflow.
I encourage you to use what works for you.
But generally, I start with my source document.
And I try to optimize that as much as possible because that's going to reduce the amount
of touchup that I need to do in the final steps here.
And the next thing is exporting to PDF and, you know, generally,
there's lots of different ways to do that.
There are different authoring tools that have a different place for exporting.
I found the best results come from Microsoft Word with the Adobe Acrobat plug-in installed.
And that makes sense, right?
If you're using the Acrobat, PDF was originally an Adobe format,
even though now it's an open format.
Well, if you use Adobe's tools, you are probably going to end up with the best results.
So, I generally use Word with the Acrobat plug-in installed.
And then-- So obviously, exporting to PDF, you will run an accessibility check
in Acrobat once you get it in that format, and then you will touch it up a bit because,
as we know, no conversion tool, no checker is always perfect, so you'll probably have
to do some touchup after the fact.
All right.
So probably, the first decision you need to make in terms
of your workflow is choosing the right tool.
So these are just a couple of options here.
Microsoft Word, it's been around for a long time.
It has really robust accessibility features.
And it's even incorporating artificial intelligence now.
So, it's getting smarter and smarter all the time.
So Microsoft Word is a great choice if you have a fairly simple document,
one where the flow is fairly linear, you're not-- you don't have a lot of callouts,
you don't have things that are sort of out of the flow, that's linear.
If you have more complex documents, I would highly recommend Adobe InDesign.
That's an Adobe tool.
It integrates really well with Acrobat as part of their suite of products.
However, you may not always have InDesign in your, you know, in your place of employment
or it has a steep learning curve, because it's really a tool for people
who are in the publishing industry.
So, you know, that's something to keep in mind.
So again, it really depends on the contact, whether it's simple or complex at the layout,
that will determine what you use here.
Somebody is asking, what about converting from PowerPoint to PDF?
That's the same thing, you can use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in within PowerPoint
and then you can export to PDF that way.
And let's see.
Is [inaudible]-- I will-- Yes, running the--
>> You can run the accessibility checker as well.
>> You know what, it does not hurt once you've got your source document as, you know,
as nicely formatted and you're taking the steps to add the accessibility in,
run the Microsoft Word checker, run the PowerPoint checker.
Make sure you catch a lot of those issues at the source and then that will again eliminate a lot
of the remediation that you have to do after the fact.
So it doesn't hurt to run it both times, run it in your source document, using the tools built
into Office, and then run it, you know, once you have it in the PDF format.
>> Wait that plug-in that you use for Microsoft Word, does that work on your Mac?
>> Yes, it does.
I've actually-- primarily work on a Mac.
I work on both platforms.
Basically, it shows up in the ribbon in Microsoft Office once you installed Acrobat.
So, in order to work with PDFs and in order to do this whole workflow,
you need to have Acrobat available to you and it's part of Adobe's suite of products.
So, that's something to be aware of, is to--
in order to like be able to fully remediate PDFs, you need Acrobat.
And so when you install Acrobat, that plug-in also gets added into Microsoft Office.
Now, I don't want to leave the Google people behind.
I know Google is in use in a lot of schools.
So a quick note on Google Docs, by default, you can export to PDF out of Google Suite or G Suite
but it doesn't produce the best results in terms of accessible PDFs.
However, there is a free add-on for Google Docs, Google Sheets,
Google Slides, it's called Grackle.
We've provided a link for you in the chat.
It's also in your handout.
So in here, you can-- basically, it performs the same function as your accessibility checker
in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or Excel.
It goes through, it identifies a number of issues with your document,
and then it tells you how you can address those,
just like the accessibility checkers in Office do.
And then it also exports a PDF with the tags.
Now, I will be honest with you, I've used Grackle primarily as an accessibility checker,
I have not used it too much to export PDFs from G Suite.
I generally do most of my work in Office.
So, if any of you have experiences with Grackle, feel free to share those in the chat
for the benefit of others in the room, especially if you've exported to PDF.
All right.
So let's see.
We're going to go on-- So, let's take a look at some of these practices in terms
of optimizing our source document.
And what I'm going to do here is actually do a quick demo for you all.
So, I'm going to exit out of my PowerPoint and I'm going to bring up a simple Word document
that I've prepared for our presentation today.
And the first thing we're going to do here is hopefully, you all can see that.
If not, let me know.
I can see the chat while I have-- I'm sharing the screen.
So the first thing I'm going to do here is just place my cursor inside this heading
and then I'm going to go to the Home tab section of the ribbon and right away,
you can see this is a heading level 1.
So it's been marked up correctly.
And I can make that even clearer if I open up the Styles panel,
I can see that it's a heading level 1.
If I go to the next heading, you notice that there was a little jump there,
it went from heading level 1 to heading level 2, same thing in my Styles pane.
I can see that it's the heading level 2.
Now, I'm using Microsoft Word 2016 on the Mac, things may be in a different place depending
which version of Office you have, but what I want you to focus on is the best practices,
not necessarily where each of these tools is, although they may be
in the same place in your copy of Office.
But again, it's making sure that the document has a good structure,
so we're starting with a heading level 1 for what the main idea is,
we're using heading level 2 or second level heading for the subsections and so on.
And we want to make sure that that makes sense, it makes logical sense.
We're going from, you know, a higher level to a lower level or a more [inaudible].
Think of it as creating an outline for your document, right?
So you wouldn't skip levels when doing an outline, same thing here.
You want to make sure that a heading level 3 follows heading level 2 and so on.
Now, I'm going to skip ahead to another heading here.
And if you look at the Styles panel, uh-oh, wait a minute, this looks like a heading level 2
but I don't have a heading level 2 tag.
Uh-oh, Luis, how do we fix that?
So what we need to do is make sure we select the text and instead of going up to our, you know,
our formatting options here and making it larger and making it bold,
what we want to do is assign a heading level to it.
And so now, we see that in our Styles panel, it's marked up correctly as heading level 2.
Now, you can, if you don't like the way that Office
or that particular template has formatted the content,
you can always select the option to modify that heading level.
If you right click in my copy here of Office, I can choose modify,
and then I can change the colors, I can change the size, and so on.
One thing that I found in Office is sometimes the colors for some
of these headings don't actually pass the accessibility checker in terms of contrast.
And I'll share with you a free accessibility checker for color
that I use later on in the presentation.
So that's the first step, is making sure our documents have a good structure
to it using headings.
Also, if we have any lists, instead of using dashes or any kind of, you know,
kind of workaround, make sure you use your bulleting and numbering options in the toolbar.
That's going to add the appropriate list markup so that when we export it,
we're actually getting a list in terms of the structure not just in terms of the appearance.
The next thing that's really easy is we can select the image, we can right click,
choose format picture, and then we want to make sure
that that image has alternative texts in the Format Picture pane.
We're going to go to the third option from the left,
it's Layout in Properties, and we are going find alt text.
Now, I generally, as a best practice, I put my alt text in the description field.
You'll notice there is a title field and a description field.
So, the theory is that the title should be a more concise description of the image.
The description is supposed to be a more comprehensive description.
In practice, what I found from using screen readers is that they read the two together.
And so that kind of defeats the purpose of having separate fields.
So in general, I put my descriptions or my alt text in the description field.
Also, when you export to PDF, the title is not going to come along
for the ride, only the description field is.
So, I might as well get into the habit of just using the description field.
So in here, I'm going to put some descriptive texts.
It's not the best descriptive text but you have me on the spot here
so I just want to make sure we save some time.
So that's it.
And I can leave that pane open and I can go to other images and check the alternative text
for that image or if I need to fix it, I can also edit it here.
The final thing I want to do here is at the bottom, I have table that provides a summary
of some of the techniques in this document.
And so, what I want to do is place my cursor somewhere inside of that table and then
in the ribbon, I'm going to see the Table Design or the Layout.
And under Layout, there's an option called repeat header rows.
And so that's what I want to introduce here, repeat header rows.
Another way you can access that is you can just right click on the table,
choose Table Properties, go to Row, and then there's that same option,
repeat as a header row on the top of each page.
And that's what's going to add that table header, that appropriate TH tag,
that again is associating each cell with what its header is.
So go ahead and click on OK.
And as somebody mentioned, you know, one of your questions was
when to do the accessibility check, I'm going to do it here first just
to make sure to check my work as I go.
So I'm going to, under the Review tab, find the option for check accessibility.
If you don't see that in your copy of Microsoft Word or PowerPoint,
depending which program you're using, just do a search in the Help, just type in accessibility
and it will take you right to the accessibility checker.
So I ran that and look, no accessibility issues were found.
So at this point, I could go ahead and export that into acrobat.
So, again, by starting with our source document, we can do things like properly mark
up the headings, which will improve the navigation of the document.
Another tip is we can actually build a table of contents from the headings.
So in here, I can go to the beginning of the document, right,
and I can go to Insert in here somewhere.
I always forget where it is in here.
Anybody? I know I generally do it but it's been a while since I've put in a table contents.
I generally am working short documents, where the table of contents is not as necessary.
But in any case, in here, you can put it in a table of contents at the begging
and what it does is it picks up the headings
and then it gives you a way to navigate a long document.
So if you had a long document, that would be a really helpful usability feature.
All right.
So let me go back to my presentation.
So, headings, adding alternative texts, and then properly marking up tables, good,
good steps to ensure the accessibility of that source document.
Any questions so far?
I'll stop here for a second, catch my breath a little bit,
see if there are any other questions.
>> Yes, so there are several questions about alt text, and I do know you're going to be covering
that in just a moment, but people are eager to get to that topic--
>> Absolutely.
>> There's just a question about Acrobat Pro and I think that--
So, Leslie had put in the Acrobat Reader, but I think that the app that you're talking
about comes with Acrobat Pro which I don't believe is free.
>> Yeah, the Reader is free, right?
That's one of the reasons why PDF is so popular is that you can download that Reader
for a variety of different platforms to actually read the PDF or consume it.
But what we're talking about is authoring accessible PDFs.
And for that, you need Acrobat Pro and the latest version is Acrobat DC,
the version that I have, at least the latest version,
so that's the authoring tool, right, the remediation tool.
And that cost some money, although now it's available as a subscription as well from Adobe,
so you just pay a monthly fee and then you can get the features,
you can use the features of that software.
Thanks for clearing that up.
That's important.
All right.
If you all want to know about alternative text, so in Microsoft Office 365,
I just want to quickly mention this, there is actually the option that makes it much easier
to find where to add the alternative text.
You can just right click and do edit all text.
And it will take you to a field where you can use artificial intelligence.
You can click the option or select the option that says generate a description for me.
And when you do that, it will actually use computer vision and artificial intelligence
and will try to guess what the description of that image is, and put it in there.
And then it also gives you a confidence level so it will say very high or high.
I would still check it no matter what the AI says.
And then also very important, there's a box now where you can mark an image as decorative.
And what that does is it tells the screen reader,
this image is just there for visual appeal.
It doesn't actually have any meaning or it's not related to the content.
And so, it tells the screen reader, skip that so that it's not, you know, wasting time listening
to information that doesn't add to understanding.
So, if you don't see those options, Microsoft is rolling out some
of these features sort of on a rolling basis.
So depending on when your copy of Office 365 gets updated, you will see this option in there.
So, what makes good alt text?
And I'm not trying to be a politician in this campaign season, but a lot of times
with alt text, it comes down to it depends.
So, WebAIM, which is a really respected web accessibility organization,
they have a really nice tutorial related to alt text.
And what I boiled it down to whenever I'm thinking about, you know,
what kind of alt text I'm going to add to an image is the three C's,
so context, content, conciseness.
So context refers to the fact that I will examine the content around the image
and determine if there is enough information there, if the image is already described
in the surrounding text, then adding another description would be redundant.
And it's just another thing that the screen reader user has to listen too.
So in that case, if possible, you will mark it up as a decretive image,
if your Microsoft Word has that option.
Or when we get to Acrobat, we would mark it up as an artifact.
An artifact is the same thing as saying this image is decretive, skip it.
Content, so we want to make sure that we're actually describing the information
that the image conveys, not what it looks like.
So, for example, on the screenshot, I would describe what's going on in the image,
something like young person sits reading a book at an airport, whatever the scene is,
rather than she's wearing a black shirt, black pants, the book is red, and so on,
so content over appearance every time.
Unless, you know, the appearance is part of an experience that you're trying to convey,
and then we get into sort of the grey areas, and that's what we're talking
about the it depends part of accessibility.
And finally, conciseness, so you don't want to be hearing, you know, again,
it will depend on the image, whether it's simple or complex.
But a general good rule of thumb is think about it as a tweet.
So-- And I'm using the old Twitter limits.
So it used to be 120, I think, and now it's 280, or 140 and now it's 280.
So think about it as a tweet.
So if somebody couldn't see this image, what would be a concise description that captures
as much as possible what the image is conveying, what information it's conveying.
Here are some other resources, especially if you're working with complex images
like diagrams, flowcharts, anything like that.
The DIAGRAM Center has an excellent section to its website, where they give you a range
of examples and then they have even some descriptions
so you can see how those descriptions were put together.
In general, you want to go from general to more specific.
So, the first thing will probably be identifying what kind
of image it is, what the general trends are.
So for instance, if it's a chart, you know, are things going up, are they going down?
What's the length of period that that image captures?
And then you will provide more specifics.
So the DIAGRAM Center is a great resource, especially if you're working with STEM content
that we have a lot of information about that.
And then the Web Accessibility Initiative, which is part of the W3C, the standards probably
for the web, they have an Alt Decision Tree.
And that's really helpful because it guides you through the decisions that you need to make,
like is this image decorative or does it have content?
Is it described in the surrounding text?
Is it a link?
If it's a link, then we need to describe the function of that image as well.
So, where will it lead you to if you would select that image or that button and so on?
So the Alt Decision Tree is a great resource.
I encourage you to check that out.
So again, as I've said, just repeating myself, do it as much as you can in the authoring tool
of choice, and then perform an accessibility check, just to make sure everything is OK,
and then the next thing is to export.
Now I originally have some information about InDesign in this presentation,
but I realized I wasn't going to have enough time.
I've included that information in the handout.
So if you're interested in knowing some of the best practices for InDesign,
they're very similar to the ones from Microsoft Word, it's just how you get
to the options that's a little bit different.
But I will tell you one feature that I really like in InDesign.
And that's something called the Articles panel.
So in InDesign, if I have a very complex layout, I can open up the Articles panel
and then just drag my various frames and boxes into it and I can set the reading order
for when it gets exported to Acrobat.
And what's nice about this is that it's an all-or-nothing proposition.
If you added into the Articles panel, it gets exported and marked up correctly.
If you don't, it gets left behind as an artifact, or it gets marked up as an artifact.
So, if you have any document where there's a lot of visual elements that are just there
to make it look pretty, then what you can do using the Articles panel is just put
in the things that are essential, that need to be tagged properly and be accessible
to the screen reader, and then leave behind anything that should be an artifact.
So it makes the process a little bit easier for doing that.
So that's one feature of InDesign that's unique and that I thought I would mention.
But again, there are others and I've included those in your handout.
>> Really quick, just a follow-up to that, because somebody has asked about an issue
with the alt text not being supported with InDesign.
So, that's an option on the export, correct?
>> Yeah. Well, that's the next step.
So the next step is we want to export it.
And as I mentioned, to get the best results, you want to use the PDFMaker, which is what the name
of the plug-in is from Acrobat that you get on your ribbon when you have Acrobat installed.
And you get that in Office.
So, you want to make sure this is at the minimum.
You have the box for enable accessibility and reflow with tagged PDF selected.
That's what does all the magic.
That's what's going to add the appropriate tags.
So if you don't have that option selected, you can export it to PDF, but you're not going
to get the tags, and so that would be my first place that I would check.
So make sure that this correct option is selected for the export options here.
I generally also check the option for creating bookmarks.
So, that's just another navigation tool that people can use in Acrobat Reader
or Acrobat depending on where they're reading that document.
So, just make sure that those options are selected before you export
and you should be good.
You know, InDesign has very similar features.
So again, when you go to the export options, you want to make sure create tagged PDF
and also use structure for tab order, so that if you have any links,
those links will be accessible to the assistive technology.
And once we export to PDF, then we're going to check our work a second time.
So we're going to run the accessibility check in Acrobat.
So at this point, we've left Word or we've left whatever our original authoring tool is.
We're now working in Adobe Acrobat.
So the run-- to run the check, you're going to find that under View, Tools,
and then Accessibility, and you want to do a full check.
And like any checker, it's not always perfect,
and there are also things that are beyond its scope.
So, a couple of things are the logical reading order.
You're going to see that it's always going to flag that,
it's going to say, it needs manual check.
And then the color contrast, that's just not a feature that's built
in at this time into Acrobat.
So that's something you're going to have to check manually.
So that's where the touchup comes from.
So we need to go in and check our work manually and perform a few fixes.
A helpful tool within Acrobat is the Touch Up Reading Order.
A lot of people call it the TURO for short.
So when you have the TURO opened, if you go to View, Tools, and Accessibility,
it's going to place a little box around each item,
and that box tells you what the reading order is.
So you can check to make sure that it came over correctly.
And with-- if there is a mistake or the order is not right on a page,
you can actually remove the structure and then manually tag it.
And so the Touch Up Reading Order, what you do is you select the text or the content
that you want to tag, and then you just choose the appropriate tags from the menu in the TURO.
So that could be a heading level 1, that could be a heading level 2,
text will mark it up as a paragraph, or somebody-- did somebody mention artifacts?
It seems my timing is impeccable.
>> And then the question about screen reader as an artifact.
>> Yeah, so look at-- This is perfect timing.
So thanks, Taylor.
So, what you'll do is you'll select the image or it could be a graphic of some sort,
it could a bar, anything that you're using that's just there for visual appeal,
you'll select it and then you choose this option in the TURO that says Background.
So it's basically saying this should be skipped.
I don't want the screen reader to read that.
So, the other thing you're going to do,
the TURO is a helpful tool, but so are the Navigation Panes.
And really, this is where I spent most of my time when I'm working with PDFs.
And you can open those panes by going up to View,
choosing Show/Hide, and then Navigation Panes.
And there's two of these panes.
And this is really important to know which one does what,
so I'm going to try to be very clear here.
There's a Tags panel and thus, the name tagged PDF.
So the Tags panel shows you the individual tags and the content that it corresponds to.
So this determines the reading order for screen readers.
And so one of the things that I'll do, I don't only rely on the TURO because I found
that sometimes those boxes are kind of difficult to see.
What I will do is just bring up the--
bring up the Tags panel and then select the top-level tags, you know, it says Tags,
and then use my arrow keys, and as I go down the tags, I should see the right order still
up in my document over on the right side.
So I can navigate the tag structure, the tag tree.
And then if I have the option to highlight the content,
I can see what the reading order is based on the tags.
So that's one reading order, that's for people who use screen readers.
There's also an Order panel.
And the Order panel determines the reflow order.
So this is primarily for people with low vision.
In Acrobat Reader, you can actually reflow the content.
It kind of-- It's not as robust a reflow as what you get with EPUBs,
it's something that the software tries to guess and you can help it by making sure
that the order is correct in the Order panel.
So this is again a reflow order.
What it does is it takes the content and it places it in one column so that you don't have
to do as much of side-to-side scrolling.
You're basically scrolling up and down.
So, for me, I actually prioritize the reading order for screen readers.
And you may disagree with me but my logic is that for this order, right, the reflow order,
you may still have enough vision where you can rely on other options.
But for the tag order, you're relying on the being able
to like just listen to the information.
All you have is that screen reader.
So for me, I emphasize trying to get the tag order right first, and then if I can,
I will try to get it to match up because one of the issues is they don't always stay in sync.
So you could make a change in the Tag panel, and then when you go the Order panel,
it may not be-- you know, it may not reflect that change in the Tags panel.
So I spend most of my time in the Tags panel.
That's where I do most of my work.
I can rename tags.
You can just double click a tag and change it or you can right click it on it
and bring up the properties and change it.
You can move things around using drag and drop, so if something is not
in the right order, you can do that in here as well.
So, I would say, get familiar with the Tags panel as much you can.
All right, so I mentioned there is a free tool because the checker is only going to tell you
that you need to check the contrast.
There is a free tool called the Color Contrast Analyzer from The Paciello Group.
And we've included a link to this in your handout, so don't worry if you, you know,
can't recall it later, you can always look at the handout.
But what it does is it allows you, using color pickers, you can pick a foreground color,
you can pick a background color, and then you can see whether it passes the WCAG standards
for color contrast.
And you can see it in this case, I did.
So that runs on Windows, it runs on the Mac.
I generally just have it open all day because I'm often working with color.
And so, whenever I need to use it, I'll just use those color pickers and then I will,
you know, make sure to check for contrast.
So, the last step, and this is really important for accessibility and it doesn't get enough sort
of a callout, so I want to make sure that I give it some time,
is making sure that there's good metadata, because that's how Lynn is cheering over there.
[Laughter] We are big on this because, you know what,
it doesn't matter how good the accessibility of your document is if nobody can find it.
And so, in here, each document-- each PDF document has document properties
and it's important to give it a descriptive title, indicate who the author is, you know,
what the subject is, and then some appropriate keywords.
So that way, you know, this document can be in some repository,
they can pull in that information or hopefully in the future they can.
And so that allows us to properly organize information, right?
And in the future, what we're hoping is that accessibility metadata will be part of that.
There are standards for that, it's just not implemented as widely as we would like.
But it's just as important for me that, you know, not only is a document accessible,
but I can find documents that are accessible by doing a search for them.
So I can do a search for tagged PDFs or PDFs that include,
I don't know, you know, different features.
So again, under file properties, make sure you have that meta tagging.
And then I also make sure that I'd select the initial view by default.
It might be the file name.
But if you're like me, my file names are lots of untitled ones,
or something that makes no sense to anybody else but me.
So, I make sure that I-- instead of the file name, I will select the document title.
And again, I make that that's descriptive.
And generally, you won't have to worry about this.
This will generally be picked up based on your languages
that you have installed on your computer.
But it's always a good idea to check, to make sure that you have the right language
for that document, because that's going to determine what language
or what voice the screen reader is going to use.
And so that can be really helpful.
Trust me, there's nothing funnier than having a document in Spanish being read aloud
by your screen reader with an English voice.
It will actually have an accent.
And so it can be a kind of distracting.
It's funny at first but then it gets a little bit distracting.
So, just making sure that you select the correct language for the document will be helpful.
So I've seen a few questions people are asking, is this going to be recorded and mailed out?
Absolutely.
So there is a recording going on right now.
You can always refer back.
Everything we do at the AEM Center, we record it, we close caption it.
You can always go the event page for this webinar
and you'll find the recording there along with all the other resources.
>> Can I interrupt a couple questions that were-- that we missed going by?
>> Sure.
>> There's a question about accessibility.
Do I have to check the accessibility of this for principal-made documents?
And so, I-- if you want to respond to that or I can respond to that?
>> I'll let-- give you a shot and then I'll--
>> So I would think that if you're making a PDF and you're only planning on printing it
that you're eliminating some users from being able to access that document.
So, it-- I-- there might be some instances but I can't think of any of those off the top
of my head where you wouldn't want to be able to have
an accessible electronic version for those users that have to use electronic means to be able
to access that document, your mobility users, your users of mobility that can't handle paper.
So I would always err on the side of making sure it's accessible even if you're planning on going
to print because somebody is going to ask you for an electronic copy of that,
so that would be my answer to that.
>> That is exactly my answer.
So the context in which this comes up a lot is I'm going to handout at a presentation.
And so, I don't need to make it accessible
because everybody is going to get it at the presentation.
But the fact is, if you provide that document ahead of time for assistive technology users,
for users who have cognitive difficulties, they may want to review the content ahead
of time just to help with their understanding of the presentation or the event.
And so, just having it be accessible to begin
with in its digital format will create a better experience for everybody.
Or in our case, we usually send a copy of our slides to the captioner ahead of time.
So that she knows what vocabulary I'm going use and so, you know,
why not make it accessible to begin with?
It just helps everybody as much as possible.
So I think we're in agreement there, Lynn, right?
>> And then there is another question.
I know we didn't talk about forms and accessible PDF forms that they don't know.
We could include something in the handout, in the digital handout or--
>> Yeah, that's just beyond the scope of this webinar.
That's a completely more advanced, you know, topic.
We can definitely, if you're interested, we can sort of think about doing that in the future.
But with forms, I would say, if you can, again, thinking about the formats and what's optimized
for what, there is a lot of support for accessibility with forms on the web.
So if you can really think about do we really need a PDF of this form
of can we use existing web technologies where there's really robust of work
for forms, so that's just a thought.
It's-- That should be a first decision.
You know, should we-- can we do it on the web as opposed to a PDF?
And then if you absolutely need to do it in a PDF, there are techniques
for making those forms accessible.
They're just beyond the two minutes that I have or the one minute--
>> Just a minute.
>> So let me just summarize and then we'll stick around for few minutes.
But again--
>> Once again, I put the survey's link in.
>> Yeah, yup.
>> Oh, yeah.
So while Luis is finishing up, Leslie has put a survey link in.
We really do appreciate your feedback.
So if you could take a few minutes to fill out that survey, it's very important for us
because we can only get better at doing this if you're able to give us your feedback.
So we really appreciate your efforts in advance doing that.
So, back to you, Luis.
>> Absolutely, so just a little of a wrap-up here.
So again, having a good workflow will really make your life easier when it comes to PDFs.
So, beginning with the source document, making sure you do as much as possible
within that source document to create a good foundation, a good structure,
exporting it using the, you know, the correct tools, the appropriate tools,
running an accessibility check to make sure that you understand once the conversion takes place,
where are you in terms of the accessibility?
What needs to be touched up?
And then finally, using some of the options built into Adobe Acrobat Pro to, you know,
make sure the reading order makes sense, the tags are in the correct order, and so on.
And so, if you followed our workflow, you should end up--
the goal is that you end up with a robust accessible PDF in the end.
So, again, as Lynn said, thank you so much, everybody, for joining us today.
And we hope you found this helpful.
Just take a second to fill out our survey, our feedback survey.
And then I want to ask one last question of you, what is the top thing you learned today
that you're going to use in your work with PDFs?
So go ahead and share that.
Other than that, I will say sayonara, adios,
and then hope to you see back here next week for Lynn's--
>> Next week?
>> -- accessible websites.
>> Yes, next week, we'll be shifting, so I look forward to seeing you then.
>> So, that's it for us.
But I'll stick around and we'll end our recording, and then we'll just stick around
and see if you have any comments.
So what's the top thing that you learned today that you'll use in your work?
Allison, next session is going to be next week, the 25th, at 2 o'clock.
For more infomation >> Topical Questions - 2 October 2018 - Duration: 11:09. 
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