What Makes an Accessible PDF Accessible? with Alan Natachu Part 1 of 3

Alan Natachu  
Hello everyone, my position changed. I'm no longer a learning experience designer. I'm a learning technology partner. And I act like an internal consultant to our learning and training teams at exact sciences. So yeah,

Luis Malbas  
All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another TLD cast. We've got a special Monday edition for you. It's been a while since we've done one of these. We just wrapped up a great event on air meet. We had one, this last Friday and the Friday before it was the data measurement and analytics Summit. That one went went off really, really well was a bunch of fun. As boring as I thought that was going to be it was pretty much the opposite. I was engaged throughout. So that was great. And just thanks to all the speakers for that one. And for everybody that attended that event. Today. This one just really popped up as being very popular. Alan nata Chu is here to talk with us about what makes an accessible PDF accessible. A little bit about Alan. Alan is a learning experience designer at exact sciences. He has been doing TL DC stuff for a number of years now probably like, what is it been five years or so? Maybe when something like that? Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, I've even been to like our live events or conferences. So Alan is an incredible guy, love him to death. Formerly, you're an artist. You worked at Apple, or you were creative for Apple, I know that I saw on your LinkedIn profile, you do like freelance video editing. And then you were over at Madison College for awhile, background with VR, and just generally geeky techie devices and all that kind of stuff. And I know you are a huge supporter of accessibility. And and it's fascinating to follow you and watch you do that stuff. And so with that, I'm gonna let you take this away. Now you're saying that this is part one of the how many series three parts, three parts, okay, so everyone keep that in mind. We'll have the dates for those next two parts up soon. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and let Alan take over. So I, myself,

Alan Natachu  
thank you for showing up. Today, we're going to talk about PDF accessibility. And we're going to do this in three parts. The first part is going to get us an introduction into accessibility, what happens when you start with your source file not being accessible and your source file being inaccessible, how much work it takes to make those two different files assessable. And we're going to take Adobe Acrobat for spin. And with that, I'm going to share my screen. Hopefully, I can share my screen

Oh, do it later, is asking me to quit Chrome, which I'm using right now. I'm like, No, I'm going to share this right now. minimize that. All right. So I'm flying them blind. Let me know in the chat, if you have any questions, otherwise. Yeah, I'm just gonna go through pause for a moment and come back to you. So these I have two different source files I have, they look very similar. And I've been working on one just prior just to make sure things. Okay, we take a look at this one. We got a title. It looks pretty nice and clean. This is from an old handout that I created a few years back

Luis Malbas  
Hey, Alan. Yeah, we're seeing your um, we're seeing your browser window showing the Crowdcast screen. So maybe I'm not sure if you share the browser or I shared the

Alan Natachu  
window doo doo doo doo doo doo, share something Share Screen Share entire screen. Let's try that and minimize all right,

Luis Malbas  
there it is. We see it.

Alan Natachu  
Excellent. So start back from the beginning. So I got a couple of documents here I have this one and this one. Both have been treated with some styling to it. Meaning you can look at it and see the you can see where headings are you can look at it and see where there's extra spaces, you can see pictures you know just kind of a simple document to get us started. And with this one and features of the very similar look, these grow through we got we got these different headings we got bullets and it's set up very similar to the previous one. The big difference between this one, and the previous one is that this document has been designed with accessibility in mind. I'm going to take this to the very top again. And I apologize in advance for everyone who may find this a little jarring. If things get to motion sickness for you, please let me know and I'll slow things down. I'm working on a Mac. But this works on a PC as well, I am going to turn on my characters show on my characters, you get to see that is a very clean document. There's no extra return marks like that throughout. I ran out of time I did not put into links, that's something we could take care of next time. It's very clean document. I'm gonna turn this off and switch to another document. This one has been formatted with just the size, bold, italics just copied and paste and cleaned up a little bit. When I turn on the characters, we get to see there's a lot of extra spaces, we get to see that there's a lot of extra things. These are not bullets, they're stars. And this will really affect our assessable PDF. A key thing I want to note here with accessible PDFs, start with your source file, make that as accessible as possible. Otherwise, you are going to run into a lot of editing. When we switch over to Acrobat. I'm going to turn off the characters here. Switch back to here. Now within the Microsoft Office applications, there are ways to check access accessibility, we take a look towards the bottom of this window, there is a little button that says accessibility. Sometimes it gives you a thumbs up checkmark, you know says you're good. But in this case, it says investigate. When I select that button, it gives me a list of errors. This is the assessable document I'm doing one final check to make sure things are okay before I export this out as a PDF errors missing alternative text, picture five. What's great is that it will take you to where the issue is, and it will even tell you how to fix it. I'm gonna scroll down this sidebar here tells you how to fix it. So I'm gonna right click View optics and call this USB charging icon. Alt text is very important to include in your document. If it's an image that conveys information, you should definitely mark it as alt text, or give it alt text description. Alt text should be just a Yeah, a quick description you don't have to write a novel, it should tell you what it is. And you don't have to say picture of image of screenshots of because the screen reader will say image of and then read the description you don't have to be redundant and like that. It's very easy to mark something as decorative here, we can click this little button marked decorative and a screen reader will read that as a decorative element. I'm gonna leave that unchecked for now. Close out this here. And it brings up the accessibility report. I love a good clean accessibility report. At the bottom of the screen it says accessibility good to go. That's good. I'm going to save this. And now let's look over to the other document, the one that was created just copy and paste and tweaked up a bit. It tells me I should investigate the accessibility here. And I do have missing alt text from this picture. Microsoft is trying something new. They're trying to incorporate AI into things and one of them is provide all text for you. Now it's hit or miss. Sometimes if it's very accurate if it's a simple image, but with an image like this. I'm gonna right click on here and select View alt text. It's a gives a very generic description. I'm going to go here and type the name of the company The Asus website. This is a handout that I did several years ago on a free and paid 3d tour creator, it is a very awesome tool, it's still around, you could use it for free up to five projects, you could pay $10 To make a project public worldwide without any ads, or you could pay a monthly fee. I'm gonna go back to the accessibility. And notice that when I make the change, it doesn't pop it up anymore. Here we go. Oh, that's interesting, those icons disappeared, and now they reappeared. Okay, I'm just going to leave it at this and we're going to export this out. Save the document. If you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your machine, you could save this as an Adobe Acrobat PDF. But if you don't have it, there's a nother way that you can save it to ensure that when you export this out, most of the accessibility features will travel with it. You'll see why I say most features in the moment. First off, let's do this one using Microsoft Word built in PDF. Save as a built in PDF. Excuse me, we're gonna export this as PDF. This is on a Mac on a PC, you will go to File I believe export change file type. And one of the file types you'll save it as is a PDF. Now you want to make sure that this select this has selected best for electronic distribution and accessibility. If he's like best with printing, it will give you the same document. But without the built in accessibility to built in features. The it will make it electronic, but you won't be able to do much in terms of accessibility. I'm going to save this to my desktop There we go. I see it right here. I'm going to do the same thing here. But I am going to I've been working with a PC for a long time and my other job. So coming back to the Mac is totally different. There's a reason why I'm coming to a Mac. For this particular demonstration. Creating Accessible PDFs on a Mac is not as robust as doing it on a PC. With Part Two, we're gonna switch over to a PC and learn even more about how to make these particular documents assessable. But for now, we'll stick with this. On a PC, you could go to File, Export, or a File, Save as Adobe PDF. And that will export your document for you into a PDF document. I was hoping for that same kind of thing here where it goes hit File, Export as pdf. I'm not seeing it. So plan B. Let's close this out. And let's close this one out. I'm going to open Adobe Acrobat

that's a little shortcut key if you hold down the command key and the spacebar, you can begin typing what you're searching for. And then it will load it up on a Windows machine, you could do something similar by hitting the Windows key and then typing and it will start bringing up suggestions for you. So we can from here, I'm going to create a PDF from file. And then from here, I'm going to go to my desktop. Select assessable and then select open

it's gonna take a little while for it to open it up, convert it and then show us the results. Depending on how many images how big the file, how many pages, anything extra, it could take, you know, a few seconds to a couple of minutes. So we have to be patient here. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen for a moment and I'll check in with people about questions. Are there any questions?

Luis Malbas  
I had a I had a question in there. Is there a difference in printing an accessible PDF like why is there two separate things like what Have you printed out? Does it look different?

Alan Natachu  
For text, it will be just a little bit sharper if you send it out to a print shop like FedEx or staples or to your own printer. Well, you'll see the difference is in images. When use, say for electronic, it reduces the file size so that it will still be clean, but it's cleaned for screens. Whereas the other one, say for print, it will make sure to keep the highest picture quality possible.

Luis Malbas  
Fascinating,

Alan Natachu  
thank you. Keep the questions coming. I'm gonna share my screen again. And we'll do this again, share the screen and

wallah. I feel like Julia Child's always have something oven ready so you can keep the show moving. This is the assessable PDF, I'm going to open up the inaccessible PDF and we're going to take a look at both of them. Not assessable. I went to File Open it open a dialog box where I search for the PDF I found it I'm gonna select Open. And we got these two different PDFs loaded up and ready for us to look. I'm in Adobe Acrobat on the top of Adobe Acrobat. I got two tabs. One says the assists not accessible. The other one says thesis assessable. But how do we get there? How do we work with accessibility in Acrobat, we need to turn on a specific feature and that is found in the Tools section. If I go into Tools, because a lot of things that you can add to your sidebar here. Now, this is a fresh install of Adobe Acrobat. If you open Adobe Acrobat on your end, you may see that these options and more would have already been provided. But what's usually not provided is the accessibility icon. Under the Protect and standardize section of these icons, you can add the accessibility button to the right hand side. Now we're ready to work with our PDFs. I'm going to turn on the accessibility tool here is going to give me several tool options. We can set reading order, we can do accessibility checks, we can auto tag the document, the one that we're going to focus on, on today is the accessibility report. The document that we're working on right now is the non assessable version. So I'm curious as to what it will pull up, I select the accessibility check. And then from here, it gives us a lot of different options. Don't have to worry about selecting or deselecting stick with the defaults, and then select start checking. It's gonna go through and it brings up a list it we see on the left hand side, a sidebar popped up called Accessibility Checker. And it goes through and checks through all these different things. Right now, it flagged me for having alternate text or not having alternate alternate text. I select the down arrow or I select the arrows to drill into the issue. Ultimate texts figure alternate texts failed and then figure one, when I select this, it will take me to the issue, which one's given me the issue. And it's this one right here. When I right click here on figure one, I could fix this. What's very cool is that if you have a whole list of images that need alt text, it will not only fix that, but will also help you fix others. So it's only have one I don't have to arrow left or right to the other images I just have the one to work with. So this is USB charging icon. And just like in Word we have decorative figure. If it doesn't convey in it any information, you should mark it as decorative, the screen reader will automatically pass it so I still like so I select Close save. And on the left hand side it says that it's passed. Now under the Documents section, there are three issues and these three are common logical reading order, title filled and color contrast. And we bring that up. So we can see that better slide out over so we can see that better. But these three are usually going to pop up no matter what you work with logical reading order, that means can the document be read from top to bottom? In order? How do we check that, we're gonna go back to the right side, we're still working on our accessibility accessibility tools, we're going to select reading order. When I select that, I get to see these boxes that are marked one, six, looks like seven to three. So we got to make sure that this goes from in sequence from one to nine, maybe here. And to do that we go to within the reading order popup window, there's a button that says Show order panel, I'm going to select that. And it opens up the new sidebar on the left hand side. And we get to see 1234 All the way up to nine. One. So we got to figure out what this one is because this is part two of the reading order, I can select it by clicking on this little square here, it takes me directly to that particular figure text, whatever inside of the reading order. And then I just drag it up. One two, same thing here image. Now this is something that you have to do. Just to make sure that things are set correctly. We're working with an non assessable PDF document. When you work with a document like this, where it was just produced without accessibility in mind, you're going to come across these empty spaces. Oh, let me undo that. can't undo that. Okay. Well, you're gonna come across these empty spaces seven is an empty space. We don't want any empty spaces, we just want to get rid of it. So I'm going to right click, and select Delete Selected Item structure. Number five, number four. Now, sometimes Adobe will do this, it will try to decide what's best for your text and what's best for your pictures. In this case, I have four and five here, put it together, we have the word optional gear. But it's separated. Let's combine those two, combine them, I make sure I highlight the text. And it has to be a fairly wide highlight because the text boxes they're larger than we work with larger text boxes, larger target. If we go in and just try to select it here, like a Word document, it's not going to pick it up. So I'm going to click and drag and just try to pick up optional gear. In on the right hand side in our reading order popup window. We have the ability to change this text, we could alter the headings. We can even create things that are background images or background artifacts, like pitchers. I'm going to select with optional gear selected. I'm going to select text and paragraph from this window and it gives it its own. Oh it combines it. That's good. Now I need to go through and make sure that things are the same. Setting up a shot Nope, I need this pitcher to be next. So I go through, bring it up. Go through and bring it up. Now I click through here 234567 We need to make sure that the document makes logical sense that way. Which Just for fun, I am going to say it is in logical, logical order. I'm not going to, I need to go back and actually go through the entire document. But we only got a little bit of time. And I want to make sure I answer questions at the end.

Luis Malbas  
And kind of can I ask you a couple questions right now? Of course. Okay. aalnc. Sabrina is asking, do we need a paid version of Acrobat to check for accessibility?

Alan Natachu  
Yes, you do need a paid version of Acrobat for accessibility right now the going rate is $20 per month just for Acrobat itself. Today, only, they're offering a 40 20% off discount off the entire Adobe Cloud Suite for the first year. So if you don't have it, you could pick up the entire suite for $40 a month. I was researching that today. I'm like, Oh, wow, I should do that. I don't know. But, okay, otherwise, it is $60. If, for individuals, if you're a student, you can get a discount on that. So if you still have that old edu address, you might want to leverage that. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying it's available. Yeah.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. Christina is asking how do we decide what's decorative, it looks like you made the USB charger image, a non decorative image.

Alan Natachu  
You're right. And we're gonna go through how to mark the or I'm gonna go through the assessable document and tag those out. So you're jumping ahead of me?

Luis Malbas  
And then, um, it's he came and asked, How is Acrobat deciding what the order is? Is there? Is there an actual logic to that? Or is it sort of random? How does the order I haven't cracked it?

Alan Natachu  
I think it's so before this particular case, I copied the pasted the text into a Word document, and then did the formatting and then brought into pictures. So I'm thinking it remembers that order of how I worked with this particular document. I don't know why. It does what it does.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. Kim is saying, um, when Kim tries to copy paste out of a PDF, it breaks up things. Oddly, so does the reading order accessibility function? Fix that?

Alan Natachu  
Yes. And that's something that we're going to go over in part two. All right, nice.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. It's the dancing. Great topic. Thanks for doing this, Alan. And then let's see. Shira or Sharrah. Sorry, I don't know, says what makes the order get nuts in the inaccessible PDF? Is it because the original doc slash pre PDF doc was built non sequentially, and these markers stay? Oh, are you just answered? Yeah.

Alan Natachu  
I don't know. I would crack the sequence yet.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah. Okay. All right. That's it. I'll let you keep going. All right.

Alan Natachu  
share my screen again.

Minimize this. So we've been working with the non acceptable version, we're going to go through a couple other checks on here to make sure that if this was assessable, how would it work? How would it look like? Let's pretend this was Lodge. This was set we noticed reading order was set correctly. So we can right click on here and select pass. Now notice how I'm doing this without actually going through the entire document and checking the entire document. The Accessibility Checker is good and checking some things in terms of accessibility, like headings, reading order, and whatnot, but it's not good enough to give you a complete picture, there are going to be some things that you will need to do to make sure it's accessible. The reading orders one of them. I'm going to select paths. I am not going to send this out to anyone because I know that's not true. Color Contrast, you could go through and make sure that your colors are good. It's asking you Do they pass I'm gonna select pass and title failed. This one gets me a lot. If you take a look at the top of my Acrobat window, it says this is not as accessible that PDF. When you give it a title, rather than giving it the file name, it will give you the title of the document. So I am going to right click here and I'm going to fix sometimes this window pops up sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't, you would need to go into File and properties. So the title I'm going to change this to Do not distribute. Because this is not assessable I could change the subject

change the author, and I could add keywords. Usually I like to put the title the subject and change the author, keywords. Seo, if you're into marketing stuff, or you do a lot of searching and computer that could help out too. I'm going to click OK. And now I get title is passed. Let's run the accessibility checker on a document that is assessable. So I have it here. I'm going to close this out. And I'm gonna go down to the accessibility icon on the right hand tool sidebar. I'm gonna get these options again, and one of them isn't accessibility check option. Please save the document. Sure. You're going to be like that. Sure. Alright, save. Now let's try. Start checking. And because we worked with accessibility at the beginning, it is better off. When we've used Accessibility Checker, I'm going to open up the reading order panel. And again, I see 1254 I don't know where threes at? Let's find out. I'm gonna select Show order panel. And it looks like three is empty. I can't find it here. Nope, there it is. So I'm going to right click on this and Delete Selected Item structure. We don't want it here. Number four is path. What is that? Oh, that's an image. Okay, so that's 123. And four should be this fourth one right here. In addition to reading order, using this tool, we can also check our headings. Bring up the reading order, I'm going to bring the reading order back up. And then in this section, Show page content groups right now we're looking at page order. structure types will tell us what something is h1, the figure, paragraph h1 Paragraph h2. In the other document, it would not give us this it will say everything is a paragraph or an image. Now, let me go ahead and go back to that question. Yes, these will go back here. Yes, those icons, they're decorative. They don't really convey information. They don't tell you the model of the tripod, they don't tell you the model, the 360 camera, it's just there. So I can select here using the selecting the square that says figure and then select background artifact. Do that see here as well. But if you do it this way, right click and delete. Oops, can I delete it? Why can you let me delete it? And this is the part of the presentation where everything goes haywire. So I right click, Adobe finally caught up with me and Delete Selected Item structure. It's going to get rid of the icon. Oh well, no, that's next week or two weeks from now. You could also delete the image but when you do the accessibility check, it may pop up hey, this doesn't have alt text. So I'm gonna go through Mark background as artifact, go through, select this and delete that. Okay, I think Adobe is not being very friendly with me. When Adobe's not working as intended, give it a moment to catch up. Otherwise close out the program and open it back up. I wish there was an easy way but there have been many times where I had to do that in order to keep working. Not a perfect system but it will get you there. Then we go back to my accessibility report and see what else is available. I got the three issues again, logical reading order titled and color contrast. I'm gonna To pretend that these all pass the fix this. And this one is to learn how to spell it first 360 panel.

Now, at the top, remember how I pointed out it gives you the file name and not the title of the document. When you give it a title, it now shows up here. And that better for accessibility because it tells you the name of the document versus the file name, the file name could be insane. Like first draft pdf of 3d panorama guide, dot pdf. Computer will read that whole out, it's better to have the title 360 panel there. And once we set our reading order, once we check the different tags to make sure they are correct, then we can say that this document has been checked for accessibility. However, there are a couple other things that we should look at, in order to make sure that this document is truly accessible. And for part two, we're going to look into that. We're going to take this document through a screen reader so you can hear it and get a little so you can hear it in learning how to navigate the screen reader. We're going to I'm going to show you a program that will help you with finding the errors and fixing them for you. And we're going to dive deeper into what's called tags. Let's see right click Show in tag order. Tags tags, Tex, Tex Tex, there we go. Because a PDF is essentially a and HTML file. So yeah, if you're comfortable with HTML, you'll feel right at home here. If you're not, don't worry, it's not too bad. Then with that, I will stop sharing my screen. Take any other questions.

Unknown Speaker  
All right, let's

Luis Malbas  
see. We had something here. John. John had a really nice posted in here that was kind of talking about, I think, Wait, let's see. Oh, this is and it was answering a question from Shira. And I'm going back to see if I can find that question. There it is. Yeah, it was about the order. inaccessible PDF. But, John, John, are you the one that we met in DevLearn? Anyway, that is that just a great answer in there? Bum Bum bum. Now TR had asked I think it was when you were overriding or saying everything was passing every although wasn't he was TR was just asking about whether or not. So that forces it to override those issues.

Alan Natachu  
The ones that have a human component where it asks you to check you as the human has to make that decision. Acrobat does not hold you accountable for that decision. So, honestly, is the best policy, don't mark it complete until you've actually done the work to make it complete?

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, yeah. So is the sort of the performance of Adobe Acrobat when it comes to doing this. The accessibility checks and making those edits? Is it expected that you kind of should let it do its thing? So that it doesn't crash or whatever?

Alan Natachu  
Yeah. Whatever programs you could close out, go ahead and close out. I don't know why it's such an intensive resource hog of a program. But yeah, once you notice it start weirding out on you. Definitely Stop it to close out any programs that you don't need. And then bring it up again.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, it's kind of doing an Adobe thing it feels like especially with Acrobat. Let's see here. Yeah, there you go. John, saying it's resource hog because it's Adobe software. I didn't want to say it out loud. Yeah, good stuff. All right. So Alan, let's, let's get the next couple scheduled because I this is so fascinating. I

Unknown Speaker  
mean, how much of your I mean, do you do this a lot? Is this something that is a daily activity for you working on? Accessible PDFs are not daily but frequent? Yeah. And I'm still learning. And when working with accessibility in mind, it's best to have people who have that particular disability test your stuff.

Alan Natachu  
That's best. The best thing that you can do get that feedback directly from them. Otherwise and do your best to make it as accessible with the knowledge that you have. And if that comes back hate, it's not working right? Learn from that, and then do better. Because it's always a learning process. I've been doing this for five, six, many years. But yeah, it was something comes back and like, oh, okay, thank you for showing me. I will now start incorporating that. Yeah,

Luis Malbas  
nice. Let's see McKenzie saying love the really specific tips and use of real world examples. Thanks, welcome. And then TR Yes, please, this is a must I get tired of telling people to make those docks of make make these docks accessible. So Alan, I really appreciate you taking the time to share with us and sounds like we'll have a couple more we have enough people to this one where it's definitely an important topic. So, so. So thank you. Yep, you're welcome. Okay, and we're out of time. So we'll see everybody next time. Thanks for joining us. Um, the women have l&d event that one is coming up in March, I'm probably going to reschedule that one. It was scheduled I think for next week or the week after, but we're just kind of I'm really behind on it. So I think I'm probably going to reschedule it for like another week or two, but that's coming up. And also Allen's wonderful series will be on the schedule as well. So we'll see everybody next time.

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