Compliance and PDF Accessibility
A review of PDF accessibility compliance legislation and a demo of Equidos PDF accessibility software.
A review of PDF accessibility compliance legislation and a demo of Equidos PDF accessibility software.
Okay, so it is two o'clock here on my clock, so I think we should get started. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining another edition of our Equidox Webinar Wednesdays. Today, we're just going to be talking a bit about compliance and PDF accessibility, so just appreciate everyone for joining. My name is Dan Tuleta. I'm the Senior Sales Engineer here at Equidox, so I'll be running us through the webinar today. Just a quick rundown of the agenda: first, we're just going to briefly talk about who Equidox is, who we are, and what we do. We're also going to talk about PDF accessibility challenges and our solution to that challenge. Also, we're going to be discussing why we need to make PDFs accessible. We're going to be talking a bit about the legislative and lawsuit side of things as well, and we will spend a good chunk of time doing an Equidox demo. So anyone who hasn't seen our Equidox software before, we'll give you a rundown of how that works and how it might apply to your PDFs and your documents and your accessibility challenges. Okay, so Equidox Software Company, our mission is to enable PDF accessibility through intelligent automated solutions. So we are a leader in PDF accessibility. We have two main core components to our business. We sell our Equidox software, so it's a software-as-a-service, a web-based application, which we'll be going through today in the demonstration. It is intended for quick and easy efficient remediation of PDF documents. We also offer an AI-based solution, so Equidox AI is more for those recurring type use cases where you have a very high volume of documents that have a lot of similarities in them. So think of bank statements or directories or just documents where you're constantly updating them, or they're constantly changing, or you are producing many thousands or millions of them on a recurring basis. Obviously, that's just a volume of documents and pages that no human could handle remediating on their own. So we can use Equidox AI to train artificial intelligence models to be able to automatically apply the ACC and compliant tags to those types of documents. So we won't be talking too much about Equidox AI today. That's another webinar for another day. It's a totally different type of tool for a different use case, but if you have any questions about Equidox AI and how it might apply to your documents, you can definitely reach out to us. We'd be happy to kind of understand your situation and give you a more personalized demonstration of it. So let's talk a little bit about the market challenges. The challenge of PDF accessibility is no secret to anyone who is familiar with traditional methods of tagging PDF documents. The process can be extremely manual and time-consuming for people who are using tools like Adobe Acrobat, for example, which is really synonymous with all things related to PDFs. I like to refer to Adobe Acrobat as a tool that kind of resembles a Swiss Army knife; you can do just about anything with a PDF document, but it is not built with the ease of use or the ability to do things quickly in mind. So it's just unsustainable as a tool that you have to use for large numbers of PDF documents because it just takes too long and it's very technical and requires a lot of experience and expertise. So this really leaves organizations behind the eight ball when it comes to getting caught up with their backlogs of PDF documents that are still out there in circulation and also on top of making sure that all of the new content moving forward is tagged and compliant. Because of how technical and tedious Acrobat is for tagging PDFs, this often forces the remediation responsibility into the lap of just a small set of experts who are often unable to keep up with these backlogs and the constant flow of new documents and content being produced and updated week over week, month over month. This will usually lead to issues with quality because the amount of work that's required is simply unsustainable if you're having to use these traditional manual tools to tag the content. So why are we making PDFs accessible? Let's kind of talk about why this is important. Many people have probably heard of laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and different compliance standards like Section 508 or WCAG, which stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. But at a high level, our world is becoming so much more reliant on digital information. And just as organizations have to comply with the ADA by offering wheelchair ramps or handicap parking spaces and Braille signage for their buildings, they also now must ensure that their digital content that they are distributing to their customers and people is accessible to people with disabilities. So these articles that you see here on the slide deck, they are linked. So when we send out the slide deck afterwards, if you'd like to read in more detail about the ins and outs of Section 508 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, feel free. We won't go too deep into the weeds on that today because I'm not a lawyer, so I don't want to stand here and preach about the exact letters of the law. But the fact of the matter is that all PDFs and all digital content must be made accessible as we become such a more technologically based and digital world. So again, this is another article here that will be linked if you'd like to read more on the topic. But recently, the Attorney General has signed a final rule on digital accessibility under Title II of the ADA, mandating that all state and local governments must adhere to WCAG, those Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level AA for content and mobile applications, and this of course includes PDF documents. So exceptions are not a free pass. There are many instances where PDFs still need to be accessible. So the rule of thumb is, if a PDF document is still actively in use or relevant to multiple individuals, it likely needs to be made accessible. And if it's your document, it's your responsibility to make sure that it's accessible. The Department of Justice has provided a Fact Sheet, which is again linked here, citing numerous examples when exceptions do not apply. We can also talk to you if you'd like to have more of a one-on-one discussion to discuss your use case and your PDF accessibility backlogs to kind of help you put together a prioritization of these documents. So if you're staring at a pile of hundreds or thousands of documents, it can be quite an intimidating thing to look at. So how do you get started? Our general rule of thumb would be to start with the newest content, the stuff that is going to be the most up-to-date and most relevant, then work towards the easiest content. So when you can get through all of the content that you can remediate quickly, then start thinking more about the older, 10-year-old types of reports that are probably not being interacted with as often, and also the very complicated stuff, which could just be more of a strain on your resources in terms of time because it's just very, very difficult to remediate certain types of those documents. We can talk in more detail if you'd like to have more of a one-on-one consultation after the fact, but just keep some of those things in mind. Okay, so to help quantify the scale of this problem, Equidox conducted a survey in part with the National Federation of the Blind. And what we found after surveying about 250 blind and low vision people is that they're finding that two-thirds of their PDFs are not accessible. So just imagine the frustration that you would have if everything that you were interacting with on a daily basis, you couldn't read two-thirds of it. It would be extremely frustrating, and you would just be at a huge disadvantage in terms of how you go about navigating the world. So that's what we're trying to change. We're trying to make sure that we are closing the gap here. We don't want to see 67% of PDFs inaccessible and unusable to a large section of the population. We want to make sure that we are empowering organizations to do the right thing and get these documents up to the right level of standards so that they can be compliant. Okay, so again, here is just some more data about the rising number of lawsuits that organizations are facing over digital accessibility, which again includes PDFs. So the theme is very clear: we are a highly digital society, and organizations have a responsibility to ensure that their content can be interacted with by everyone, not only fully sighted people. These increasing numbers of lawsuits are not going to stop increasing until these organizations make the necessary changes and improvements to their digital content. So again, it's just not slowing down. The ADA is not going anywhere, and people are going to continue to become more and more reliant on digital information. So we have to start working through our backlogs and PDF problems. Okay, so when we are going through the demonstration today, which we're about to move into in just a moment, I'm going to throw around the word “tags” pretty often. So just anyone that's new to PDF accessibility, there are these little elements in a document called tags that we are using Equidox to create or fix if the document was already tagged. The tags are basically these little digital markers that are used to identify and organize the content on the page. So there are different types of tags: you have tags for elements like text, images, headings, links, lists, tables. The tags must be in the correct order so that the PDF will be read in the correct order because obviously you can't have content that is just being kind of scrambled around the page and read in any random order; it could render an entire document useless if that were the case. So that's really what we're going to be doing inside of Equidox. We are going to be organizing these tags to make sure that this document is able to be interacted with using assistive technology, a screen reader for example, and that the user who is using that screen reader can extract the exact same information that a sighted user can by visually looking at it. So different elements must be read in a different way, and depending on what type of element it is, that's going to determine the type of tag that we apply to it. So just to give everyone a heads-up, when we're throwing around the term “tags,” this is what we're referring to. Okay, so we are going to jump into the Equidox demo now, and the demo itself will be, of course, recorded. So we will link it here inside of the slide deck. If you want to share this amongst your organization, show it to different people, feel free to send that along, and we'll insert the link to the video as well. Okay, so let's jump over here to Equidox now. Equidox is—this is my Equidox application. If you notice here, I'm operating directly in my browser. So what's nice about operating in the browser is I'm not tied to any one individual computer. Equidox is a web-based application; you can interact with it from literally any computer, assuming you have an internet connection, of course. We also work with a concurrent user licensing model. So what that allows for is if you, let's say, have 10 concurrent licenses as an organization, that means any 10 people can use Equidox at the same time. Maybe you have 20 or 30 or 40 people that theoretically might be using it for a project that they're working on, but you don't necessarily expect them to be sitting there for 40 hours a week remediating PDFs. Oftentimes, people just need to log in for 10 or 15 minutes and work on a document. When they log out, that seat that they were using is now available for someone else to log in. So it's very flexible in how you go about deploying it to a larger group of users because you don't have to purchase an annual subscription to anything for a user that just might need to use it once a week or once a month, very infrequently. So you're not having to install and update and maintain software across every one of these individual computers. The other nice thing about being web-based is that Equidox is naturally collaborative. So what that means is you can share documents with other users in your account. So if you needed help on a document, you could ask a subject matter expert because maybe there are diagrams or charts that you're not really sure how to describe with alternative text, and you don't want to make assumptions or guess at what you should be typing in for alt text. So you'd rather share that with the person who might know more about that subject. You can also work together on the same document at the same time as another user. So if you have a very large document with a tight deadline, maybe, let's just say it's a 500-page-long document, that's a very daunting task for any one person to just kind of tackle 500 pages on their own. But maybe you've got five really strong remediators and everyone can take a 100-page section of it. Now you're getting that project done in 20% of the time because you've got all hands-on deck working through that really large document that has that tight deadline. Okay, so what we're going to do is, I'm actually going to import a document for us to work on today. What we're looking at now is just kind of a list of documents that will populate as you start to import PDFs. Then your five most recent documents will show up here across the top. If I go to the Import Document tab, though, it will take me to this screen. I can either click to open up the folders on my hard drive, or if I have my folders already open, I can just drag and drop a document or multiple documents into this gray area. That document will quickly upload to the cloud, and then this blue Import button becomes available. When I press the Import button, this will start an automated process where Equidox is now evaluating this document for things like existing tag structure, which may or may not be there—we don't quite know yet. So if the document has been previously tagged, you can use that existing tag structure and kind of clean things up and make adjustments to what's there. Or in some cases, you might prefer to just start over from scratch. That's the thing with PDFs; you don't always know what you're going to get because you might not have had anything to do with designing this document. It might have been published 15 years ago from some old, deprecated software, and you don't know what you're going to get into until you start working on that document. That's the challenge of PDFs; they're all unique. They come from different tools, different designers. Some are new, some are old. So it's a very broad spectrum of what you can get inside of a PDF, and that's really what makes the remediation side of things kind of challenging but also kind of fun because it's kind of like putting together a puzzle. In Equidox, think of Equidox as a productivity tool that helps you solve that puzzle a lot faster than you can with other, more manual tools. Okay, so if I click here on the thumbnail for this document that I just imported, it will take me into the Document Detail page. Inside of the Document Detail page, I can see some thumbnails here. So I have two thumbnails for the two pages in this PDF. I have some basic features up here to, like, search for pages. If I need to go to page 453, I can just jump straight to it. I don't have to scroll through all those thumbnails. I have buttons here to export this back to a PDF, which I'm not really ready to do yet. I could share this document with other users, of course. So if I needed to ask for help on this PDF for whatever reason, I can. And I, of course, can delete the document, which I'm not going to do yet either because we haven't done anything to it. Down below, there are some properties of the document. So this is the file name here, and if you notice, in this case, the file name and the title are identical. You can always update the document title if one is not provided. Equidox, at a bare minimum, will fill it in for you with whatever the file name is because that's an often overlooked part of PDF accessibility. People will forget to add a title, and then that's an automatic failure from an accessibility standpoint. So if you want to, you can always adjust your title to make sure that it's something that's plain English and easily understood. You can add or edit your author if you want. So if you have an author already there, it will be in there, or if you want to add one, you can. And then one other property would be the language attribute, which Equidox will set to English for you, just assuming that the document is in English, which most documents are for most of our customers. But if you hit the drop-down menu, you can change the language attribute to whatever language matches the content of the document. So, for example, if you have, let's say, a Polish document, you don't want an English screen reader trying to read Polish words; that would sound very silly to a Polish speaker. So that's how you can adjust the language attribute, and you can always save your properties if you make any updates. One other important thing is the Images tab. Now, this document only contains a couple of images in it, but what's nice about the Images tab is you get this sort of consolidated list of the images together. So if you know exactly what these images represent, you can quickly streamline your approach to writing the alt text. Or, you might prefer to actually get into the document itself and make those decisions about alternative text once you're in there. So we'll jump into the first page now. And when I get into the first page here, what I immediately notice about the PDF is suddenly there are these yellow boxes that are kind of like covering up the content. These yellow boxes are what we refer to as reading zones. The reading zones are, again, like similar to the tags. These are what's going to create the tags when we export the PDF. So we are going to use these reading zones here and organize all of this information on the page to make sure that it is going to line up with how a screen reader user would be interacting with this content. If I don't like the initial detection that I've been given, so for example, in this case, I don't really want every line of text to be in its own individual zone, I can move this Zone Detection slider from left to right, and you'll see how it kind of changes the granularity of those reading zones. As you bring it way over to the right, you get kind of like a zoomed-out view of all of the data on the page. Whereas if you bring it further to the left, it gets much more microscopic and focused on the data. You're typically going to find somewhere in the middle that seems to work pretty well for whatever page you're working on. In this case here, the detection level of eight seems to be fine. So now I've got all of my zones in the right location, I have the right number of zones, and I can start making changes to these individual zones to make sure that they're all organized correctly. One other thing you can do is you can always press the Reorder button as well. Reading order is a critical part of PDF accessibility. If content is not read in the correct order, it can render everything useless. Just think of like a newspaper article with three columns. If the screen reader is just reading clear across the page, you're going to hear just a bunch of fragmented sentences from totally separate columns, which would make no sense to anyone. It would be impossible to understand that document. So reordering the content to make sure that everything is going to be read either in a one-column, left-to-right, top-to-bottom layout, or a multi-column option, depending on the layout of the page, is another critical part of PDF accessibility. One other thing before we start making any changes to the structure of our tags here: if I press this button on my—the button here that looks kind of like a computer monitor—it will open up a separate tab in your browser. In this browser preview, what you get is this HTML rendering of the page that you're currently working on. The reason that this HTML is important is because instead of having to interact and understand the complexities of the tag tree, you just get this very simple linear representation of how would a screen reader read this page if I were to just stop working and export the document. This shows you the reading order. Of course, if you have tables, lists, or links, or anything that is different in the document besides just standard text, you'll see all of that proof here in the HTML preview. So we'll be going back and forth from the preview several times just so you can kind of see how things change. If I go back to the PDF, I'm going to start making some changes here. One of the important parts of PDF accessibility is heading structure. Heading structure is a way that screen reader users can navigate the document. They can jump from section to section and drill down into a subsection of a section, and they can find that information that they're looking for in a much quicker way. If everything is just tagged as text, there's really no navigation help with a million little P tags or text zones. In this case, when the user is trying to navigate through that content, they get very lost and they can't find that specific section that might be in Chapter 13 of that book. So the heading structure is what will allow them to quickly find that. Now, headings can be set very quickly in Equidox. You can see over here that this is a text zone by default, but if I hit the dropdown menu, I can select Heading, and it will change to a Heading Level One. However, I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts. So when I want to set a Heading Level One, I just tap one on my keyboard, and it instantly changes to a Heading Level One. I'm going to set this as an H2 and I'll set these as H3s. I'm just hitting the corresponding number on my keyboard, and what we'll see changing in the HTML preview is the font size now gives us that visual confirmation that we've actually set that element as an H1, and these are—that's an H2, and then we obviously have our H3s here with the bold font that kind of stands out compared to the regular text that we have. We also have a couple of lists on this page. So these lists right now, they are not tagged as lists, but you can understand that list structure is very important because all of these list items have a relationship with each other, and they are nested inside of another list item, which also has a relationship to the list item it is partnered with. So, the structure of a list is critical. If you don't tag it as a list, it will just read these elements as kind of like strange run-on sentences with no punctuation. You can imagine the confusion that could cause. So we want to make sure that we're handling our lists properly. Now, by default, it's a text zone, but all I have to do is hit "L" on my keyboard and nudge my list detection slider. You'll see a theme of sliders today to make this a lot easier and faster. Instantly, I've detected those five list items, and if I go back to my preview, I will see the proof of that. Instead of having just a big weird sentence, I now have five distinct list items that are delineated by these bullet points. This is a nested list, which is exponentially more complicated to tag manually in Adobe Acrobat. You'll hear horror stories of Acrobat users fighting with nested lists because there are so many tags that you have to build, and they all have to be placed in the correct order. There's a million ways to do it wrong and only one way to do it right, so it's very tedious and slow. But with Equidox, we just hit "L" and nudge our slider, letting the artificial intelligence quickly figure out that okay, that's a list, and inside of that first list, we have another list, and then we even have a third layer to that list. So very quickly, if we go and look at our preview, we're able to build that nested list structure, and all of those tags will be automatically produced for us when we export the PDF. We also have a couple of images on this page. Now, images, of course, need a description or they need to be artifacted. For this image here, it's the first iteration of the logo. As a general rule of thumb, I might give a logo a description one time in a document. If this logo keeps repeating itself throughout, I'm not going to keep describing it. That's just too much work to keep typing in the same alt texts, but also a screen reader user doesn't need to hear it page after page. They don't need to be reminded that there's a logo there. So I'll simply type in "Equid logo" for now, and that will give me my ALT description that's required for that image. Then down here, we have another image where, again, it's another iteration of our logo, but this one has a dog in the picture. This is really just kind of a decorative image; it's just there for visual aesthetics. It's not really adding any new or unique information to the PDF itself. So if you want to get rid of an image, you can just hit backspace on your keyboard. The zone itself will disappear. We're not visually removing the image from the document; we're just making sure that it's artifacted so that a screen reader will pass right over it instead of stopping to read just redundant alt text. And again, in the preview, that image is now gone, and we're just left with the text-based content with the lists, the headings, and of course, the image at the very top of the reading order. Okay, so we'll jump over to the next page here. On this page, we have a couple of tables. Tables are another one of those things in PDFs that are extremely time-consuming, but I'll show you how quickly we can handle tables inside of Equidox. All I'm going to do is put a zone by clicking and dragging around the table. I'm going to hit "T" on the keyboard to change it to a table and I'll go into the table editor. Blink and you miss it, but if I just nudge these detection sliders back and forth, you can see that it will instantly figure out the structure of this table. All of my cells have been identified, and all I now have to do is press this checkbox to give myself a table summary. So when I go back to my PDF, all of those little text zones that were there before have now been replaced by a single table zone. And if I go into my preview, we will see that we have a nice clean HTML table compared to the other table, which we haven't yet addressed. You can imagine how useless this would be to hear through a screen reader. None of these numbers would make any sense if they're not structured as a table. Again, we will solve this table very easily by just drawing a zone, hitting "T" on our keyboard, and going into the table editor. Again, if you blink, you'll miss it, but you just have to nudge the sliders to wake up the artificial intelligence, and all of the cells have been identified. The only other thing with this table—well, there are two small things. The years 2024 and 2025 are actually column headers that straddle four separate columns, so we just want to make sure that we are spanning by holding shift on our keyboard and selecting above Q1, and just holding shift and then selecting above Q4. We can then either hit the span button or just press "S" on our keyboard. Again, I'll do the same thing here for 2025. So what that allows for is for the year to just be a column header that has four sub-columns underneath it. The other thing is that this table is somewhat unique in that it actually has a second level of headers. So not only is 2024 a column header, but also the individual quarters within the year need to be set as headers as well. All we have to do is hit the up arrow to change the column header from one to two, and then this will indicate to Equidox you want the top two rows to be set as your column headers. And here you can see that bold font that reflects that change that you've just made. So, the logic here is that if a user is inside this data cell, they are aware that they’re in the sales row for the year 2024, and more specifically, they’re in the fourth quarter of 2024. All of that structure is built for them so that they can freely navigate this table and always understand exactly which columns and rows they’re associated with. Again, hit the checkbox here, and Equidox will programmatically write a table summary for you. It’s one less thing for you to do. If I save the table and close out, I'm left with the single table zone. I realize we are right up against time here. I haven’t covered form fields in detail, but at a high level, for those of you dealing with form documents, the main thing is to make sure that you're adding tooltips. I can enter tooltips here, such as “Enter today’s date,” “Enter first name,” “Enter last name,” “Enter date of birth,” and “Select if US citizen” or “Select if non-US citizen.” Adding tooltips is as simple as adding an ALT description, but you can build these tooltips really quickly. Now, our page is more or less handled. We could probably make some small adjustments to the reading order of these form fields, but in the interest of time, we can always just press the reorder button to consolidate things, and that will correct most issues. So, let’s back out of the document and go to the Export tab. All I need to do is hit “Generate PDF,” and Equidox will produce this brand-new document for me. It will be the exact same document that we started with, so you’ll see nothing has changed about our PDF—it’s still the same. However, everything we built in Equidox, and what we validated with the HTML preview, is going to appear in the tag tree. If I download this document and save it to my desktop with a suffix to indicate it’s the remediated version, I can open it in Adobe Acrobat. The original document was completely untagged, but the one we just built has everything tagged—our lists, tables, form fields, and more. This document will pass the accessibility checker if that’s your goal. You’ll only see two warnings: one about reading order and another about color contrast. These warnings are not issues but notifications that you need to handle reading order and color contrast in a different tool. That said, I know that was a lot of information, and we’d be more than happy to discuss Equidox as a solution with you and your organization on a more one-to-one basis. If you have any sample documents or questions about the tool, please feel free to reach out. You can email us at EquidoxSales@Equidox.co, call us at 216-529-3030, or visit our website at www.Equidox.co. We’re also on various social media platforms. Thank you all for attending today. I apologize for being long-winded and going a few minutes over, but we appreciate your participation. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions at all.
A review of PDF accessibility compliance legislation and what applies to your organization. Plus a special look at how the right tool can reduce the manual elements of remediation and make the process 90% faster. No more tag trees, no complex accessibility skill set required. Learn the basics in just an hour. Begin remediating documents right away using the Equidox AI-driven automation tools to quickly comply with Section 508 and the ADA.
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