What Makes An Accessible PDF Accessible? Part 2 of 3 with Alan Natachu

Luis Malbas  
All right, it looks like we are live. That took a second there that last second in our countdown took like 30 seconds. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the training, learning and development community. Happy Monday to you. We are here for the second part of Allen not to choose wonderful series, what makes an accessible PDF accessible and there is a part three that I think we have scheduled for next week. Maybe it wasn't two weeks, two weeks, two weeks. Okay.

And so thanks, everybody, for joining us. Thank you, Mackenzie. Lisa Kim, it's great to see you. Yeah, very excited to get the series going. But before we do that, I just want to say really quick, the women of l&d event, which is happening this week, on Thursday, and Friday, I think I may actually run to incur capacity on that one. So because there's so many people registered, there's, you know, close to 800, it's getting there. So if you aren't registered for that one, please register, because we may run out of seats. I know, it is pretty amazing. I didn't realize that this one was going to be so big. But that says some very, very good things. You know about the about the event and the topic and the theme. So I'm so glad that then we're going to be doing that this week. So keep that in mind. Um, please make sure you register to that go to that cldc.com. And you can find a link to that event in a banner that is at the top of the screen. And yeah, all of a sudden there goes on my emails messenger. Yeah, it's been super busy lately. So let me quiet things down. I'm gonna go ahead and just let Alan, take it away. And, Alan, if you need anything I will be

Alan Natachu  
hiding. All right. So welcome to part two. I'm gonna share my screen in a moment. But I just want to let you know this one's a little bit more in depth in the previous video. In the previous video, we learned how to use the reading order tool, learn some of the basics of what makes Oh, PDF assessable. Now we're going to get into some more finer details.

So if you give me a moment, I will share my screen.

And now looks like my screen is being shared. Can I get confirmation in the chat, please? All right. So the last PDF, it was a very sparse PDF and graphics, short paragraphs. And sometimes when we make job aids, that's what we have. Sometimes we got to create longer documents. And that's what this one is, it's a longer document. I copy and pasted information from the Pac Man Wikipedia page, because I like Pac Man. And I like Wikipedia, and it's free. If we scroll down, you could see there's links, headings, footers, couple of pictures. So on and so forth. So the first thing that we're going to do is check the accessibility on this. There are certain topics that I'm going to skip over because we covered those in the last video, I'm going to focus just on a few more advanced topics with this particular video. So I'm going to select this disability from the right hand side here. If you don't have it on yours in Acrobat, go to Tools, scroll down. And instead of open it would say add and we'll add it to the right hand side here. But then we go ahead and start that up. Accessibility. What we're going to do next is an accessibility check. Select that the defaults are good. Select start checking, and it's going to give me a report as to what is missing here. Now in the previous in the previous video, we talked about reading order, we opened up reading order, are able to take a look at the page content order from top to bottom 123 Or two. This one's a little different because I'm going to switch the structure types. up it doesn't break that up. We're going to have to do a little clean up here, and the first thing that we're going to clean up is bullet points. Bullets are handled differently in Acrobat than they are in Word, PowerPoint and whatnot. Before I do that, then we clean this up a little bit. That should be a Heading One, I select my text, select Heading One. One thing about selecting stuff is that let me see if I can zoom in a little bit here is that you have to circle the entire text in order to highlight something and sort of select the entire image. If you want to select that image, if you go halfway with it, it won't select this is text. And put that aside. Make sure that this is text to. Now even though I highlighted this text, it's showing up as one block. That's because here in my reading order options, checkbox that says Display like elements and a single block is selected. I want to unselect that. And that should break it up for us. Looking at into the scary part right here in a moment, but first we're going to focus just solely on the bullets.

I'm gonna highlight this bullet. And I could go into here on the left hand side to look at the tags. In the previous video, I talked about tags. And that's sort of like how the how this is like a webpage. It's similar to HTML. I could go here, select it, open it up. Oh, yes, I was using a dialog box. Let me pause my sharing. And let me share the entire screen this time, the entire screen. Okay, there we go. See reading order. There. Thanks for bringing that to my attention, Kim. All right, here's the left hand side reading order. Go back here, okay.

Now, I'm going to select this. And I could try to do a couple things. I could try to go through my tags and try to find Okay, where's this located at? or I can select right click. And oh, wait, no, that's right. Go here to the options and tags. And then select Find tag from selection that will take you directly to where that particular tag is. By scroll down and select this year and do the same thing. Options panel and then go into find tag from selection. It will take me all the way there to where this particular items at. Now with this it's with this the bullets. They're done a little differently. If you've worked in HTML you may have you may know that it's set up in a specific way. I take a look here in the tags. It's currently highlighted in this excerpt from the Pac Man Wikipedia page, a CP that tells me that's a paragraph. I see. Li are l li and P. L stands for list. Li stands for list item. We're going to have to break this up a little bit because there's two things that are missing. There's the list label and the list body. Do this I'm going to open up my accessibility panel again. Open up the reading order again. And I'm just going to select that bullet and get that its own paragraph. I'm going to select the text here. Let me zoom out. I'm working on a very small screen so please forgive me there and I'm going to select this as its own text two. As I'm doing that, on the left hand side in the tags panel, we get to see every time that I create a new tag or a new selection to mark it as text, it creates something new. So, I'm going to add the label embody to this, I have this text highlighted, it's marked SP. And I can see here, it's highlighted here on the page. I'm gonna right click, and then I'm gonna go into Properties. And then from there, under Type, we're already in the tag section and under type on this, select and switch that to lists label or label. And notice how it changed here on the left hand side, lb L, that's what we want. Now, if I select this one, it tells me it's a paragraph. That's actually a list body.

So this is the formula for list, you got to have the list. Got to have the list item. And inside the list item, there is a label, which is the period of print little dot, and then you got the list body. I'm gonna do the same thing here, I'm gonna highlight these little bullets in this text.

Sorry, I'm going all over the place. Let me minimize this for a moment. And then I'm gonna go here, Mark, that is paragraph, mark these two paragraphs. That is a paragraph.

And from here, I'm just going to repeat what I did previously, I'm going to change this into a label. By right clicking on the tag and selecting properties, on their title, type, I'm gonna select label. Then I'm gonna select oops, it's already here. And then I'm going to select list item body. By doing this, we think we would be done. But actually, we need to do one other thing to make sure that everything reads correctly. And that's to create individual list items. This item should be for one item, either a numbered list, one item, or a bullet lists just one item. So how do we add another list item, I'm going to right click on it, and then select new tag. And there's a lot of tags that we can use. The one that I just want is list. And I select okay. Oops, I'm sorry, list item, then we remove that thank you. New tag list item. You know that feeling that you get when someone's looking over your shoulder as you're trying to do work and you're trying to spell and you misspell everything. Well, that's kind of the feeling that I have right now. So please forgive me as I backtrack. Alright, so I'm going to take this label, and put it under and list for this body fit under the label here. Oops, I want to make sure that it's correct meaning the list item opens up to both the label and the body. Start a new tag, list item quote to here. Take that and drop it inside of here and take this and drop it inside of here. Make sure that they are stacked

during the list, I may have messed up the order. So I'm going to select my list. And I'm going to walk the tags meaning I'm going to select the first one and see where that lands in my document. I select the first one and the last line is highlighted. You need to change the order of this. I'm going to take this last. Take this tag and just move it below here. If it will let me know. Okay. Well instead I'm going to take the one at the bottom because that's highlighted first and I'm going to send it up top. Sometimes it's a little tricky to get these little tags in the right order. 123 And it's a little work on our end. But if this is the way that we have to create lists in Acrobat to make them accessible. Now, I'm checking out the chat here, because I'm working with to Windows awesome. There's no difference between a bulleted list and a numbered list, it will still be the same and it will follow the same formula. list list item, label and label body. The only difference is with a numbered list. Instead of having a little character for a bullet, you would have the number and then you would put your text or whatever afterwards. Yeah, that is surprising. So you can spend a lot of time cleaning up your PDF to make it accessible. If you have a lot of bullets. Close this up a bit. In the previous video, we will check out the reading order by using the reading order tool reading order panel. And then show order panel show page contents Ergo Show page context is selected. We were able to look at this from the top 123456789 and a whole lot of stuff here. We are able to clean up this stuff by selecting it and then marking it as text

I'm going to go back into the tags panel here I can see that each one I can see that's all text. That's good. See next one paragraph, that's good too. But then I also have this note and a paragraph and heading. Do you notice how that note went into my footnotes? Well, in this particular paragraph, there is a footnote right here. If I open up the paragraph I got that highlighted. I really don't want to look in here for that particular spot. So I am going to open up my reading panel again

I got that one. That little tiny one still highlighted. Actually doesn't recognize that so I'm going to do it again. And I'm gonna mark this as a reference. Now after mark the market is referenced, I want to take you I want you to look at this side here on the left hand side market as reference.

Okay, now, this is the part of the presentation where if something crashes in my technology or if I can't fully explain it properly, we'll do an interpretive dance. I've only had to catch that check once

you're slow down there

right here number 16. Paragraph here

why is it not letting me select that let me show elements as a single block. Let me highlight this and mark that as reference. And then it's not popping up as referenced by itself. Okay, well, what was supposed to happen was when we mark something as reference is supposed to pop up here in the text panel on the left hand side in tag from selection there we go. Reference Now, another reference that we have attached to this is this one right here. Number one, if you my mouse a second funny name, we use the keyboard trackpad here. This is the first footnote that's tied to that reference. So I'm gonna mark this as reference as well. And how do we combine the two? Well, first, we need to make sure that we are working in the same spot. So let me close this out a little bit. Let me highlight that and label that as Heading One. Let me highlight this paragraph here. And label that as texts, individual text boxes. That way this will be easier to navigate. Like elements is a single block.

Sometimes when you're going through and editing your PDF, it can get kind of crazy. As you can see, there was a lot of different things in there. So I just highlighted everything and mark them as text. Just so I could see where I was working at. Now I'm going to go back to this number one, select that, and highlight that make that a reference. That's what it was supposed to do. There were too many boxes earlier. Plus to save 1516 1718 is supposed to go from one to three, mark those individual pieces as text and just that little bit as reference. I'm gonna go back down here, because we have marked this one as reference. I select that the boxes go to where was it? Not really order? Fine tag, why can I find you? Okay, well, anyway, I'm gonna select this, and then I'm gonna go back to reference again. And hopefully that will let me that will show me where it's at. Nope.

Well, what was supposed to happen is, is supposed to let me find the reference tag, and then that little number one on the list on the left hand side, I would drag that first reference and put it right behind it. So it would read something like let me turn this off. Because most video games at the time had themes of war or sports, footnote, one Lamers 1986, page 265. Although the inspiration for Pac Man character was the image of a pizza with a slicer mode, so on and so forth. I don't know why it's not letting me do that. And sometimes you have to really play with the document in order to make it right.

I apologize for that not working as I wanted, but where the show must go on.

So we explored a little bit with tags, we can do a whole lot with tags. Begin to investigate them by opening up and see what they're about.

But there's another area that I want to show you and that's the content content pane. I'm not seeing it here. So I'm gonna go to View. Show Hide Navigation panes and content. This is something that you should have open, it's going to open up on the left hand side and show you more of your document. Let me select that little file icon on the left hand side is like Pac Man. It says page one and rotations. That's all the links in my document. And then I go down and I walk this to

I'm just going down clicking on these little individual things and seeing where they land. Remove this one This says path, certain items, named path are on a blank images or images that shouldn't be there. If you take a look here, Japan maze action video game that's highlighted in pink. When this is highlighted the path, it's recognizing that these are underlines, these are hyperlinks, so we want to keep the height of the underlines there. If I were to delete it, it would remove those underlines. I undid that action, so I can put them back. In development, although reference one, I was having trouble trying to find how to put the footnote in the proper place looks like I could do it from here. When you are kind of lost in the tags, this is where contents comes into play. Move this up here, just changed the order came development that sentence. And then next one should be number one. And following that should be although continue onward. But in the previous our last tag that we marked was a reference for this, the footnote, I'm gonna go down here and see if I could find something called reference. There we go. I'm gonna take this, drag it up. So that it's right here. And it should now read something similar to the like of this paragraph. Then it should be number one. And then from that reference, it should hit the Frontpoint layer footnote. And then after it reads the footnote, it should go back to the paragraph. So there's these little itty bitty things that we have to be aware of. And if we can't find it in tags, we can't use the tags to find what we're looking for. Then we go into the content panel. Now, here's the kicker when we are doing this, checking for accessibility reading orders important the last video we did the reading order and use the touch up reading order tool.

And we're able to see, okay, 1234, so on and so forth from the top. Well, not only do you have to have check the reading order for this, using that tool. But you should also check to make sure that reading orders the same in your tags, the tags is what most assistive technology will read. Most modern assistive technology will take a look at the tags and know this is where I start, this is where I need to go and read down the list accordingly. Older assistive technologies will read the contents and the reading order. So in order to make sure that we are accessible not only to users who are using more current assistive technologies, but to make sure it could be used even further to people running, I don't know. I'm not up to date on Windows. So whatever the last version was, sorry, I'm gonna Mac users. And they wouldn't be able to open it up and read it. So we want to maximize the capabilities of screen readers being able to read this

okay, and that was a big part of what I want to show you today is just a reading order. This is more advanced because we're digging into the PDF and looking at the little details to make sure that the back end looks nice. You can close these things out and we can look at our document and say yeah, that looks good. But without going through and doing the individual steps to make sure that the document is accessible through the tags Through the reading order. And through the content

you know, we're not doing justice to our learners. Now the thing I wanted to show you was the list because that one is a unique situation. And we do use lists a lot in our documentation, I wanted to make sure that you have the ability to know where to go and how to correct it. I'm going to stop screen sharing for now, and then I'm going to bring us back and see if we have any questions. I know that was kind of technical, I wanted to make sure that it was alright, so I'm open for questions. Anything in chat? I got a question here. And then we open that up. How much time do you estimate you spent on a PDF document to make it accessible? That is an excellent question. When you're first starting is going to take a while. And for Word documents like that, where it's a lot of text, a couple of pictures. Okay, might take me an hour for those five pages, maybe less. But yeah, that's, that's what I was. As you start doing it more and more, you get to look for these different things you become accustomed to what needs to happen. So when you first started, it's going to take a long time. But as you get more proficient, you will be able to be faster about it. And there is another tool out there besides Adobe Acrobat that could help out with this. I was trying to set up my boot camp to run Acrobat and this tool, but I couldn't get it to run. So in the next talk, I'm gonna start out in Windows and show you that tool, because that really helps speed up the process. Nice.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, because we were talking earlier that you were on a Mac. But if there are any considerations or advantages to either operating system, like using Windows versus Mac and doing this, if there are any major differences.

Alan Natachu  
Yeah, they both run acrobat. And the Windows side, just because it has that extra tool that's free, it's specific to Windows, it has more power to it. Nice, okay, benefits of accessible PDFs beyond accuracy for screen readers. Right now we're focusing on the technical side of the PDF. In addition to the technical side, we also got to think of the design side, we got to check our color contrast, we got to check our font size, we got to check to make sure that it flows from top to bottom, and so on and so forth. Because even though this is talking about the technical of PDF accessibility, we still got to keep that in mind when we design. Okay, how is it going to look? How are people going to interpret it? Do my colors? Blend? Will someone who has color vision and can't see read be able to read my charts? How are we going to be simplified?

Luis Malbas  
Can you show us like at the end of say this project? You know what? How a screen reader is going to be interpreting all of this work that you're doing?

Alan Natachu  
Yes. Awesome. Cool.

Luis Malbas  
Thank you for that one. McKenzie. Here's one from Kim.

Alan Natachu  
If you start from word are there are some of those things automatically done for you? Or was this PacMan document from Word and not a webpage? So this one I cheated I copied from Wikipedia and pasted it into Word and cleaned it up in Word and did some of the accessibility like creating the headings creating the references and whatnot. But because we're moving from word to Acrobat, there are certain things that do transfer over and certain things that don't transfer over well, like the bullets, those bullets. We had the framework for it, but it wasn't completed. So we have to go in and clean those up. Interesting. And whenever you're working with accessibility and looking to optimize for screen readers, excuse me. You want to start with a source document and make that as accessible as possible. Otherwise, you're going to be doing a lot more work in Acrobat and that could be frustrating. Yeah,

Luis Malbas  
yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine.

Alan Natachu  
Yeah. Very cool. All right. Well, gosh, yeah, there

Luis Malbas  
was a lot there. It does seem like it's a lot of work but I it's it's Something that is necessary, you know, and I know that this is probably like a topic. I know this is something I'm going to be chasing after personally myself, but is anything like on the AI side of things if you heard it like

Alan Natachu  
that's where this tool I gotta look up the name but it will on the window sign that really helps out speed up the process. Oh, yeah, yeah, there's we still need to go through and do the human checks like the colors that match the reading order. Is that cool? Otherwise, the AI part of it, the automated part of it. This tool will def definitely speed things up. Yeah, like

Luis Malbas  
I forget who was mentioned in the in the comments about like, if it were like Photoshop Oh, there it is Christina Photoshop, Photoshop style macros and would help simplify this process. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, cool.

Alan Natachu  
And got one more question fastest way to generate the document from Word or HTML. HTML would probably be better just because that is a standard language. And you do have all the things that you need headings, text of all the code that you can do to make it optimized. And from there, you can take it and deliver it on its own. Whereas with Word, you start out as a document and convert to PDF. So if you do have that option, I will try HTML, but then that's another set of accessibility skills that you need to make sure that it flows right. Very similar concept, but there's extra things in HTML world that you need to know. Thinking about that, wow. Yeah. Sort of like driving stick and driving automatic. Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh,

Luis Malbas  
looks like oh, that's just a Dan, Kim saying and this is XML based word. Imagine how awful the old word it's totally true. It's totally true.

Alan Natachu  
All right. Well, Alan, thank

Luis Malbas  
you so much for spending some time with us on a Monday and sharing this part two of the series. I was yeah, there's there's a lot there. I really have to let this one sort of, I just have to soak it in a little bit. And I'm gonna have to take a look at it like an Adobe document somewhere in my system and just start to play around with it that way. But

Alan Natachu  
yeah, I started with a simple one, just tech. Yeah. Before you move on to other things, you'll be surprised.

Luis Malbas  
It's a surprising amount of work. Side question. Are you doing anything with chat? GPT?

Alan Natachu  
Not yet. I am interested in it. I asked it to build a bio for me, but it kept pulling in the information from my uncles, who are jewelers and really had their their in catalogs and whatnot, jewelry and catalogs. And they brought in all the information. And it assumed that I was working in the 70s. Yeah, yeah. And that's from the Native American perspective. There's not a lot of us to talk to you check GPT Internet data. So it's more represents us more.

Luis Malbas  
Right now. Yes. That's interesting, isn't it? Because i Same thing for me. I tried to do something similar and had no clue who I was. I think that said I was a fisherman or something. I'm not. All right. Well, um, Alan, thank you so much. So we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Really appreciate appreciate you sharing with us and everybody. Don't forget about this Thursday and Friday. I don't know I'm afraid to look at at the registration for this, the event on Thursday and Friday, because I have a feeling it's going to be already over 800 Next time I look. So hopefully we'll see everybody there. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close this out. Thanks a lot, and we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks again, Alan. Oh,

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