FAQ's | Digital Accessibility

The most common questions we are asked are located below! If you have a question that isn't answered below contact the Digital Accessibility Coordinator at [email protected].

What is a Disability?

A Disability is a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.

The five (5) categories of disabilities that benefit from digital accessibility are:

Physical - movement functions
Hearing - hard of hearing or D/deaf
Visual - colorblind, full blindness, or low vision
Cognitive - ADHD, Autism, or Dyslexia
Speech - Speech impediments or the inability to speak

What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital Accessibility refers to the usability of information and communication technology (website, mobile app, web application, online documents, etc.). Digital Accessibility impacts all users whether they have a disability or not but the primary reason for Digital Accessibility is to help individuals with one or more disabilities navigate information and communication technology independently and acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services within the same timeframe as individuals without disabilities, with substantially equivalent ease of use.

Does my site have to be accessible?

Yes! Please see the standards and guidelines page for more information.

Do the documents on my website (and other digital platforms) have to be accessible?

Yes. Any item that is placed on a digital platform (website, mobile app, web application, online documents, etc.) should meet WCAG AA requirements. In order to make your documents accessible use the built in accessibility checkers provided by the program.

Before posting any document, ask yourself the following questions:

Does the document need to be on the website?
Is there critical information in the document that is needed on your website?
Can the information be provided on a webpage instead of a document?

I need help with editing my website for accessibility. Who can help me?

If your site was built by the CACS team you can email the CACS team to check out their Drupal Basics website to help you make any and all accessibility tweaks you may need. If you need further assistance contact CACS directly.

If your website was built and is maintained by someone else contact your website administrator for assistance in making the needed accessibility adjustments.

You may also contact the Digital Accessibility Coordinator at [email protected] to help with specific issues and questions you may have on fixing accessibility issues on your platform.

What is considered a digital platform?

A digital platform is anything that uses technology to view the content. A few examples of digital platforms are:

Websites
Mobile Apps (mychart, maps, etc.)
Programs for a computer (Microsoft, Adobe, Slack, etc.)
Digital Signage (user interacted and non-interacted)
Kiosks in buildings (user interacted or non-interacted)
Video streaming (Vimeo, YouTube, Spotify, etc.)
Social Media
Online Payment Centers

What type of content needs to be accessible on my digital platform (website, app, digital sign, etc.)?

All content needs to be accessible. This includes but is not limited to:

Images
Videos
Audio
Electronic Documents (word, pdf, PowerPoints, etc.)
Links
Any kind of moving content (sliders/slideshows,.gifs etc.)
Headers
Color
Graphs/Charts

How accessible is my website?

You can find out how accessible your website is by contacting CACS and having your site added to the Siteimprove site scanning platform. If your website is already in Siteimprove you can login and view your Accessibility score.

Why is my color contrast insufficient?

What does this mean? Text without sufficient contrast relative to its background can be difficult to read for users who are colorblind or have low vision.

How do I fix it? WCAG requires a minimum color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text, and 3:1 for large text (18pt and above, or 14pt bold). Text color and size may be controlled by your site's fixed theme. Please contact your local website support team or the CACS Drupal team at [email protected] for guidance.

Best Practices: Do not use header tags (h1, h2, etc) to change text size or color.

How can I determine if my website/document colors are accessible by people who are color blind?

There are many different options for determining if your colors are accessible by users with colorblindness. There are many apps and resources that allow you to determine what they see depending on their type of colorblindness and you can find them listed below:

I and/or my team would like additional training, who should we contact?

To request training on accessibility contact us by emailing [email protected] with your request for training.

If I have difficulty accessing any Information and Communication Technology what should I do?

You can report disability-related barriers to Report a Barrier.

Are there code examples I can use to develop digital materials?

Absolutely! We have provided a list of code examples from Deque University for various digital features that are commonly found within digital materials. For training, register for one of our sessions.

Is it possible to Skip to Main Content?

What does this mean? For users who may use a keyboard to navigate the internet, it is important to have the first element reached by keyboard (often by pressing "Tab") be a link that allows them to skip to the main content area of the page. This allows users to skip the navigation section (with its many links) and images at the top.

How do I fix it? This element must be added by developers. Please contact your local website support team or the CACS Drupal team at [email protected].

How do I add a text alternative to video or multimedia (iFrame)?

When you embed videos you need to make sure that you have the proper label associated with the video so that assistive technology users are able to know what each video element on your page is without having to watch the video.

In order to do this you will need to add a small piece of code to your embedded iFrame in your content.

If you need help with this or need to be trained contact CACS or the Digital Accessibility Coordinator.

Example:

Before:

After:

Or you can also do the following but the above is the preferred way:

What is the difference between an accommodation and inclusive practice

Accommodations are specific adjustments that have been requested by an individual with a disability to help ensure effective communication, access to information, and an equal opportunity to participate.

Inclusive practices are proactive things that we do by default to help ensure effective communication, access to information, and an equal opportunity to participate for everyone.

Captioning and Transcription

How to caption sounds, music, or spoken words?

When adding captions, it is crucial to identify sounds and speakers. Check the basic guidelines below, and for detailed best practices, visit w3.org's transcribing page or explore 3PlayMedia’s Captioning Standards.

Captioning spoken words

If they are on screen and their name is known, then their name should be in uppercase letters or in parenthesis. Example: “DIANE” “ALORA” “DEAN” “CARSON” “(Diane)” “(Alora)”
If they are on screen but their name is not known, then a descriptor should be in uppercase letters or in parenthesis. Example: “DOCTOR” “PROFESSOR” “NARRATOR” “ANNOUNCER” “(Professor)” “(Doctor)”
If the speaker is offscreen, then their name or descriptor should be in italics followed by [offscreen]. Example: “PROFESSOR [offscreen] Who knows what an atom is?” “(Professor) [offscreen] Who knows what an atom is?”

Captioning sounds or music

If the source of the sound is not visible, then it should be identified in brackets. Example [audience applauds]
Sounds can be described, or the specific sounds spelled out. Example: “dog growls” “grrrrr”
Should be all lowercase
If the sound is coming from off the screen it should be italicized
If music has lyrics, the lyrics should be verbatim with music icons before and after the lyrics.

What platforms are recommended for auto-generated captioning?

There are many options, but some that allow users the most flexibility to create their own captions are:

Adobe 2023 (new auto caption and transcribe feature)
MyMedia/Kaltura
Canvas Studio
YouTube

Automated captions for meetings:

When do I need to caption and/or provide transcripts for my multimedia?

Provide Transcripts and Captioning for Multimedia
Type of Multimedia	Captions	Transcripts
Pre-recorded Video and Audio	Yes	Yes
Pre-recorded Audio only (e.g., podcasts)	NA	Yes
Live Video and Audio	Yes	Provide if Requested
Live Audio Only	Provide if Requested	Provide if Requested

Audio descriptions are needed in certain circumstances when visual information is not being clearly conveyed to the user through sound. Contact the Digital Accessibility Coordinator to determine if your multimedia requires audio descriptions and to learn how to obtain them.

Provide sign language interpreting services if requested. Contact the Student Disabilities Access Center (SDAC) or complete the ASL Request Form for assistance.

How do I caption multimedia that is produced?

You can hire a vendor or auto-generate the captions. See the Captioning Vendor and Cost Section for more details. Here is how to edit auto-generated captions with commonly used university services. Please note it is essential to review captions/transcripts for accuracy that have been auto generated.

For assistance, contact [email protected] or the Digital Accessibility Coordinator.

What companies can we use for captioning?

UVA Contracted Captioning Vendors
Company	Live Captioning	Post-Production/Pre-Recorded	Audio Descriptions
3Play Media	Yes (Remote)	Yes	Yes
Ai-Media	Yes (Remote)	Yes	No
Azur	Yes (Remote and on-site)	Yes	No
Cielo24	Yes (Remote)	Yes	Yes
Karasch	Yes (Remote)	No	Yes
Verbit	Yes (Remote)	Yes	Yes
VZP Digital	Yes (Remote)	Yes	Yes

Depending on the kind of captioning you require the cost will vary, but in general the costs will be approximately:

Post-Production: $1.12-$2.00 per minute with 3-day turnaround time
Live Captioning: $80.00-$150.00—per hour
Audio Description: $7.00-$20.00 per minute

For a full list of vendors and up to date pricing visit the VHEAP Captioning Initiative Website or contact the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Coordinator.

I'm hosting an event (online or in-person), what do I do?

To view sample language for your event invitation or for more information on making event accessible visit the University ADA Coordinator’s planning accessible programs and events page or contact the ADA Coordinator Team directly ([email protected]).

I received a captioning accommodation request, what do I do?

For a UVA Student

If captions are not accurate, or not available for the multimedia, contact the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Service Coordinator at [email protected]. Please note that the turnaround time for captioning service is five (5) business days.

If you are conducting a meeting and captioning is needed, then submit the captioning request form or email [email protected].

For a Faculty/Staff Member

If captioning is needed for a faculty or staff member, please complete the captioning request form or email [email protected].

For a Community Member

If you are in need of an accommodation for an event, but are not a student, faculty or staff member, contact the event organizer to request an accommodation for the event you plan to attend.

Will the University pay for my captioning needs?

The university covers captioning for student accommodation requests and academic course content (e.g., video recordings, podcasts) through the Captioning Project. Departments are responsible for funding captioning for public-facing web content or material behind a UVA Login. For inquiries about captioning specific content or payment details, please email [email protected].

Can I just turn on the automatic closed captions?

You can use automatic closed captions (speech recognition technology), and we recommend turning them on by default for inclusivity. However, these auto-generated captions often do not meet accessibility standards and need editing. They work best for clear, single-speaker videos with minimal background noise and no specialized terminology. While cost-effective, they require more time for editing and proofreading to ensure accuracy.

If an accommodation request has been received, we ask that you contact the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Coordinator or the ADA Coordinator Team (faculty and staff) to ensure that accommodation efforts are consistent with University procedure.

What do I do if I have an audio file? (i.e. Podcast)

When sharing an audio-only file, such as a podcast, include the transcript directly below the media. At UVA, it is common to present the transcript in an expandable and collapsible accordion. Ideally, display the transcript as text on the page rather than as a separate file. If providing a separate document, ensure it is assessed for accessibility before placing it on the digital platform.

Transcript Example

Video and Transcript Example

How to enable automated captions for meetings and webinars

Managing Automated Captions
Zoom: Accessibility Considerations & Best Practices
MyMedia/Kaltura
Canvas Studio
YouTube

How do I use captions within Panopto?

Machine generated speech recognition captions are automatically populated to any video created or uploaded to Panopto.
Panopto Professional Caption Instructions:
- Instructors may email [email protected] to ask for access to submit professional captioning requests for videos used in courses.

How do I use captions within MyMedia?

How to use captions within Canvas Studio?

How do I add captions to my media file in Canvas Studio?

I need more assistance, what do I do?

We value your commitment to making your media accessible to all. Please feel free to complete the brief Captioning and Transcription Request/Question Qualtrics Form or contact [email protected] to discuss how we can assist you with your captioning efforts.

What is the difference between 99% accuracy and <99% accuracy?

Accuracy is derived by the number of errors in a given audible recording. Errors can be related to formatting of the captions provided or specific word errors such as spelling, punctuation, speaker identification, relevant non-speech sounds, and others. 99% accuracy is the industry standard for caption quality. Accuracy is a critical aspect of the captioning process.

Accuracy effects your content. If not accurate it...

Makes you content inaccessible for those with disabilities
Alters the meaning of your content
Decreases reading comprehension
Lacks compliance with FCC, DCMP, and WCAG standards and major accessibility laws.

A 99% accuracy rate means that there is a 1% chance of error or leniency of 15 errors total per 1,500 words. A 95% accuracy rate means there will be 25 errors.

Examples:

In the trailer for Manchester By The Sea, during a very emotional moment, Michelle Williams’ character is captioned saying “My heart was broken nose is broken too,” rather than “My heart was broken. I know yours is broken, too.”
In a recent course, the professor said “He proposed the law of octanes by analogy with the seven intervals of the music scale.” VS. “He proposed the Law of Octaves by analogy with the seven intervals of the music scale.

Equidox

What is Equidox?

Equidox is a PDF remediation solution that uses automated features to simplify some of the most manual remediation tasks to a few clicks.

How do I get a login to Equidox?

To begin using Equidox you will need to register for the online Equidox training provided in workday. Once you have completed the training complete the request form and once your training has been verified you will be granted a login by the Digital Accessibility Coordinator or the CACS team.

How much does Equidox cost?

Equidox is free to use for UVA faculty, staff, and UVA Health employees.

Who is eligible to use Equidox?

UVA faculty, staff, and UVA Health employees are eligible to use Equidox.

Is there training for Equidox I can take?

Yes! You can find training located in workday for Equidox. f you need additional training contact the Digital Accessibility Coordinator for assistance

Can anyone see my documents?

No, the only people who are able to see your documents are: Equidox Admins, People in your group, People you share your file with

Can I share a document with someone to help me?

Yes! You have the ability to share your files with anyone who has an account in Equidox.

I have a document that is similar to one I have already remediated, is there a way to copy what I have already done?

Yes! Contact the Digital Accessibility Coordinator requesting a zone transfer. You will need to send the Digital Accessibility Coordinator the file that is correct and the file that you want to match.

I remediated a pdf but then a change was made, do I need to redo everything?

Is there official documentation I can look at for Equidox?

Yes! You can find the official Equidox User Guide on their website. You can also find additional training videos on Equidox's YouTube page.

How do I create a table of contents?

A table of contents would be "List" under the Zones tab, and "Type" would be "list". The sensitivity slider under list detector may not pick up all items in the table of contents. If that is the case, use the up or down arrows in the list items box to increase or decrease the number respectively. You cannot type in a number.

Why does the table editor slider for the number of columns and rows not align with the number of rows and columns I want?

This happens when some of your zone fields are too close together. Make sure to only include the information you want for each zone, and that the zones do not overlap. You may have to adjust this slightly if 2 zones are close together.

How do I undo something in Equidox?

Equidox has a left facing arrow at the top of the editor window for "undo", next to the "RE-ORDER" button. Control Z does not work.

How do I create label?

Labels can be created under the "Settings" (Gear icon) tab on the left-hand side. It will be the left most option from the menu across the top of the settings tab. Choose "NEW LABEL"

How do I reset my Equidox account password?

Sometimes people do not receive the email or they are not able to get past the screen so what we advise is that you make sure that you have entered your email address correctly and that you have checked the ReCaptcha box to to tell Equidox you are not a robot. If your address is correct and you have checked this box please contact the Digital Accessibility Coordinator for assistance.

How do you use the help option within Equidox?

Inside of Equidox you will see a little blue HELP button. Once you click that you will see a screen where you can:

Enter your name, - your first name is absolutely fine
Email that is associated with your Equidox account, this is really important because it helps us just associate things better from a client aspect
Priority - is not necessary unless you are submitting multiple requests then you'll want to set the priority because that lets us know which one you want us to work on first
Subject - just a brief summary of the issue or question is necessary
Description - The first and most important thing that Equidox would like to see in the description area is the document URL link, your page number if that is applicable, then a clear description of the issue, and then also if you are receiving an error message or something is appearing weird you can go ahead and click that take screenshot button and that will take a full screenshot and will allow us to see what's going on.

How do you add documents to Equidox?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get started by importing some documents. So, pretending that I'm just logging in for the first time and I'm ready to get started.

The two documents that we see sitting right here, these were just documents that I used a few weeks back when we did sort of an administrator pre-training just to talk about like user management stuff. So, we're going to actually get into the mechanics of how to remediate documents today using Equidox. But what I first want to do is import some files to work on.
So, if I go to the import documents tab here on the left-hand side, that will bring me to this. I can either click to open the folders on my hard drive or I can also, if I have my folders already open, I can just select some files that I want to use and then just do a drag and drop to upload those documents.

Once those checkmarks disappear. That just indicates that the files have uploaded to the cloud. This blue import button is now available When I press the import button, this is going to start an automated process where Equidox is going to begin to evaluate these files for things like existing tag structure. So, if the document were previously tagged at some point in its lifecycle, Equidox will import those tags and give you the option to kind of make some adjustments or in some cases you might prefer to just start over from scratch.

It's always case by case with PDFs, you don't always have control over where these things came from or how old they are or what happened over the course of that. Documents lifecycle. Sometimes you're just you're kind of forced to make a choice. Is it worth trying to update what's here or is it better to just start over with kind of a blank slate using the automation inside of Equidox?

And then alternatively, a lot of documents won't have tags at all, So you're probably importing a lot of documents that are completely tagless. And if that's the case, during the import, Equidox is automatically detecting the elements like encoded text images, hyperlinks, fillable form fields, even pages that might require optical character recognition. So, if you have like a scanned pages, for example. Now if I look here at the cross, like the main document, recent document list here, I can see those are the five files that I just imported.

All of your documents will begin to populate down below so you can always go back and like find documents that are older or things that you might have imported weeks or months ago. But your five most recent documents will appear across the top. The five that you've just most recently interacted with. There are some basic filter and search features down here throughout your document list.

They're relatively self-explanatory. I mean, it's just, you know, basic filtering by like title of the documentary owner or labeling system, which we can kind of cover briefly in a little bit, but they're pretty self-explanatory search features. In general, though, I find that most people are like importing a handful of documents. They're working on them. Those five documents are going to be sitting up at the top of your list and you can kind of, you know, get through them, export them, and then move on to other projects. So that's kind of like the ideal way to use Equidox.

How do you edit or look at the document details in Equidox?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

So now that I've got these documents in here and we're ready to get started with some remediation, what I'll do is I'll click on the thumbnail here for this document. This is a very simple document on its face. I promise it takes me about 30 seconds at the most to remediate it using Equidox.

But there's a lot of stuff that is kind of universal about this document. So, things that we talk about with this PDF are really applicable. So virtually every document you'll ever work on using Equidox. So, there's plenty to talk about just within these two pages that will be applied to everything that you do moving forward.

Okay, So.

When I click on that thumbnail, I'm now the document detail page, and here I can see a the file name right up here . I have a search I'm able to filter or I'm able to search for a specific page. So, it's not super valuable in this case because I only have two pages and I could just click on either thumbnail and go directly to those pages.

But if you have a 200 pager and you know that you need to get to like page 173, you can just type in that number into this field, and it will take you to that page. You don't have to scroll through hundreds of pages. I have a button to directly export this back to a PDF. I won't press that right now because I haven't done anything to it yet.

I can also share the document. So, if I wanted to ask other people to help me with this file, for whatever reason, I can keep in mind that Equidox is collaborative, so you don't have to install anything on your computer. It's all web based. You can have people that are in totally different locations working on the same document even simultaneously.

So if you have like a super high priority big document, maybe it's 200 pages, you know, maybe four of your best mediators each take a 50 page section of it and you can get through it in25% of the time versus one person having to, you know, clear their calendar and kind of panic all day as they try to rush through pages.

So just keep that in mind that you can share the document with other users or other groups of users. So, groups is another thing that's kind of up to the administrators to establish. I can of course delete the document, but I won't do that right now. I'm not going to remove anything out of Equidox. I'm just going to leave this alone.

But if you ever needed to take something out of Equidox just to clean things up, maybe you want to minimize the amount of documents that you're storing inside of it. You can delete things at your leisure. There's no maximum number of documents, though, so don't worry . If you're like importing documents for a year straight, they can live inside of Equidox.

It's not a problem. You can always just keep them there and revert back to them at a later date. Down below you'll see some basic properties of the document. One thing I want to call out because this is something that's so often overlooked, especially by people that might be new to accessibility. The document title. So, if you notice the document title that's been set here is the exact same as the file name.

So, what happens is many times when people are creating documents, they don't they don't remember, or they don't know that they're supposed to add document title. And if you don't have a document title, it's an automatic failure for accessibility. Virtually every accessibility checker in the world will flag a document that doesn't have a title for being inaccessible. So Equidox knows this.

And in an effort to avoid you falling into that trap at the very least, it's going to take the file name and it's going to plug it into the document title field for you. So, this is only for documents that don't already have a title set, which I would say is probably 90% of them from my experience.

Now, you're not limited, though, to this title. You can always update and enhance it. So, I always mention this because a lot of times I see file names that have a really, the naming convention. They'll be using serial numbers and acronyms and things that don't really make any sense, especially when hearing it read through a screen reader. So, you can always just update your document title, making sure that you're putting like spaces between words.

You don't need the dot PDF file extension at the end. You can always clean up your title to just make it something that's clean and clear and descriptive of what the content of the document is. An author is optional. You don't have to add an author if you don't want to, but it is something that you can do.

And then also the English language attribute is going to automatically be set for you. Now you can also set other language attributes. Of course, it just depends on the document. So, if you have like a Spanish document for a Spanish class or maybe, you know, an information packet for a foreign exchange students or something like that, you can set the language attribute to match the language of the document.

This will trigger the screen reader to read from the correct library of words so that it will read a French or a Spanishor a mandarin Chinese document with the correct cadence that will then be able to pronounce all of the words correctly. By default, it's set to English, so you don't have to worry about it in the majority of cases.

But any time you leave the English language, you can always just hit the dropdown menu and find the appropriate language. If you make changes to your properties, either like the title or the language attribute, just make sure you hit the save button.

What do all of the buttons in Equidox do?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

Okay, so let's jump into page one and we'll kind of walk through the interface a little bit and kind of talk about what some of the buttons do, and then we'll get into the remediation of this page.
So, when I arrive in the remediation page, there's kind of a lot going on. And this is the first time you've seen this, which I think it is for the majority of you, it can be a little bit intimidating. So, there's a lot of buttons here. So, I'll walk through what these buttons do. But the first thing that I notice when I look here at the remediation page are these yellow rectangles that are kind of covering up the content.

These yellow rectangles are what we refer to as reading zones. And reading zones are essentially the same thing as tags. So, if you're coming from Adobe Acrobat background, which I assume that you've had at least some experience or exposure to that sort of concept of tagging PDFs, these reading zones really act the same way. These are what's going to establish the tag structure when you export the document back to a PDF.

So, we're here to use these readings zones to organize the content to make sure that everything on this page is read in a logical way that's going to be compatible with assistive technology, primarily like a screen reader. So, we need to make changes to the various reading zones on the page if there's changes that are required. So, we'll get into kind of what some of those changes are in just a moment before we start making edit some changes to this page, I'm just going to run through kind of the interface and what some of the buttons do.

Now on the left-hand side, you have your kind of main workspace, and this is where you'll do like, you know, the majority of your manipulation. There are two separate tabs. One is for the page tab. So, the page tab allows you to make changes to the document at the page level. So, what I mean by that is let's say you have a document that you have some zones on the page, but you're not really impressed with what you've got.

Maybe the existing tag structure just looks like a big, you know, tangled mess or maybe the initial detection that Equidox has given you is just not quite right. You have this little slider here called the zone detector, where if you move this back and forth, you'll notice how Equidox kind of re-detects the text, the granularity of the zones on the page.

So, as you bring it more to the left, it kind of gets more zoomed in as you bring it back to the right, it kind of zooms out a bit more. So, you just have different options as a starting point. It’s a good way of living, it’s a good place to start. If you don't like the initial detection level that you've been given or if you don't like the existing tag structure, you can kind of reset things with the zone detector.

What's nice about using the zone detector from the page tabis that you can apply it to all pages. Now, this is handy if you have a document that is maybe a bit longer and it's kind of got a templatized formatting. So, you're using the same fonts and color schemes and like general layout structures for out throughout the document.

If you apply to all pages, it will set that detection level for you across all pages. And then in theory, you won't need to revisit the slider. If you have an outlier page or two, you can always adjust it, but it should do the, you know, correctly set the sensitivity for the majority of pages. If it's that type of document where it's kind of consistent.

The zone detection slider is also available up here, just so you're aware. So, we just recently put out a new user interface, and part of that was to make the interface more accessible to people that use keyboard to navigate. So, we've put a lot of the commonly used buttons up across the top. So, the sensitivity slider is kind of duplicated in both locations.

So, it's always there for kind of easy access. Down below you have the reading order option and again, that’s also duplicated up at the top. So, with the reading order Equidox, the default assumption, it’s going to be a one column reading order. And all that means is that we're going to set the reading order left to right, top to bottom.

So as Equidox scans the page, it's going to find every single reading zone. And wherever it finds a new reading zone, it's going to place that next in the sequence. So that can always be adjusted, though you have four different column options. So, if you need to reorder things at the page level, you can also reorder things in different ways, like for individual zones or even a multi select of zones.

You can do kind of like group zones together to reorder them. We'll get into that later, but in general, you know, you're reading order for the full page. You can either choose 1 to 3or four columns and that should in theory give you a really good starting point, depending on the layout of the page. So, by default it will be one column.

But again, you can apply it to all pages. If you have, let's say, a three-column article that's 20 pages long three-columns three columns, you can then hit apply to all pages, and then Equidox will set it for you for all of the different pages in the document. Now over on the right-hand side and [inaudible] collapsed, it's really just a thumbnail of the pages in the document.

So if you want, if you need like scroll around and jump to a different page, you can always like you can find that. But if I just I typically just leave that collapsed. Now, if I click on a specific zone, you'll notice that the zones tab is now populated. So, there's the page tab and then there's the zones tab.

And when I clicked on that zone a bunch of new menu items just appeared right here. Now, these menu items are duplicated so they're also available on the left-hand side, much like these button are available on the page tab. But part of a left-hand interface redesign was to put the commonly used features u at the top menu because it's easier to access through a keyboard, but these are kind of duplicates.

So as a mouse user in general what I do is I just hit this toggle switch to eliminate that second layer of the men because I just to me, I just visually like the way that it looks better this way. And it also just gives you some additional vertical space on your screen. So, if you're using like a wide monitor, I like to have as much, you know vertical space as I possibly can.

It's all preference, though so you can toggle that on and off with this little toggle switch. Now, when you click on a specific zone, you can interact with all of the properties of it. Right now, all of the zones on the page are set to text zones by default because this is all just text as far as a machine is concerned there was no tag structure to begin with.

So, we're going to go through some processes to kind of clean this up and make sure that all of this is set up properly for a screen reader user. Now, the buttons up at the top here, just to quickly run through them, there is an undue and a redo button. If you have an undoable action, then you can hit the undo button and it'll reset things for you to whatever it was before.

The redo button will like revert back. So it's kind of like you can go in both directions. So, if you smash the undo button ten times, the only means that hit it nine times. You can just hit the forward button once one that populates. I don't really use these too often, but they are like nice to have and not need rather than need and not have.

So don't rely too exclusively on them. But they're there if you need them. This little circle with the half-moon. This is not like a critical function for the purposes of training today, but the little green flags in the upper left- and right-hand corner of each zone that’s called the zone info. It’s just the type of zone you’re dealing with and then also the reading order of the zone.

You can turn those on and off depending on your preference. I in general leave them both on, but sometimes you're dealing with a really like tightly spaced page and the little green flags can just become like an eyesore if you've got, you know, 150 zones on a single page, it can be a lot to look at. So, you can turn them off if you like.

There is a save button. So, if you're halfway through a page and you want to save your progress, you can. You also save when you toggle between pages. So, on the left-hand side over here, there are arrows to take you from page to page, and it will prompt you to save your work as you go. So being a browser-based application, even if you're, you know, Google Chrome does like a forced update on you or your laptop battery dies, you’re never going to lose your progress.

You can you're saving at the page level. So, no more of like Adobe Acrobat crashing and 4 hours of work just being like, you.

Know, thrown away.

Which happens all the time. This checkmark right here, this is a nice tool ,especially when you're collaborating on larger documents with other people. When you get this checkmark, it marks the page as validated. So, it just indicates to other users that this page is done. So, if you're back at the main document list, you can see that, okay, one of two pages are complete here.

There's actually a toggle switch . If you flick it to the right ,it'll only show you the pages that are yet to be complete. So again, if you're collaborating and working together and you're like maybe leapfrogging around in the document where you're doing 20 pages in the morning and then someone else logs in and they do 17 pages ,and then you have time in the afternoon to do 30 more instead of having to like ,try to figure out where the last person left off.

You can always be aware of that by using the check mark here. So you can see exactly where people left off in the process. There are zoom in and zoom out buttons ,which I was just pressing. So those are pretty self-explanatory . It's just all a preference on what you like to look at. Depending on the page, you can zoom in and zoom out.

There is this lowercase icon. So, this is a menu of keyboard shortcuts. I don't worry about memorizing these, but this is just a menu if you'd like to look at them. Now, again, this is more speaking to the accessibility of the application itself. But as a mouse user, I can still use those shortcuts to kind of pick up the pace.

It's just less mouse movement, less clicking around, less dropdown menus that you have to deal with, that type of thing. So, they will become second nature after a while. There’s probably about a dozen or so that I use just without even thinking about it, and I'll let you know when I'm using them today. During the training, I'm there's also this X that will close out of the page and bring you back to the document detail page.

So pretty self-explanatory if you close out it will bring you back to where we started. Okay. And then the button that I skipped over here, it's the most important one up here. It's this preview button. Now, when you press this preview button, it’s going to open up an HTML preview of the page that you're currently working on. So, this HTML preview is just a simple line a rendering of how this page is going to be read.

If you were to stop working and export the document right now, if you looked at the tag structures in Adobe Acrobat, you know how complicated that can get. It’s very technical, very tedious. You have to have a lot of training and sort of like, you know, prerequisite skills to be able to interpret it. But each HTML is very simple.

It's just what you see is what you get. So, this is a reflection of the reading order. If we have headings, we have tables if we have lists, we have hyperlinks. All of these different elements are going to populate in our HTML preview. So essentially what you're doing as a mediator is to make sure that your HTML structure sort of matches up with the structure of the PDF and how you would visually read this document if you were going through it.

So you just want to build that equivalent experience for a blind person that's using a screen reader who isn't visually able to see the reading order of the page or they're not able to understand that there’s a table there, that type of thing, You need to make sure that you’re setting up the structures on your PDF from your PDF through that each HTML preview. Now, in terms of making changes to this,

I have content on every page that isn't critical how should these elements be tagged?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

so it's kind of a misconception in the PDF world that all things on all PDF pages must be tagged at all times. It's not exactly true. You can have redundant elements or decorative elements, things that are really just providing like a speed bump to a screen reader user.

So, think of like, you know, headers or footers or the revision date, you know, in the bottom margin of a page like these types of things that recur that are, that are like recurring throughout the document, are not offering any like unique information. And just the same as you wouldn’t visually read it, your eyes would just kind of glance right past it.

If it's just like something in the margin, a screen reader user doesn't want to have that read to them on every page. So, there is this concept in the PDF role called Artifacting, and you can achieve that by simply clicking on a zone and hitting the remove zone button or just hit backspace on your keyboard. So, hitting backspace is the keyboard shortcut to artifact that element.

So, if I look at the HTML preview now, you’ll see that it's no longer included. So, the reading order for this page would start with my heading level one and then work through the rest of the content. So that's simple enough for like a short document. You know, if you have like recurring elements in the margins, you can just click on them and hit backspace.

But what's what about if we have a situation where, you know, you've got a 200 page document and every single one of those pages has like the chapter title or the revision date or a serial number for office use, like in the margin of the page, you can easily forget to do it across half the pages. And then you've got like a very sort of inconsistent experience for an end user.

If you click and drag to just create a new zone and just make it intersect with that area of the page, you can change that zone either through the dropdown menu, you can change it to an ignore zone or you can hit I on your keyboard. I for ignore. Now what? What will happen here is even though I have a text zone around that content, if I then go and look at the HTML preview, it’s still not there.

It's not included in the tagged reading order. But the nice thing about the ignore zone is that if I were to move on to the next page without arriving at this page, yeah, the ignore zone is already there waiting for me, so it copies itself to all pages in the document so that you can artifact those things kind of just across the board without having to remember to like scroll to the bottom left corner and an artifact by hitting backspace that little tiny zone.

So, it's a nice old trick to have up your sleeve for longer documents in a real-world setting. I would not use it on a two-page document because I can just as easily click and hit backspace, but a couple of times it’s not really a big deal. But on long documents, it’s a nice little trick to have and it can create a better end user experience by using it because you're not making them read this redundant header across every page.

One other thing is down here we have this page number. Page numbers are actually, you know, redundant in the PDF worlds. They can actually just cause confusion because this is not like anything other than just screen reader reading one, but the screen reader user already knows that they're on the first of two pages in the PDF. That's just how the PDF is built.

And then this number one could actually easily be conflated with this sequence of numbers at the end of this paragraph. So just having a screen reader read one out loud is rather confusing because they don't really know what it's in reference to. They would probably be able to figure it out in this very simple document. But rather than like leaving it up to, you know, hoping that they're able to figure it out in general, I recommend removing them or hitting, you know, backspace to artifact or using that ignore zone trick.

But just to show you a different mechanic here and what you can do, if I scroll down a little bit on the left-hand side, there is this area called zone Source. And underneath zone source there are four different squares. The main zone source is PDF and all that means is that whatever is encoded into the document, we just put a tag around it.

So that's like in general, everything is a PDF zone source. What I'm going to do though is while I have that zone selected, I can just click on actual and actual is a way that I can edit what is read by a screen reader when it arrives at this tag. So instead of it just reading one, I can make it read something like page one of two.

So, I'm actually adding some additional context to what that element is instead of just, you know, leaving it up to the screen reader user to interpret it.

How should page numbers be handled in my PDF?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

So, it's kind of a misconception in the PDF world that all things on all PDF pages must be tagged at all times. It's not exactly true. You can have redundant elements or decorative elements, things that are really just providing like a speed bump to a screen reader user.

So, I'm actually adding some additional context to what that element is instead of just, you know, leaving it up to the screen reader user to interpret it.

How do I create a list inside of a list in my PDF?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

So, lists are kind of an important part of PDF accessibility, of course. List structures are very tedious to set up manually because you have to identify like a label and a list body, and a list item and you group it together and then you nested all inside of a list tag. It just takes a while to get through.

But with Equidox, it’s really quite simple. Now, these lists, this this document here is completely untagged. So, there's nothing here to identify these as lists to a machine. So right now, I could just see this as just like, a block of text. And if you were to look at the HTML preview, you would see that evidence right here where I have just like this weird looking paragraph with bullet points, there’s really no punctuation.

So, what we do to fix his is we simply click on the text zone and hit L on our keyboard. When you hit L on your keyboard, it will change it to a list for you. So, it selected list for me and it all automatically scroll me down to the list detector. Now, from the list detector, I can just nudge the slider from left to right and it's automatically going to create a list for me.

And if I go back to my preview, you’ll see that instead of having like, a strange little run on sentence, I’ve actually got in a list with three distinct list items. So Equidox will do the hard part of exporting the tags for you. All you have to do is identify it as a list and then nudge your slider from left to right.

If you have a list like this where you have like one, two and three that are present instead of just standard bullet points as your list style, sometimes you'll have Roman numerals or letters or numbers. It's the same process. Hit L on your keyboard and nudge your slider over to the second setting. So, when I drop it over on the second setting, I’ll explain this in just a second.

It's kind of technical. But what we do now is we hit the ordered radio button. When you hit the ordered radio button, you get a dropdown menu that says style type. And if I hit the style type dropdown, I can now change this to a different style. So, this is now, this is a numbered list. So, I want to hit numbers and instead of having just bullet points being assigned to the list items, I have numbers like one, two and three.

Now this is really more for the HTML esthetics. We’re not visually altering your PDF, so it's not really making that big of a difference for a PDF export. But if you want your HTML to kind of match the style of the PDF, you can see that instead of having just standard bullet points assigned, you’ve now assigned the list labels as numbers to match this document.

And then finally, we have a nested list here. Now, nested lists are very difficult, much more complicated than just a standard list. But in Equidox, it's really the same thing. You just hit L on your keyboard and again, move your slider over to at least the second setting and this little wheel spinning. It's just indicating that it's using the computer vision and machine learning.

So, we're using a form of artificial intelligence that has been trained to figure out what nested lists look like. So instead of just having two main items, it actually finds that there's a layer inside of those list items of another list. So, we're just a couple of seconds. You can build nested list tag structure. So that's list such as a quick crash course through lists.

If all else fails, if for whatever reason your list is just like really weird goofy, you can draw a zone, hit Land then say, okay, this list has six items and then you can drag these things around and kind of place them wherever they need to go. I would say I need to do this less than 1% of the time, but if you ever need to manipulate things, you can you can do it manually.

Okay.

How do I create a table in my PDF?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

Let's back out of this document. I want to talk about tables as kind of a final thing here. Tables are really an important part of PDF accessibility, but they are quite a burden from a tagging perspective for most people that are using, you know, the primitive tools like Adobe Acrobat. So, if I click here on the thumbnail for page six, it's going to take me to this page and well, if I take a look at this page, it's pretty scary looking at a bunch of these little, tiny zones for like each data cell.

And if I were to go to the HTML preview just to kind of see like where I'm at, you know, you can easily put yourself in the shoes of a blind person who would have this table read to them like this is just a bunch of nonsense, completely useless to just leave this whole page in this type of format.

So, what I do as a remediator is I'm going to draw a zone around the entire table. So, when I put a zone over all of this, I can ignore the existing zones underneath. I'm not worried about those. I can then hit T on my keyboard, or you can again use the dropdown menu if you'd like for table.
You can then either click on the table editor button or you can just double click on the zone that you created. Either one will work, it’ll take you to the table editor. And when you're in the table editor you will notice these green grid lines. The green grid lines. They're kind of out of place right now. You know, you can manipulate them and drag them around, but that's not very fun and would be pretty tedious because there's a lot of data cells in this table.

So, what we have are these table detector sliders. So, for columns in rows if you just nudge these sliders from left to right, it wakes up the artificial intelligence. So, it's going to just kind of reestablish where those grid lines go. And now all of my green grid lines are in perfect alignment with my table cells. So, as you know, you don't have to do this, but you can see all of the cells are nicely defined. And with just that quick change of, you know, nudging the sliders around, if I go back to my preview, you can see what a dramatic difference we've made from whatever this big monstrosity is of data. So, we've actually built a real table now.

So, you we've got some you know, basic table structure established. There's a couple of other things, though, that we have to address with this table, primarily the fact that like level one, the top, it's kind of like split into two cells and then it's flanked by empty cells on either side. We need to make sure that we're spanning across all of these different columns because level one kind of straddles these six different columns.

So, what I do to span is I click in the cell where I want the span to begin, and then I will hold shift on my keyboard. So, there's shift key on your keyboard and then select where you want the span to end. That will then select tall of these cells for me. So, they all kind of like turn purple and then there's this arrow button appears.

So, this is the span button. Or you can also just press S on your. Either one will work. And if you then go back to your preview, you will see that level one now spans across all six of those columns. One other thing that we have to address with this table is the fact that the second row here, these are also table headers.

So right now, by default, Equidox assumes that your table has a single column header and a single row header. So that's just the average kind of run of the mill table where you have table data, a header for each of your columns and rows. But in this case here we have two levels of column headers. So not only is it the specific level like level one, level two, level three, but then you have a subheading level as well.

So, all we do is over here on the left-hand side where it says column and row header. There at there at the default 1 to 1 ratio. If you just set the up arrow, changing it from 1 to 2,you will then go back to your preview, and you'll see that you have bold fonts for that top two row section indicating that both of these are going to be tagged as headers.

So, if you're in this particular cell as a screen reader user, you know that you are specifically in the mobile device row, you know that it's level one. And then more specifically, it's the SSN column. So, they're able to freely navigate this table data and always understand their relationships with their various column and row headers. Table summaries are not required, but you have this checkbox here that says auto summarize.

You can hit that checkbox and Equidox will give you a table summary programmatically. It's not really a compliance requirement in for simple tables. Table summaries are pretty much just obsolete for modern screen readers, but something you can provide with a checkbox there just hit it and it will fill it in for you. You can always add or enhance this table summary.

Like if you're using. I saw a table the other day that was using stars like these, totally like nonstandard symbols, stars that were like indicating how highly rated these like mutual funds were for an investment portfolio. So, it's like five stars. Four stars, three and a half stars. That's great if you can see the stars. But a screen reader user doesn’t know what those are.

So, you can go in and like indicate that, okay, in the fourth column there’s a bunch of stars and depending on how many of those little symbols there are, each one of those symbols equates to a specific number of stars. So, you can make like that sort of enhancement through the table. Summary. You can also go into a specific cell and much like you have that actual text or the custom feature, you can enhance it by like typing in something doesn't exist.

Like here's a custom cell edits. Not that you're going to need to do this very often, but if something is like ,you know, using like a visual cue, you can add in something that’s not there, like putting in real words that can then be read by a screen reader. You can add and split rows like deleting a row with these buttons.

You can hit R and D, you can create new columns and hit remove columns so that C, M for your score ,your keyboard shortcuts. And you also have the ability to nudge your columns or nudge your rows. You won't need to do this very often at all, but just in case you do. Instead of clicking on 50 rows and moving them up just like two pixels, you can nudge them, and they all move together in unison.

Again, that's very rare. If you have like a super tightly spaced table, maybe you’d have to do it from time to time. You know, like a size six font with 90 rows in the table. Those types of things can be like super, super tight. So, like you can nudge things so that you don't have to click on all of them individually.

But if I save the table and close out when I return to the PDF, all of those like million little zones that I had before, they have been overridden as one single table zone.

I want to provide additional information for screen reader users, how can I do this in Equidox?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

Other ways that you might use actual text. Think of like documents that are using a lot of acronyms. Acronyms are kind of the enemy of screen readers because, well, they are just read as words most of the time.

So unless like someone's actually using actual text, let's say the acronym is like Capital B, Capital A, capital T, while a screen reader is just going to read bats so that that blind user might be very confused, like, why is this document suddenly talking about like baseball or flying mammals? It’s just like a very confusing sort of it's unclear as to why is like this word constantly being read in this document when it's not really like the topic at all.

So, what you can do is you can go into actual text, and you can phonetically spell out like what that acronym is in reference to. So, then you're overriding that tag to say, don’t just read the letters Bas the word bats, but phonetically spell out what does that B stand for? What does that A stand for? What does that T stand for?

And at least then if you do it once, at least, you know, you're like one iteration of it. They can then make that connection to go, Oh, okay. Like every time I hear the word bat, it’s in reference to this acronym. So just like little things like that can make a really big difference for the end user, especially when you extrapolated over the course of like dozens or hundreds of pages where that one confusing acronym that keeps being brought up, they don’t know what it actually is in reference to.

So that can make a big difference. Or if you have like nonstandard symbols, you know, if you have like think of like a restaurant menu that uses like chili pepper, like a chili pepper to indicate that a dish is spicy or a V with a circle around it, indicate that it's a vegan dish. I think that's great if you're cited, but a screen reader doesn’t know what to pronounce or read out loud when it gets across that symbol.

So, you can phonetically spell those things out so that that blind user has the same experiences they're reading the menu. So just little things like that can go a long way. If you come across them, you’re not going to have to do this on every document or every page. These are just kind of like seeing all the fringe examples.

But there are like tricks and mechanics within Equidox to help you overcome them.

How do I add alt-text or artifact my images in my PDF?

Transcript:

Paul Campbell
I think that's it for now.

Dan Tuleta

Okay. And while we have this document open, I’ll just call something else out that inside of the document detail page, you have this images tab in this images tab. It's basically a consolidated list of all of the images in the document in one location. So if you are familiar with the document and you're comfortable kind of interpreting what these images are and how they need to be described, you can quickly kind of streamline your approach in writing the description for them, or if it's like a STEM class and you have like a professor that needs a PDF remediated and you're not the subject matter expert, maybe it's a chemistry document, got a bunch of crazy chemistry diagrams and you're not a chemistry student.

They might provide you that alt text like in an alternative source, maybe a spreadsheet or something. And then you can just kind of quickly copy and paste the alt text to match up with the image so you can kind of approach it in that way. Another clever way of using this image was tab.
Not that this applies to all documents, but I do see a lot of documents where you have like a logo in the upper left-hand corner of every page. Now that can be very redundant. You don't want to have to remember to artifact that on every page and you don't want to have to type out the same alt text of the same page after page.

So, what you can do is you can hit this hide all zones checkbox and you can select the all visible checkbox. And what that does is it will artifact all of those images in one click. Now, it's not really it doesn't make sense to do that on this document. But hypothetically speaking, if this sort of National Park Service logo, that's just like tiny little logo up here in the right hand corner, if this were the only image in the document and it repeated across a 300 page long survey or a 300 page long report, you would be able to eliminate that across all the pages.

And then if you wanted to just keep it like on the first page, you can just reverse the check mark and you can type in your descriptions needed. If you make changes to your images, just make sure you hit the save button. There's a big save button here and there's also a save button at the bottom of the list as well.

So just remember to do that before you leave the page. And then of course, you can, you know, if you were to go into the specific document here, I've you know, I’ve got my image up here that I left. And then I also just artifact that this one, all of the other images in the document would have been artifact ID, but here I left this one specific image and I can type in my National Park Services logo description right here into my description field, because sometimes you need to have the context of the image within the full page to understand how you want to describe it.

So, you can, of course, add in your description at the page level. I'm often asked about long description and title, much like the indentation property, the long description and title. These are HTML only. So don't worry about these unless you're going to export its HTML. There's really no place for these to go in the PDF world, but it's just again, we support multiple formats.

So even though the majority of our customers are using it for PDF exports exclusively, we still have quite a few users that do export to HTML that want to have the ability to add long descriptions and titles to their image. But it's only a HTML property. Now, a couple of other things. So, we do have like know, jump into this document to talk about lists really quickly.

I want the screen reader to read something a certain way how can I do this?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta:

But there are like tricks and mechanics within Equidox to help you overcome them.

My reading order is not right how can I reorder the zones?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

Now if I go and check out my preview, things look pretty normal, but then suddenly I get down here and I realize like, Well, why are my paragraphs at the very bottom of the reading order? The reason this happened is because I already had 12.

I already had 12 zones on the page. So, when I shrunk this zone down and drew new ones, this became Reading Zone 13and this became 14. So, my reading order is all messed up. It goes from 8 to 13 back to nine, then 14, then 10, then 11 and 12. I can solve all of this by just hitting the reorder button and now it's all reordered appropriately.

Where if I go back to my preview, I can see that all of those paragraphs fall in line with their corresponding heading.

I have a text that is in a different language can I change the language for that specific section?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

If you're curious why I’ve put Japanese text into this document, like why the sudden change? Well, for a simple reason. Sometimes you have documents with mixed languages. So, whatever the case may be, if you have a document with multiple languages present, we've set the parent language attribute for this document to English because the majority of it is in English.

But then suddenly we have a tag that’s now in Japanese, while of course, an English screen reader cannot read Japanese characters. So, what I can do is I can click on this one tag where I suddenly have Japanese present, and I can come over here to the language dropdown menu. So, the language dropdown menu, I just hit j on my keyboard.

It'll take me straight to Japanese and now I can set Japanese as the language attribute for just this one tag. So assuming it's a bilingual person that’s reading in both English and Japanese and they have both languages installed on their screen reader, they’ll be able to read all of these characters and have that information relayed to them.

How do I export my remediated PDF out of Equidox?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

And the final step here to kind of things is to export the document. So, if I click on the export tab, this will take me to this option here where I have either PDF, HTML or EPUB. In general, I think you're going to be keeping things in your PDF format, so you import the PDF. Most users want to get a PDF back from Equidox.

You can also exports HTML or EPUB. So, the choices is yours, like if you want to convert something out of out of PDF into a different format, you can or if you want to provide it in multiple formats depending on the use of the document, you certainly can do that as well. So that’s what’s nice that you remediated once, and you can produce three separate formats.

But we'll focus on the PDF today. So, if we just, you know, the default setting is PDF and all I have to do is hit generate PDF. When I hit generate PDF, it's going to produce brand new document for me. And in this new document for me, it opens up in my browser. I have this little like Adobe Reader installed on my browser.

So, this is just this is where it opens up for me. You might have a different default reader on your on your machine, but this is mine. But now that I have this new document, you can see it's the same document we started with. Nothing has changed about it. But if I were to download this and I'll bring it out, save this one to my desktop and let's see here we open up the original.
This one, the original document was completely untagged, so this would of course, fail all things in the accessibility checker.

See.

Start checking. Obviously, all of this just lights up with issue after issue. All of this is bad. So, we get yelled at by acrobat. That's no good. But if we go to the one that we just exported from Equidox and we look at the tag structure. So, this document is now fully tagged. So, everything that we built, and we checked in that HTML preview is reflected here.

So, you can see all of our heading level two’s all of our P tags. Here’s even that little custom information about the page. You can see that we've actually inserted that little hidden message for a screen reader user. All of that work that we did and kind of checked along the way using the preview is all available to us.

And then this one will pass the accessibility checker, which might be a way that you're used like that. You're validating things kind of as like a final step. But other than these two warnings, which if you use Acrobat, you know that there's really no way to avoid these two things. These just come out with every document and they're just telling you that you need to manually check the reading order and the color contrast.

But of course, we already checked the reading order. We asked what we were using the preview for. So, we know that we've done a good job. So that's kind of like the full lifecycle of going from import to remediation to exports to validation. So that's what you can expect kind of as an average, an average day of using Equidox.

Of course you'll be going a lot faster, but we're in a very slow-paced training mode right now.

I have an image or scanned document that I want to be text to be text how can I change the content to text?

Transcript

PAUL CAMPBELL
I think that's it for now.

DAN TULETA
Okay. And while we have this document open, I’ll just call something else out that inside of the document detail page, you have this images tab in this images tab. It's basically a consolidated list of all of the images in the document in one location. So if you are familiar with the document and you're comfortable kind of interpreting what these images are and how they need to be described, you can quickly kind of streamline your approach in writing the description for them, or if it's like a STEM class and you have like a professor that needs a PDF remediated and you're not the subject matter expert, maybe it's a chemistry document, got a bunch of crazy chemistry diagrams and you're not a chemistry student.

My document has multiple columns, how can I make Equidox read it correctly?

Transcript

Dan Tuleta

So, with the reading order Equidox, the default assumption, it’s going to be a one column reading order. And all that means is that we're going to set the reading order left to right, top to bottom.
So as Equidox scans the page, it's going to find every single reading zone. And wherever it finds a new reading zone, it's going to place that next in the sequence. So that can always be adjusted, though you have four different column options. So, if you need to reorder things at the page level, you can also reorder things in different ways, like for individual zones or even a multi select of zones.

What is the Indentation Tool in Equidox?

Transcript

Paul Campbell

Do want to get these other questions answered. Those people do have to go. So Michael asked I noticed an indentation attribute. Would you set that for page two of the document?

Dan Tuleta
The indentation attribute I’m not oh indentation on this would be for HTML purposes. So, as I said, part of the export process of Equidox is being able to export to the HTML world. So, if you wanted to make visual like sort of adjustments to how your HTML appears, if you wanted to be consistent with the PDF, like for example, indenting something, you have that ability with this feature.

But the vast majority of users are just keeping things in the PDF world. So, this would not be applicable to making a visual alteration because we're not here to change the way that your PDF works. The author chose to indent this in the PDF. That's just a visual element built into the document. So, when you export it as a PDF, it’s going to stay the same.

Paul Campbell
And then one other one here from Sarah. What is the process for editing the OCR?

Dan Tuleta
Oh Okay, good question. So, we can take a look at a like a document like this. We’ll just use this really quickly. So, the other, the other zone source that we were looking at here. So, when you if you draw a zone and place it on top of the image here, the other zone source is OCR. So, let's say, you know, you’ve got this image of this thing that’s just been inserted into the document here, but now there's this text just kind of like locked inside of it.

I don't really want to retype all of this. It's like alt text. I'm probably going to misspell things and stuff like that. So, if I go into the zone source, I can just click on OCR and I can press the convert to text button. When I press convert to text, it’ll just take a couple of seconds, but it will give you a text result.

Now that I look at my result here, I have, like you know, Grammarly installed on my browser. So, it's yelling at me that like hit houses is not a word, but it is as far as the author is concerned. And then it's telling me that like agriculture is like hyphenated, so I can clean that up. I can just edit the result inside of this so you're able to change whatever the result is inside of this OCR.

The OCR is very accurate when you're dealing with, you know, a good quality scan. So, in most cases you won't really have to make too many changes, if any. But in the event that it’s kind of like a crooked document or it's got like a shadow from like an old Xerox machine, you know, results may vary. It's always just up to what the OCR engine is capable of seeing. So, you can edit that result inside of this text window. This is also expandable. So, if you have like a huge paragraph, you can always make this larger.

How do I start Remediating my PDF in Equidox?

Transcript:

Dan Tuleta

So, let's start making some changes to this page. There’s not a whole lot that we really have to do. And like I said, if we were going at full speed, this would have been a long we’ve. We would have been done with this document for a long time. So, forgive my long windedness, I’m just talking through a lot of like, you know, navigation and basics and stuff like that.

So, with this document, as we know, there is no existing tag structure, nothing came in with this document except the fact that Equidox sees that there is text on this page, and that’s why it's drawn these reading zones for us. But by default, all of these reading zones are just set as text zones. So, you can see everything in the upper left-hand corner is text and everything in the upper right-hand corner has a number indicating the reading order.

Now we need to change our headings on this page. So, if you're not familiar with the way that heading structure works, you’re basically building an outline of the document for a keyboard only user to be able to navigate through the tag structure and find a specific section that they're looking for. So just as you would scroll through a document or flip through a document, you know, just visually looking at it, a screen reader user needs to be able to navigate a specific section or subsection within the content.

So, if I were a screen reader user and I wanted to just read this paragraph, I would be able to navigate through the headings to find that specific section and then read the corresponding information without any headings structure. That becomes impossible because they wouldn't know where to begin or where to stop. They would just have to read through everything to eventually hear what they were looking for.

And on a simple two-page document like this, sure, it’s not that big of a deal, but what if it's a 500-page textbook? And what they're looking for starts on page 451?Well, how are they to find it without having structure? That’s why this is a very critical step in what we're doing. So, headings structure is kind of one of the pillars of PDF accessibility.

I provides that main navigation tool for a screen reader user. So, what we'll do to set our headings is I'm going to click here on this element, which is my heading level one for the document. And over here underneath the properties it says type and the type is text. So, you can hit this dropdown menu and you can like scroll down to find heading and change it to a heading.

But I actually prefer to use my keyboard shortcuts. So, when I want to set a heading level one instead of messing around with dropdown menus, I simply tap one on my keyboard and it instantly becomes a heading level one. I can then set these elements as heading level twos because these are subheadings of this, each one. So, I'm going to set these as each twos by just tapping two on my keyboard.

And if I were to then return to the HTML preview, what I'll see is this visual change, or I've got much larger fonts for where those headings have been identified. So, the reason I like to do my headings first, once I've established my zone detection level, you set your sensitivity setting on like whatever you prefer. The first thing I like to then do is mess around with my headings and try to set those up because once you've got your headings identified, it really helps you kind of establish the reading order for the page.

Because now when I look at this HTML preview, it's really obvious to me that I have a reading order issue. I never want to see back-to-back headings of the same level. This is technically illogical heading’s structure. You can have nested heading’s structure where you have an H1 directly followed by an H2,but you never want to have back to backH2’s without any content in between that that doesn't make any logical sense.

So, the problem here is very simple. It's just that Equidox by default is assuming that your, your document is a one column reading order. So, it's just reading left to right, top to bottom. So, when it gets down here to this bottom half of the page, it sees that this is reading zone five, this one is six and seven and eight.

I can very quickly correct this by simply hitting the dropdown menu, choosing two columns, and pressing reorder. And it happens instantly. But now we have four, five, six, seven and eight. And if you go back to the preview, what you'll see is that change reflected here in your HTML, where every paragraph is now directly following their corresponding heading.

The only other thing to talk about on a page like this, so it's kind of a misconception in the PDF world that all things on all PDF pages must be tagged at all times. It's not exactly true. You can have redundant elements or decorative elements, things that are really just providing like a speed bump to a screen reader user.

So, I'm actually adding some additional context to what that element is instead of just, you know, leaving it up to the screen reader user to interpret it other ways that you might use actual text. Think of like documents that are using a lot of acronyms. Acronyms are kind of the enemy of screen readers because, well, they are just read as words most of the time.

But there are like tricks and mechanics within Equidox to help you overcome them. One other thing about zone source I can draw zone that’s not even touching anything. And if I call it a custom zone, I can actually add in a custom information.

About this page and so there's nothing visually that's going to be altered about the document in any way. It's going to be like a little hidden message for a screen reader user. So, think about things that, you know, there’s a red arrow pointing at a paragraph to emphasize that it's really important. Well, you can make sure that that's known by like leaving that little hidden message that, hey, the next element on this page is being emphasized by the author.

It's got a red arrow pointing at it. You can like add that information in or if you have like a flowchart that has, you know, multiple reading orders, you can make sure that you can return to that focal point of the flowchart by using a custom zone and then go down the other alternative reading order of that flowchart.

So, these are all again, just like sort of abstract examples, sort of hypothetical situations, but the custom zone source and the actual text, they’re really helpful and kind of around documents where there’s things that are being conveyed visually that don't have a text equivalent. So, there's not sometimes it's just the location of two things on the page or the fact that they're color-coding things on the page, that they're conveying information through that visual aspect.

But a blind user, if they just read the text, they don't have that same experience. So, you can enhance the document for them by using that custom zone source. Again, not things that you're going to have to do every day or on every document or on every page. But when you do come across them, these are important techniques to understand.

So again, I know through a lot of like sort of dense information there at the end at you, but are there any questions about actual text or custom? Okay, great. So, we will jump to page two. And when I jump over here to page two, what we will see, it’s kind of more of the same. So, it's a little bit of a review.

So I'm just going to tap two on my keyboard to set my age twos and then I get down here and I realize that, well, my H3,which is a subheading of this H2 is kind of consolidated inside of the same zone as it's paragraph that goes with it. So that's kind of annoying. And I probably could have solved this by using the detection slide and given myself like a better starting point.

But I'm also able to just resize a zone and then click and drag to draw a new one. So, if you need to make like, you know, very small adjustments like that, you definitely can you can resize the zone by just clicking in the lower right corner and you can resize and move them around. Pretty straightforward. So, this is now an H3,so I tap three on my keyboard.

It's the same problem here. I just resize tap four for my H4and then draw a new zone. Now if I go and check out my preview, things look pretty normal, but then suddenly I get down here and I realize like, Well, why are my paragraphs at the very bottom of the reading order? The reason this happened is because I already had 12.

Where if I go back to my preview, I can see that all of those paragraphs fall in line with their corresponding heading. But one little final check of this HTML preview. And I realize that oops, I forgot to set an H4. I never clicked on that heading. It's not showing up in bold font so I can get that visual sort of confirmation that that’s actually supposed to be an H4.

So, I tap for my keyboard, and it will fix it if you're curious why I’ve put Japanese text into this document, like why the sudden change? Well, for a simple reason. Sometimes you have documents with mixed languages. So, whatever the case may be, if you have a document with multiple languages present, we've set the parent language attribute for this document to English because the majority of it is in English.

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