May, 24, 2017 Oklahoma ABLE Tech Webinar

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>> Rob: Welcome everyone. All three of you, unless you are sitting in a very crowded room, it's all three of you. I appreciate you taking the time this afternoon to come in. And learn a little bit about accessibility in PDF format. My name is Rob Carr, Accessibility Coordinator at Oklahoma ABLE Tech. This is brought to you under the “Oklahoma Works” project here in the state. I jokingly said in the chat that this could turn into a Q and A session. But with the few folks, we have an opportunity for you all to fire some questions off. I will be watching the chat window to keep an eye on the questions that come through. Please use the chat window and type questions in there. If you come in with any questions before we get started, feel free to go ahead and put them out there. I will of course, go through the slides, and potentially demonstrate a few things in Acrobat, but feel free, and please do, jump in, and ask questions as we go.

So accessibility really comes down to two different components. The piece that you can see, the presentation on the screen, or in the case of PDF, especially, the printed page, if a PDF file is printed. And then we have the structure. That's what makes PDFs and Word documents and web pages look the way that they do. It's almost like a building in that when you are in a building you can see walls but there's a lot behind the walls that makes the building actually stand up and look the way that it does. It's a very similar thing with any kind of digital content. You have both presentation and structure. The presentation piece is purely visible. And the big thing to keep in mind with the presentation piece is that none of the presentation is automatically available to assistive technology in a terribly meaningful way. If you just have a PDF file that is text based, it's not really accessible even if the text is available to a screen reader or Braille display. There's a lot of missing stuff. That's where the structure comes in. The structure drives the presentation, but it also has a lot of information there and available for assistive technologies, specifically screen readers and Braille displays and speech-recognition software as well. So we have presentation and structure. What we want to do is make these two things match up. We want to make sure that what is behind the screen, in the structure, is the same as what is on the screen. So an example of that is if you have a document that has different sections. And you have a section or a subsection heading, most of the time that looks different from the rest of the content, but we also need to make sure that it's heading in the structure behind the screen.With PDF, a lot of the accessibility, and, in

fact, the document structure that's so critical, is in a place called “tags”, or in something called “tags”. So the idea of the PDF is that we want to match up the content things like indications of whether or not content in the heading or in the list, we want to match that up visibly with the tags. And make sure that the PDF tags match the reading order of the document. Usually something we figure out visually by looking at the position of the content. We're trying to do a lot to match these two things up. PDFs have a lot of layers. And in all honesty, in an hour, we're just going to get a few layers deep. If you look at the purple onion, sliced on the screen, we say we only get a couple layers deep because we have the visible layer, the presentation, and we have the tag, which is where the structure is for assistive technologies. But then PDFs also have a content layer that determines a lot about how a PDF looks if you shrink it down or try to view it on a mobile device. And there are additional layers as well. That gives us some kind of neat opportunities because we can do a lot with the PDF document that you can't do with a Word document, for example.And we'll scratch the surface of that a little bit today. The interesting thing about PDF is that when you are in Acrobat Pro, you can work with the layers independently of each other. We can do things in the tags that may be a little bit different from what you see in the visual presentation. So, again, we won't get too far into that, but it's important to note that a PDF is actually kind of a multilayered format. PDF tags are the key to accessibility. There's more to accessibility in PDF than just the tags. But we've got to get the tags right in order to make sure that folks using assistive technology can interact with whatever is in our PDF, whether it's just text and images or if it's a

PDF form. So the tags are really the key to accessibility. The tags are something that are missing a lot of the time from a lot of the PDF documents that are published online or that are sent in a big mass e-mail, for example. Folks just don't know that they need to take a couple of extra steps in a tool like Word or InDesign to make sure that the tags are there and that they're correct.Tags contain meaningful content in a PDF. If you think about the kind of layer that we're operating in, in the tags. Each tag contains content that you can typically see in the document. I mentioned a couple of slides ago a heading tag. A heading tag just contains the text content that makes up the section or the subsection heading. I'll talk more about making tags specifically in a few minutes, but tags work if you have a heading, an image, or a table. The content that you see on the screen actually resides in a tag, in what is called a Tag Tree, that I will introduce you to in a minute. Think of tags as being the containers that keep a document structured and organized, like the boxes that are on these couple of shelves, in the image on the screen.So I mentioned meaningful content - tags contain meaningful content. What does that mean? Meaningful content are things like non-decorative images or any kind of text or table, links, form fields, all of the meaningful information that is in a document needs to go into a tag. But there are some things that you might not necessarily want to have in the Tag Tree. So, for example, background images. You may have decorative images that are really just there to be eye candy. They don't convey any meaning. They are just there, again, to be visually appealing. If an image doesn't convey any meaning, then in Acrobat Pro-you can hide it from assistive technologies. There's a

judgment call there, you have to determine whether or not something contains meaning or not, and if it doesn't, we can hide it. It's often a better experience, because there's no reason to add extra overhead for someone using screen reading or Braille display if something is just there to be pretty and doesn't have any specific meaning.You might have a document that actually exists on paper and you scan it and create a PDF from it and then go in and make sure all the content has the right tags in place. Sometimes with those scans you'll have artifacts. So, for example, if you tear a page out of a spiral notebook, then you have on the left hand side all of the little shreds of paper. If you scan those, Acrobat will try to turn them into some kind of content, but they're really not. It's just a residual little bit of kind of garbage that comes out of the scan. But Acrobat lets you take that stuff and still account for it, but make sure that it is hidden from assistive technologies.Sometimes things like header or footer information can be really redundant as well. On the slide decks lower right, logo for DRS, for Oklahoma Works, and ABLE Tech, that's on every single slide. There's a case where you can say those don't need to be repeated for someone using a screen reader on every slide. They're just there visibly, and we can make sure their announced through a screen reader or displayed on a Braille display on the very first slide, but it'll be really, really redundant to make someone listen to the alternative text I put in to those three images that I put on every slide. And the same for page numbers and PDFs. Sometimes it's important for the page numbers to be in the Tag Tree and be available, especially if you reference specific page numbers in the document. But if you have a document where the

page numbers on the pages match up with the page count in Acrobat Reader, then the page numbers are not terribly helpful. And there are situations where page numbers or other information in a footer may be hidden from technology because they don't serve a purpose for those who can't use a screen. A little bit of judgment here, but it's important to know that there are a lot of ways that we can, in fact, hide the content when it is not actually meaningful.We'll talk about the tags in detail. A regular PDF file, and this is true in any other format, you typically have a style for just the regular text. All of your paragraphs and such will just be in what's called a paragraph tag. That's your regular text content. The headings I have kind of talked about a little bit. But headings are a subsection or section headings. Typically, they're smaller. They often are a different font or maybe a larger font or bolded. There's a visual difference when you encounter a section heading or subsection heading. But the tag is really important. You can have as many as six layers of headings in an Adobe PDF document. So first section for main section, and subsection, is a second level heading. A subsection under the second level, there's a third level all the way to six deep. I have not actually encountered -- I don't think -- any documents that went all the way to six. Sometimes the sixth level heading in the lower heads are used to organize different kinds of content in brochures. So you might see text boxes that all have a heading five in them. And that's consistent throughout a brochure. It's pretty easy to understand that structure. But in terms of regular document content, it's really rare for us to need as many as six different subsection headings. But that doesn't mean you won't run across them.

Microsoft Word, I believe lets you do the exact same number of headings, which is convenient, because a lot of the stuff that ends up being published as a PDF comes from a tool like Word.You've also got list tags. Like the name implies, a list tag contains a bulleted or a numbered list. There's a really specific structure that I will talk through in a few minutes, when it comes to a list tag.Linked tags contain links within a PDF. Sometimes you are able to click on a text in a PDF and jump to another part of the PDF itself. Oftentimes links are pointing to something out on the open web. So you'll have a website address that people can follow inside the PDF. And it'll take them out to a web page. So, again, links we'll talk about the specific structure and how to build those here in a few minutes.We have figure tags. The figure tag is for any kind of a visual element. Doesn't matter if it's a picture, a chart, are graph, are logo, all of that stuff gets wrapped up in the figure tag. And we'll talk a little bit about not just the tag but making sure that we have a text equivalent for our visual as well as. Data tables are wrapped up in table tags. And tables, honestly, they're kind of their own webinar topic, and I think that we may well look at focusing on tables for a webinar next year, and not get into table accessibility there. Because Acrobat lets you do quite a bit. Even really complex data tables can be made to be pretty accessible.And then the final tag type we touch on is artifact or background. As you might kind of take from the name, the artifact or background tag is where we put the not meaningful content in a PDF. It's the way that we take an image that's only decorative and hide it from assistive technologies.So these are the tags that we'll talk about a little bit today, and I'll get into a little bit

more about general themes and working with tags. Your tags need to match up with the content specifically. The content that they apply to. One of the things that you will find out, if you get Acrobat Pro-and start to work with this. You can get yourself into a little bit of a bind. And you can, if you wanted to, make an experience really challenging. As much as the PDF format lets us make the experience more accessible for people who use assisting technologies and those who don't, we can also break stuff. For example, you could take all the content in a table and put it into a header tag without a table tag there. You could literally highlight everything and drag it into a heading articulate which would be completely misleading. But it's one of the things to keep an eye on when you encounter a PDF. I run into this more when file comes from InDesign or another design program. The file is converted to PDF, even when the designer working in InDesign does everything to the letter of the law, you might find that content ends up in the wrong tag. That's why you need to make sure that the associations are correct. I mentioned this before, but the tags have to be in the right order as well. When a screen reader comes in, and looks at a PDF, it'll try to find the tags. And that's what it looks for. It doesn't look for the content in the PDF that you can see. Now Acrobat has a read out loud feature that it's had for the last few versions but that's very different from a screen reader. It's not a full-fledged screen reading. It doesn't look for things like headings. It just looks for the text, and reads the text out loud. It's very useful for people with print disabilities and low vision, it's really great, but not sophisticated like a full fledged screen reader like JAWS, VoiceOver or NVDA. Kim asked, is it reversed like in PowerPoints? No.

Conveniently, the reading order in the Tag Tree is from top to bottom, not really left to right. But it is top to bottom. I will show you a Tag Tree in a minute, and we can walk through it. But that's a good question. It’s what you would expect it to be.The last point with figures. You need some type of text equivalent for meaningful visuals that exist. Because a screen reader, as sophisticated as it is, doesn't interpret an image though they’re getting there. As a matter of fact, Microsoft has rolled out what they call alternative text generation, automatic alternative text, in PowerPoint, maybe, and Office 365. It tries to interpret an image. You put an image into a PowerPoint slide, you could have it automatically generate a description. But it really just looks for things like faces and it might do like FaceBook does now. FaceBook has similar technology to this. FaceBook will look at a picture of two friends standing next to each other smiling, and it'll say “two people standing next to each other smile be”. Well, that's descriptive, but text equivalents can be a very different thing. We'll discuss that more in detail in a few minutes.So the Tag Tree, and I will jump out and share my screen here in just a minute. And, in fact, I might go ahead and do that now. So I am going to stop sharing there. And I am going to ... share my screen. The Tag Tree I am in, Acrobat DC. Some things will look a little bit different. Can everyone see my screen? Could someone type in the chat window to let me know that you can see? Very good. Thank you. The Tag Tree, in Acrobat Pro, even though this is Acrobat Pro DC. It's on the left hand side. You can Google. You can Google for the specific version of Acrobat and find out what little menus you need to go through to make the tags visible. The

tag three as the name applies, is a tree of information. So it starts with the root tag, which is always just labeled tags. Everything else falls under this tags root.So this is a document that came out of InDesign. And InDesign, even though it's an Adobe product, it adds layers that something like Microsoft won't. I expand to the left hand side, and you see the structure of the document. You start to see things like H1 pop up. It's heading one. In the conversion from InDesign to PDF, the conversion tool, the black box basically that the InDesign file goes into before it comes out as a PDF, that's decided that it thinks some of this stuff is a first level heading. That makes sense. More than likely it is. There may be issues that I need to fix, because this just came out of InDesign. But you can see, we have all of this structure, and what we are looking at here are the actual tags. We have a figure tag, for example.You will notice, too, as I click on the tags, it highlights the content in the actual document. That's a quick visual way to know what content is contained in a tag, in the Tag TreeI see another H1. Then I see Ps, paragraphs. Here's one where it looks like InDesign didn't quite get it right. Because I have this heading for the whole thing that says Section 508 refresh. Some key things to know. So part of that is contained in H1, first-level heading but part of it is in the paragraph. I have a little bit of work to do. We'll kind of go through and I will show you some of the techniques you can use to fix things like that. But as a move through here, and I will start to use arrow keys. When I work with a PDF, that's one of the first things I do. I come into the Tag Tree, and use the down arrow key to see if the tags are in the right order. Kim, this comes back to the reading order. As I go down the Tag

Tree, I should see content highlighted in the document, and the order makes sense. I will hit the down arrow key, and see that in this case the order is correct.Now I will be pretty picky with this one. We'll publish and distribute this pretty broadly. And I will go in and fix the paragraphs. Right now, for example, the paragraph tab that I highlighted has the very end of one paragraph, and it looks like it's a very short paragraph, just two sentences. It has a little bit more than just one paragraph, and I will want to fix that. And, again, I will show you how I do that in just a second.As I move on through, and we get into the lists. We can see on the screen that we have a list. We have bullets and we have indentation, and all the visible cues that this content is in are list format. Well, the tag also needs to match up. In this case, we see an “L tag”, which is a list tag. So that's good. But it also looks as if not everything is in the list tag the way we need it to be. So I will hit the down arrow key. I see I have a paragraph tag that contains a couple list items. Somewhere in the conversion process this broke basically, and I have to fix it. When documents come out of InDesign, you have more to fix than when documents come out of Word or PowerPoint, typically. Especially if you have a later version of Word or PowerPoint. So the rest of the tags are very similar. We have different heading tags. There are “heading 2s” which makes sense. They're subsections. Subsection of the main section of the document. So it got these right. It says, hey, these are second-level headings.But that's the Tag Tree. And you will see more similarities in a Tag Tree than you do differences. The differences will be based on the kind of content, and the different kinds of content you have in the document. I will say this, too. I have seen

the same file start in InDesign or in office. And end up different in PDF. So you save it once and the tags look one way. And you might make a very small edit and saving it again and the Tag Tree sometimes looks dramatically different. That's just something to keep in mind when you work with any kind of a source program like Word. And you do the PDF conversion. Don't be surprised if there's a little bit of inconsistency, even within the same document from one to the next version.So to work with tags, you can do a little bit in the Tag Tree. You saw I was moving around with the mouse and the keyboard, but a lot of the work, in fact, most of the work you will do is with the “Touch Up Reading Order Tool”. If you hop out online and read some documentation, you will see that shorthanded to TURO, T-U-R-O. The tool helps you work with tags directly and quickly. It's something that will become your friend if you do a lot of accessibility work with PDFs. Remember, and I mentioned this a couple times, I mentioned you have to have Acrobat Pro in order to see the tags much less using the TURO tool. You can buy the software that's quite a bit more expensive than Acrobat Pro. Acrobat Pro is going to be the most affordable way to work with tags. But Acrobat Reader won't let you work with the tags or let you see them in the same way. The Touch Up Reading Order Tool, is one of the tools from the accessible tool set. I will hop out again.In earlier versions of assistive technology, it looks a little bit different. It still is something that you can enable and it'll be over on the far right hand side of the screen. It's in the set of accessibility tools. I believe in previous versions of Acrobat, it says touch up reading order, and in Acrobat DC, it says reading order. A few things changed. Instead of having a

cursor to select text with, I now have for my mouse pointer basically little cross hairs. I use the cross hairs to select different kinds of content that I want to put into a tag. So that's the biggest thing, in terms of working with the document. The Touch Up Reading Order Tool itself gives me several different options. So what we're looking at here is a little pop-up window with a series of buttons on it. A button labeled text. One that says form field. And then it has buttons for heading one through heading six. The nice thing about this is that I can choose my heading levels, at least those that are available, from the Touch Up Reading Order Tool. And that's a relatively new feature. In Acrobat 10, it has just heading one, heading two, and heading three. I have also figure, table, cell, and formula, which, again, we're not going to get into as much. I have a button for background, and I have other options as well. But we're really going to focus on using the tools in the top part of the Touch Up Reading Order Tool.So let's say that I want to put something in a tag. It doesn't appear anywhere in the Tag Tree. And I want to, as we say, “tag it”. It's like playing tag on the playground, except not at all like that. It's just similar in the way that we say it. Let's say, for example, this much more information heading is not actually in the Tag Tree? Well, with the Touch Up Reading Order Tool open, I will use the cross hairs. And I am going to click with my left mouse button and hold it down, and I will draw a rectangle around this text. Now one thing to keep in mind is that you don't want to try to get your box as close to what you are trying to select as possible. In fact, you kind of want to overshoot it a little bit to make sure you get every little bit of the content. So when I drew the box around, it drew a nice box and highlighted much

more information. I can come in and literally select a couple of words, or a couple of letter, excuse me. It's so important to make sure that when you use the cross hairs to select content you overshoot it a little bit to ensure you get everything. And also notice if I draw the bottom part of the box across some content below it, right now the bottom part of the box is halfway into the letters below, it's not going to select those. So it's okay to overshoot and then pay attention to what you are selecting. You just want to be sure that you don't grab other stuff but that you do grab everything you need.So now that I have selected it, I have all of these options. In this case, it's a second-level heading. All I need to do, once it's selected, is click on the second-level heading button. Or it says heading two. I click on that, and it puts it into a heading two tag, which will appear over in the Tag Tree. Let's say you do scan a document, and run something called optical character recognition to convert it into text. Or someone e-mails you a document, and you say, I don't really think this is accessible. By saying that, you volunteer to help fix that, which sometimes happens, this is one of the quick ways that you can go in and quickly move through a document, apply all the correct tags and then go into the Tag Tree and change order, if you need to.So you are starting to maybe see how we can work really independently with the PDF tags. And how hopefully working with the tags doesn't mess up the visibility content. There are documents sometimes where that happens, but that's for an advanced session on the topic.So let me go back over to slides real quickly.And I have introduced you to several of the tags, the paragraph tag we have taken

a look at. We've looked at the heading tags. One note is that section headings, when you talk. Terminology, there are headings which are section and subsection headings and then there are headers, which are what you'll find in data tables. So there's a difference, and, again, keep this in mind when you read about accessibility in the web or in PDF. There's a difference between headings and headers. So don't let that trip you up a little bit.The list tag is something that I touched on and showed you really briefly. But list tags are kind of complex. List tags have a really specific nesting that you have to abide by for them to work properly. And that is that you have a root list tag. Then each list item has a list item tag. So if we have a three-item list, you'll have a root list, and then three list item tags. Each list item then contains label, especially if it's a numbered list, because the label tag contains the number, and then you have the actual content of the list item, which is the list item body. Let me jump over back into Adobe. And we'll take a look at a couple of the lists here.So, again, this document has a lot of list content in it. This came out of InDesign. Lists that come out of Word, especially the later versions, usually come out really well. The one thing to keep an eye on with lists that come from really any source, and move into a PDF, is if you have a list that goes across pages, like this one does. This one runs from the first page on to the second. You often have more than one root list tag, and there really should only be one. But we'll fix that here while we take a look at it. I'll expand the list tag. You can do it.The keyboard with the right arrow, or you can click on the little plus sign to the left of the tag.Adobe has gotten creative. A root list, and

a second tag nested inside there. That's not really right. This is one big list. There should be only one root list tag. But, again, it may be pretty easy to fix. If I look at this now in my fake list here, I have a list item, but this actually looks like it might be pretty good. It's highlighting the first list item in the list. So we may be on to something. We'll expand this and see. We have a label. So put the bullet into a label. Okay. Fair enough. And then we have the list body. But the tricky thing is its jammed all in there together. So I have a bit more clean up. Let's see how it did on this list item. Here we have a label. And a list body. But, again, it put both of these into one. So we'll have a little bit of cleanup. Let's see how it did on page 2. And I think it's pretty consistent with what it's done. Let me go to my handy fall back example. Where we'll see the list structure the way it's supposed to be. I opened a new file to make it that it's easier to follow. A three itemed numbered list. It's super creative. My examples are always creative. The list items No. one, the item is list item 1. And 2, list item 2. And 3, is list item 3.We have a root list tag with three individual list item tags under that. We have an L for list, and LI for list item. When I click on the first list item, we can see over here in the content that No. 1 list item 1 is selected. Now this is what it is supposed to look like. Underneath the list item, we have the list body. The one thing that's missing in the label tag. I will say this about the label tag. I don't know of screen readers yet that separate or distinguish between a label and a list body tag. In other words, I have not run across the screen reader that says, label 1, list item body, and list item 1. Depending on the amount of effort it'll take to fix something like this, I may leave the label in with the list item, because I know that

functionally it'll spit out the same content. The most important thing with a numbered list is making sure that the numbers there are available. So you can make a case that it's okay to not split these out and have a label and a list body. If that makes sense. But this came straight out of Word. A simpler list without all the nesting. That combined with the fact that it came out of Word gives us a little bit cleaner list, and one that you could send out and have someone who uses a screen reader or Braille display can move through, get the content, and know they are in the list. The thing about the list tag, when a screen reader hits it, it'll announce that the content is a list. It'll also announce how many individual list items are in the list. That's why it's important to have the structure to lists. Who knew that a document could be quite this complex? What questions do you all have while I jump back into the slides? Fair enough. We'll move on. So I want to talk a little bit about links. And specifically about how to deal with website links that have a website address or URL, the www.dotwhatever.com or organize. And having text that actually describes when someone follows the link. I always suggest that you have the active link in the document of any kind, whether a web page, PDF, or PowerPoint file, I always suggest that you write some descriptive link text that talks a little bit about and describes what happens when someone follows the link. With PDF content, you may need to make sure that the website address is visible. And the technique that I will use to do that is to actually have both.To have both the descriptive link text and the website address. For example, I don't think I have an example in the slides, so I will give you an idea of what I am talking

about in the chat window. So I typed Oklahoma ABLE Tech, and in parentheses, I put ABLETech.OK.gov. In a PDF, or a Word document, people are liable to print these things out, so I will include the actual URL in parentheses. A slide deck sometimes I make indented bullet in a link test. Kim asked, if you prefer to use Bitly over the actual web addresses. If you have a web address that takes up three line, which I have seen web addresses that take up two or three lines in if the page, and don't want to use that much real estate, it makes sense to use a URL shortener, to not lose the real estate. If it's relatively short link to begin with, I might just leave it the way it is. There's nothing wrong with using a website address shortener, and I think most people probably prefer for print because website addresses take up a bunch of room. Ideally, with link text you want to avoid things like click here or read more. Those are not at all descriptive. Oftentimes when you see one link that says click here, you're going to see five to seven to 20 others. If you go to any of the news websites, you often see the lead-in to the story, and a link that says, click here or read more. Screen readers will by request read out all of the link text on a page to someone. So if you have 20 different links that say click here, that's not going to help someone who is trying to get an idea of what kind of links are on the page. I think there's a case to be made that descriptive link text is helpful for anyone, not just anyone who used a screen readers. That's about the content of the link. When we talk about what it looks like and how it behaves in a PDF, there's a link tag. It really only has two components. Simpler than a list. The link text, the descriptive text that you use, and something called OBJR, the object reference. The functional part of the link.

Ideally, that happens on its own. If you create a link in Microsoft Word or in InDesign. That structure should be in place. If you have to go in and create a link on your own, it's not entirely complex. It's not like creating a list from scratch. But you don't use the Touch Up Reading Order Tool, strangely enough, to do it. You use the Acrobat selection tool, the arrow pointer which lets you select text. Say in the document, the phrase, on the insert tab is the descriptive link text. I will highlight that with my mouse. You can do that from the keyboard, I think shift control and the right arrow selects one word at a time. Let’s you select multiple words. Do a right click, and there's an option that says create link. I select that option. Down at the bottom, it gives me the option to make this a link that opens a web page. In this case, that's what I want to do. I will select open web page and just kind of walk through the wizard. Next step tells me the web address for this. It will say, Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. And now it should have created -- should being the operative word -- an accessible link. The link is active. I can run my mouse over it and it'll follow and go to the website, but I want to look in the Tag Tree and see if it's created a link. So it's in this paragraph. And it did. It created a link for me, just the way that it should. One of the rare moments when a live demo went right. Now on the link tag that I created, I have the link text itself, and the link dash OBJR. The screen reader announces it's a link, and announce if it's a link that you have visited before or not, similar to when you are on the web. It should be there when you save a Word file or PowerPoint as a PDF.And a recurring theme coming up has a lot to do with the tools that you use to create the documents. And that's really where the key to a lots of this is. We'll go

through that. The slide deck will be available. And I literally just demonstrated much of that for all of that for you. So the slide, as I move through them, you are not missing anything.I want to talk briefly about figures and text equivalents. The figure tag, again, any kind of visuals, charts, graphs, pictures, logo, anything that you can think of that's visual. But as I mentioned, screen reading technology may be moving to a place where it can create descriptive text, a description may not convey the intended meaning. And sometimes those algorithms that analyze an image, if they see text in an image, they may or may not term them correctly. It's up to us as document authors or owners that there's a text equivalent for a visual. The thing to keep in mind with a text equivalent is that the context is really, really important. I have used this example many times. This is a picture of a scissor tail fly catcher looking like it's coming in for the landing, judging by the water in the background, near a lake. That's a description. But that might not be as important as saying something like, scissor tail fly catcher, the state bird of Oklahoma. It might well be in the context of something that I am writing that that's what the image conveys. If I write an article on state symbols, that may be something that I am trying to convey. An article for a bird watching magazine, I might start describing the scissor like shape of the tail and go into more detail on how that might help me be a better hunter or something like that. I don't know if any of that is true, other than the scissor-like tail. They're always contextual. One way to think about it is how do you describe the image if you were talking to someone on the telephone? That helps to kind of get a mindset around creating the text equivalents for visuals. You can put a text

equivalent in a few different places. By far and away the majority of the time your text equivalent will go in something called the alternative text attribute, which I will show you how to do in just a moment. You can put some of the text equivalent into a figure caption that is right there adjacent. But if you have a long text equivalent, picture worth a whole bunch of words, it makes more sense to have the description in the narrative of the document itself or maybe it's an appendix that you attach. And that can be helpful for a lot of folks, even for multimodal learning. It can be helpful to have the visual and the narrative description, if it's a complex visual. The example that I have seen actually quite a bit is in scientific research and in the papers that come out of that. I have seen really complex images that have experiments in different phases and there is just a bunch going on. The text description of it is really, really long. So in a situation like that, I encourage you to put that in adjacent to the image or the set of images so that folks have both right there and available. So the last point I will make about this is that for charts or graphs. Charts and graphs come from a set of data. It may be that the best text equivalent is to use the data tables that actually create the chart or the graph. That might be in addition to a description that you include. So text equivalents can vary quite a bit. Text equivalents are kind of an extra step. I think it's one of the few extra steps that we have to take in tools like Word or InDesign. Because you actually need to go in and insert the text equivalent. The good thing is, it's pretty straightforward to do. The technique is really similar in a bunch of the authoring tools, including tools for the web, for web pages. And in Acrobat, if you open the Touch Up Reading Order Tool, and you

right click a figure, there's an option in the menu that pops up that says edit alternate text. You then go in and type in the alternate text. It's as simple as that. It's very similar in office. If you are in PowerPoint or Excel or Word, you right click on an image, and you select -- I think its format or image properties -- and it opens up a menu. And you can navigate into a field and you type in the alternative text. This is really, really important. Folks using screen readers will rely on this to be able to perceive the image and get the meaning of the image into their brains.A couple of visual things and we'll wrap up here pretty soon. One is color contrast. And color contrast is something that you really need to address in the source file. You can change colors in later versions of Acrobat, but it's ideal to go back to the source file. Word, InDesign, whatever it might be, and adjust the color contrast there. What's on the screen now is the phrase, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in a really light gray, up against a white background. This is an instance where you can tell pretty immediately that the color contrast is not high enough. I have done this, projected this slide in conferences before, and in one it literally looked like an all-white slide. You literally could not see the gray. So you have a lot of variables that come in, in the way that people consume this, that certainly include different forms of low visioning but it might include being outside on the mobile device in the middle of the day. Yes, I think Kim was in the top when it didn't show up.Color contrast is important to keep in mind. Tools let you test color contrast against the ratios that we have in guidance in web standards. We can apply those to PDF content in the same way we do regular web pages.So this tool called the Paciello Group Color

and contrast Analyzer is the tool I use most for PowerPoint, Word, or PDF documents. You have to download it. It's really small. Giving you an eye dropper to select the text and then selects the background that's right behind it. It's a really, really handy tool. It gives you very clear indication whether or not the text contrasts well enough with the background that's behind it. Then you have a contrast checker from WebAIM and one from Chrome as well. I really like the Paciello Group for the PDF and other non-web content. The other thing to keep in mind for color. Use something in addition to color to convey meaning. This is a chart with three different series plotted on it. Line graphs. Series one is blue, series two is red, and series three is green. So what's wrong with that? Anybody want to take a crack and type into the chat window? Yes. So the way this is set up -- thank you, Kim -- the series are just labeled over here in a key to the right. There's nothing on the lines other than color to distinguish them from one another. Especially in the case of series 2 and series 3, which are red and green respectively. If someone is red and green color blind, they can't perceive the difference between them. And if this, for example, is printed out on a black and white printer, you end up with literally shades of gray. Kimberly, I have added shapes and markers to each one. And series 1 is blue, but has triangles. Series 2 is red, but has triangles. Series 3 is greener but has squares. The key is to have something in addition to color. I am not at all saying that not to use color, because color is helpful for those who can perceive the differences in color, but we need to use something else. With line graphs in particular, you can use different patterned lines. You might have a solid line, a wide dashed line and a narrow

dashed line to distinguish in addition to the color. So there are lots of ways to do it. With line graphs it's different than if you have bar chart, for example. With bar charts it might be a matter of making sure that each bar has a text label that distinguishing the one next to it. There's a lot of options and ways to do this. The great thing about this now, is if someone can't perceive the color for some reason, you can distinguish one line from the next with the markers along it. This is it in gray scale. Because of the shapes, you can still see. Kim asks, how would a screen reader read the chart? It depends. Because there is more built in to especially charts on the web where screen reader users can navigate through data points and it reads a whole lot of stuff. Something like this in are PDF is more likely to be wrapped up in a figure tag. That's where it's important to write a good text equivalent for the chart or the graph. So that's the most common approach is to describe the chart or graph in alternative text. Or a longer text equivalent. You could also publish the data set. So if you have the tables full of data that make up a chart or graph, you can also make that available, either adjacent to or as an appendix in the same file. Folks get in and navigate through the actual raw data. But that could be a little overwhelming with the big data set, so that's important to have the text equivalent in place as well. The text equivalent is pretty -- the text equivalents can get pretty complex for figures and charts. So there are other techniques that will be beyond the scope of what we're doing today, that might work as well.So kind of wrapping up, talking about artifacts and background. If you have content that's not meaningful, you want to hide it from AT. But you need to account for it. Acrobat gets upset if you don't have content in a tag. It doesn't know what to

do with it. Its accessibility check throws a red flag. It says, hey, this is not in a tag or artifact container. You need to put it in one or the other. The artifact and background is what we use to hide that stuff. It's just a matter in the Touch Up Reading Order Tool of using the background button. If you recall, I used my cross hairs to select the content. And it could be an image or a series of images. It can be text. Whatever it might be that I am okay hiding from assistive technology. I will select it with the cross hairs and click on the background button and Touch Up Reading Order Tool and that will put it into an artifact container. And it'll be invisible to assistive technology, which, of course, means that AT can't report it to someone. Again, it's a judgment call. You need to be really sure that if you hide content that you mean to hide content.Last thing I want to talk about is not specific to tags as much as it being a really great tool. Because you can do so much with accessibility in Acrobat, I highly recommend using the accessibility checker. It could give false positives but it is comprehensive. Letting you know if content is tagged and letting you know if there's ALT text. It's very much using the one in and office. And I think it's even more helpful if you use the one in Acrobat. Real quickly, I am going to show you how to do that. It's over in the accessibility tools. And there is an option and it's labeled the same I think in Acrobat 10 and Acrobat 11. It is labeled full check. It gives me options. I leave everything there as default. And I click on the check. And it gives me a report. Looking at things on the document level. Showing an issue with a document title. The nice thing about the report, I can select one of the failures and click on explain, and opens up a web page to explain what the failure is, and many times it tells you how to fix it.

It's a really helpful tool because of the things it captures and it takes you right to resources that help you fix stuff. And we have an error for alternative text. So I have a figure that doesn't have alternative text. And in this case, I right click. If I select fix, it opens the little box that says, set alternative text, and I can go in and do it, set it from there. Kimberly, thank you. I'm about to wrap up. I wanted to show you all the checker. If anyone needs to get ahold of me, and don't have the e-mail address, you can get ahold of me -- I am typing into the chat window. I think you all have it. I welcome your e-mails. The last point is it starts in the source file. Work on accessibility in the source file and you have a much easier time in the Acrobat. I am over by a minute. I want to say thanks again. I will let everybody know when the archive of this is and where to go when posted. Everybody have a great afternoon.>>CART Captioner: Thank you. Have a nice rest of your day! **********DISCLAIMER*********THE FOLLOWING IS AN UNEDITED ROUGH DRAFT TRANSLATION FROM THE CART CAPTIONER’S OUTPUT FILE. THIS TRANSCRIPT IS NOT VERBATIM AND HAS NOT BEEN PROOFREAD. TO DO SO IS AN EXTRA FEE. THIS FILE MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. PLEASE CHECK WITH THE SPEAKER(S) FOR ANY CLARIFICATION.

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