A Path to PDF Accessibility

[Dan Tuleta] So it is two o'clock so I think we should get started so welcome everyone to another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays this week we're going to be talking about a Path to PDF Accessibility so trying to guide you to a more efficient PDF remediation process so as always I'd just like  to mention if you would like  to discuss your organization's needs or maybe talk about our software a bit more if you'd like to see a one-on-one type of demo please don't hesitate to reach out to us our website is also Equidox.co we'll get into the actual  steps to PDF accessibility  so first things first is  kind of establishing where do we start when it comes to PDF accessibility so we have an eight-part well eight-step process that we have defined we would certainly encourage you to your organization to use this type of process or some sort of modification to this process that works best for your specific organization so the first step would be to assign the staff the second step would be evaluate the scope the third would be create a written plan fourth prioritize the documents fifth choose a tool or a vendor sixth remediate the documents seven validate the documents and eight is maintenance so we're gonna take a deeper dive into each of these eight topics on the next slides okay so first assigning the staff so you really wanna choose the correct team so assign a person or a team to manage the project choose whether you will use an in-house team of remediators or a vendor to do the work for you also a signing staff for training validation and maintenance so it's really important to figure out exactly which departments in your organization are going to kind of take the lead when it comes to managing the PDF content whether it be on your website or intranet so is it going to be coming from the Marketing and Communications team is it this Disability Services if you have a division for Disability Resources in your organization is this something that it or the webmasters are going to take charge of or also figuring out do you need to hire in outside staff so maybe you don't have the the bandwidth in your current team maybe  you need to look externally  and actually make some additional hires to bring in people that either have accessibility experience or just in general to remediate documents if you have that type of backlog the second step would be to evaluate the scope so so many PDFs and so little time so first removing outdated or unnecessary files to reduce the workload next would be to evaluate the number of PDFs to be remediated and also their complexity and also decide what will be done in-house versus what will be outsourced so you really don't want to spend the initial phase of your PDF remediation work workflow going through outdated backlogs of documents so this these would be things that you would probably want to put towards the end of the pipeline so if you've got old advertisements or meeting minutes from 20 years ago these are the types of documents that would be lower in priority so you really want to try to audit yourself and figure out what kind of documents do you have currently floating around on the website are documents being produced on a daily or a weekly or monthly basis figure out what is going to be most impactful when you are choosing which documents to remediate first the third step would be to write a plan so this is going to help you get on that road map to creating accessible documents so establish a timeline do you have external or internal deadlines or possibly both you might have to set expectations of responsibilities so who is supervising this project who is going to be actually doing the remediation who will be valued validating the documents and who is going to handle the future documents so documents that are being created on a regular basis you want to make sure that you have a plan in place to manage those as they're created versus creating another backlog for yourself that you then have to work through all those documents down the road so having a written plan may offer some protection from a from legal.. from a lawsuit if you will but you really have to make sure that you're executing that plan that you write so you have to take it a step further than just having some written written plan you might want to make sure that you are putting that plan into action and actually following through on what you have put in writing the fourth step would be to prioritize the documents so I did mention this briefly on the second or a few slides back but what comes first so we would recommend that the most used documents come first the most recent documents next and then the third ranking and priority would be the lowest complexity and then the fourth ranking and the priority would be everything else so we want to make sure that you're you're going to have the most impact on the most amount of people so the documents if you have these types of metrics from your website or your internet the documents that are most frequently interacted with so they're open the most often those are obviously documents that are high priority those are the ones that the majority of people are going to be using on a regular basis also the most recent documents so you want to make sure that you are not creating a bigger problem for yourself as you work through this so those documents that you're producing on a regular basis the the stuff that has the the most up-to-date information about your organization you want to make sure that  you are also prioritizing  those third would be lowest complexity and the reason for that is because the the complexity of a document can really impact how much time it takes to make it accessible so if you are able to get through lower complexity documents you're typically going to be able to work through a lot more content in a shorter amount of time so if you choose to work on the highest complexity documents then you're not going to be having as great of an impact because you're going to be spending more time working on those more complicated elements it's not to say that complicated documents should be completely ignored but we would say that you can be have a create a you can create more accessible content quickly if you choose to work through those lower complexity documents first and then the fourth would be everything else so that would be you know those older documents something that might be outdated things that you might choose to you know put in an archive somewhere stuff that's just not necessarily being used on a regular basis or it's very old or it's highly complex and it's going to take you a little bit of a technical know-how and some nuance to get through the remediation of it so the fifth step in this process would be to choose a tool or a vendor so are you going to do this in-house or are you going to outsource so first do you have the budgets do you have the staff how much training does your staff require how many people need to be trained how much content needs to be remediated how much new content is published on a regular basis and also what is your timeline so kind of understanding all of these different factors can go into your decision making whether you want to bring in a software tool to remediate things internally or if you would like to outsource so it really the you know if determining if you have a budget is really the ideal first step because do you want to spend money on an annual subscription to a software tool and then of course you have the expense of human resources having to use that software or you do you want to do you have the budget to outsource now outsourcing documents can get it can get expensive because if you think about it you're remediating at the per-page level most remediation services are going to charge you on a page level so understanding that if you have hundreds of thousands of old PDF pages outsourcing that can really kind of add up to a pretty a pretty large invoice at the end of that entire process but also you have to consider do you have the budget for a lawsuit so these are things that cannot be ignored it's at some point you have to make you have to make a commitment and choose a path that you want to go because you know you're you're not going to want to be sued over having your website and your internet full of inaccessible content so just understanding these types of things can go into that budgeting decision  and also understanding  you know the technical expertise of the people that you have on staff so step six would be to remediate the documents so making every PDF accessible so working through the documents using the plan whether that be in-house or outsourcing and tracking all of the documents to be sure that none are missed so if you're using the tool if you're using a tool to remediate documents you also need to make sure that you're confirming that everything is in fact accessible before you post it to the website or distribute it to your clients whatever it may be if you're outsourcing documents that is typically included as part of the price of that of that remediation service where they are validating documents for you but you also need to make sure that of course you are replacing the the old documents with the new documents that have been provided by the remediation service company and nothing of course will stop you from doing your own sort of third-party validation of these documents if you were to outsource them so we would  always encourage additional  checking and confirmation that everything is in fact accessible and usable in the documents whether you have done them yourself or whether you have outsourced the documents to a remediation service so just touching more on that step seven is to validate the documents so are they all accessible and are they all usable there is a difference between the two so if if you're using if you use testing tools to ensure that the documents are compliant or you can validate using assistive technology to ensure that the documents are usable so the there is just a touch briefly on the difference between accessible versus usable many organizations are just aiming for you know what we might call bare minimum compliance so making sure that these documents can pass an automated checking tool so that they aren't being you know tripped up during an accessibility audit for saying that “oh your document is inaccessible” but there is a big gap between what is bare minimum compliance in terms of accessibility versus what is actually usable there are many ways to trick these sort of validation tools or these checking tools so we always encourage you to use assistive technology to really replicate how an end user  is going to be interacting  with that document to make sure that everything is navigating as you would expect to confirm that the reading order has been appropriately set to make sure that links are taking the user to the correct destination all of these different elements really you really need to use assistive technology to properly check and validate so the final step in this process would be the maintenance of these documents so once you get compliant you want to stay compliant we don't want to have to go back and retroactively you know make all these different types of changes to documents and we don't want to create a new backlog for ourselves so accessibility isn't “one and done” and you need to check new content regularly and make staff accountable for the new content that they're producing so stay on top of it like I said you don't want to create another mountain of documents that you have to then a year from now or two years from now go back and retroactively remediate yet again so once you've gone through sort of the once you've gone through the the trouble of remediating your backlogs of documents and getting everything up to speed and up to date you want to make sure that you are staying on top of that it's a lot easier to maintain this at the design level and at the you know sort of document by document as they're being published level versus you know creating thousands of new documents that then have to go back and be fixed down the road okay so this is a quick slide here just talking a bit about our competitors so we are of course Equidox and mainly in when it comes to PDF accessibility when you think of PDF most people think of Adobe Acrobat and also another competitor for ours would be Commonlook so this is just a quick little table here that's just going through a few of the advantages of Equidox over Adobe and Commonlook so getting into a few of the details of Equidox so Equidox is PDF remediation software we feel that it is easier faster and better it automatically detects PDF elements so when you import documents you're getting either existing tag structure automatically detected or if there is no existing tag structure Equidox is automatically picking up things like text hyperlinks images pages that require optical character recognition fillable form fields so on and so forth so you're getting automatically detected PDF elements just by importing the document we also have an AI-powered Smart Table Detector that makes PDF remedi or table remediation in PDFs can be very painstaking and tedious and technical and slow if you are doing it the manual way with a tool like Adobe Acrobat but we have a different approach to remediating tables and we can spend literally seconds working on tables rather than hours if you're doing it the manual way we also have an AI-powered Smart List Detector so much like tables lists can be a very tedious and technical type of element to properly tag in a PDF but again we have a different approach to it using artificial intelligence computer vision and machine learning that allows us to very quickly pick up list tag structures and develop them whether it's a standard list that's just you know like a few bullet points whether it's an entire page of lists whether it's a nested list that goes across multiple pages there are many different types of complicated lists but our AI-powered Smart List Detector allows you to very very quickly tag them with almost no technical expertise required we also offer the remediation of PDF forms so fillable forms are sort of notorious for being technical and challenging to remediate Equidox offers a solution for that we can very quickly remediate forms by off by adding in the tooltip for the different form fields it's that's a much faster process for for tagging for tagging forms which are notoriously slow and take a lot of time we're also able to add alt text for images all in one place so alt text is something that's required of images if you're not artifacting the image of course but if what we offer in Equidox is a consolidated list of all of the images for the document in one location which offers a lot of advantages so if you have things like repetitive logos that are on every page in the document you can quickly artifact all of the the the instances of that logo that you don't want to be included in the PDF and that then you don't have to apply alt text to it or if you require subject matter expertise let's say you're in a higher ed institution and you've been asked to remediate a chemistry document that is using all kinds of charts and graphics and tables and things that you don't really know how to provide alt text for because you're not the chemistry expert well you're able to then just you know work with the work with the professor or the teacher's assistant to get accurate alt text for those charts and graphics so that you're providing that accurate information to the end user you're able to then just quickly you know copy and paste or have that professor or that teacher's assistant assist you by adding in the alt text themselves and it makes it very simple because you have all the images whether it's one page or a hundred pages all of the images can be consolidated to a single location so that you can very quickly streamline your approach for adding in that alt text the other another element is the HTML Preview which is a way of kind of checking your work as you go so as you're working through a document you're looking at this what we would call the HTML preview it will show you the structure that you've built in the PDF so you're able to see things like your reading order your headings your lists your tables everything is populating in this HTML preview and HTML is a very simple linear format and it really just is a reflection of how a screen reader is going to interact with that PDF page if you were to export the document so it's a way of checking your work as you go you also will get compliance warnings when you export the document so although we don't really subscribe to the idea that PDF accessibility checking can be entirely automated in terms of you know compliance versus usability you are getting information about the document that you're exporting so it's it's kind of watching your back for things like illogical heading structure missing alt text if you have links that don't have a destination set there are a number of different checks that are being applied when you export the document so it's like another layer of protection for you when you're remediating documents Equidox is kind of watching your back making sure that you're exporting a document that has at least logical tag structure you're also able to collaborate on large and complex documents so because the way that we work with the PDF we're able to interact with individual pages and Equidox being a web-based application you can have multiple people working together on a document they don't have to be hunched over the same computer together they can be in totally separate areas they can be at home or at the library it doesn't matter they can be working from anywhere but you can actually have multiple people working on the same documents simultaneously so if you have a 200-page annual report that needs to be posted right away well maybe you put your four best remediators on it and every one of them takes 50 pages and they can all be working together simultaneously without disrupting the other the other person's work and that will allow them to get through that content very very quickly so that you can get that document you know remediated validated and posted to the site so just talking a bit more about Equidox we do offer software licenses and that those licenses are a concurrent user licensing model so what I mean by that is if your organization were to purchase let's say 20 concurrent licenses that means 20 people could be logged in working on Equidox at the same time but you might have additional users that actually have access to it it's just a matter of how many are working on the on the tool at any given moment we also can offer organization-wide licenses and we can integrate with single sign-on solutions so if this is the type of tool that you'd like to deploy to your entire organization that's definitely something that we can support we also offer free training and support with Equidox so we want to make sure that everyone  is getting the most out of  their their subscription to the license so we we do offer training for all new licensed users and then also support is built right into the application so if you're having any sort of issues whatsoever any questions along the way you can always drop us a line through our support ticketing system we also can offer a cloud-based or an on-premise version so I mentioned that Equidox is a web-based application so you can operate it directly through a browser now you can operate through the cloud as we as kind of like what the genesis of Equidox was was a cloud-based application but we now offer an on-premise version as well so if you would like to keep this on your own network on your own servers inside your own four walls whether it be for you know just it security reasons or if you have you know sensitive data that you would like to keep protected inside of your own servers that's totally an option that we can support now so happy to talk to anyone after this call if you have any questions about how that works we can certainly set up a a call to discuss in more detail and also we offer professional conversion services so we do have a team of expert PDF remediators on staff so the the conversion services process it kind of goes like this so first you will request a quote you then you will upload the documents and then our Equidox are our Equidox remediators our expert remediators they will remediate the documents using Equidox and then we put those documents through rigorous validation including using screen readers so there's a multi-step validation process that we put every document through and then we will return those documents to you so if there if you feel that you have a you know a large batch of documents that you don't feel comfortable taking on yourself please feel free to reach out to us we'd love to take a look at the documents and we can certainly give you a quote for what it will take for us to remediate them for you and the pr we often get questions about the pricing model for our services so pricing is based on three parameters first the the volume so how many documents are you working with how many pages are there that's a main factor in the pricing because we do charge at the page level the complexity of these pages so are these documents very very complex or are they simple you know text-based word documents it really can depend and it can impact the pricing so there's a big difference between you know a simple document that just basically contains text and headings versus a you know an irs form that has you know 150 fields on it there's a lot of different a lot of different things that go into remediating a very complex document so that can impact the price on how we and how we will quote that document and also the delivery is another factor so how quickly does this need to be completed if you need the document back tomorrow there are cases when we can certainly support that but it will impact the price versus if you're kind of pushing things out you know if you don't need the document back for a week or a month or two months whatever it may be that will also go into the pricing factor and so as I mentioned before the typical workflow so documents are submitted for a quote deadlines standards and procedures are agreed upon a system for document transfer between the parties is developed so whether that be like through google drive or some of one of your ftp servers or if you want to send it to us through dropbox whatever it may be just get us the documents one way or another documents are remediated validated by our team and then returned to our customers and then of course we also offer a hybrid model so this is always something that we encourage so teamwork makes the dream work so first you can obtain our software so you're working through the less complex documents or perhaps the new content that you're producing and then you're able to also outsource documents to us so if you have documents that you have like a a short timeline on if you need it back right away  if you have complicated  documents that you don't feel that you have the technical expertise to to work through or if you have a large backlog of documents you're able to offs outsource that to us and also we're going to talk a little bit about a couple of of case studies about how clients work with Equidox so both using software in-house are our expert remediation and validation and as well as a hybrid of both software and services so accomplishing large PDF remediation projects address the backlog through a vendor service or staff allocations choose software and train the staff make content creators responsible for accessibility of future content which will both fulfill accessibility goals and also eliminates the  need for future large-scale  services down the road and also of course perform regular maintenance so that's just kind of a quick summary of what we've been talking about but these are all very important parts of the PDF remediation process and now we have a few minutes left and I'm just going to turn it over to one of our account managers Dawn Campbell she's going to talk quickly about a a couple of her clients and how they're best using Equidox and our services [Dawn Campbell] Thanks Dan thanks for having me today I'm actually only going to talk about one particular project I have number of customers and I'm always not sure which which to talk about because so many of them I am very excited to be working with but this particular project is a county that is located just outside of Toronto and encompasses seven municipalities within this county government so where there where they approached us was a couple of years ago because in Ontario there are there is mandated accessibility legislation and that that deadline actually passed last year now it is important for again anyone that might be on this call in the united states to also understand that Canada and the federal government also has mandated accessibility legislation along with many of the provinces so if you're thinking about doing work here or having business here you should be familiarize yourself with that now this particular county had a very proactive accessibility coordinator that was hired where she did a lot of training with staff around the importance of designing an accessible document in that source so that really helped again for future now the challenge was was that over the last how many years of building a website they had all of this inaccessible PDF that was already created so again this was a team this was a coordinator of this government that knew Acrobat and was familiar with the challenges of Acrobat and was looking for a tool to that again required did not require such an in-depth PDF tag tree expertise and one that offered free training so that's where Equidox came into play Dan can you change the slide for me sure so their process was actually really really really interesting to watch and again as the account manager in third party it was exciting process to watch because essentially they'd had to do an internal audit it's exactly what Dan talked about already they did an internal audit to discover what and how many PDFs were on their website they divided those PDFs based on PDFs up based on the departments and each department within that government was asked to figure out which was most important and where did they want to start prioritize and then they purchased 10 software licenses and a champion was basically created from each of those department a champion who understood again and did you know work the most in Equidox so there was free software training provided for all of the relevant staff Equidox again this was a really neat hybrid customer because we realized we had to play catch-up from like the last 20 years of all of this PDF so they I did budget to be able to have   Equidox remediation team help them with again the larger bulk of the historical documents that needed to be validated and then again they had the software so it was they were able to again do projects in-house themselves can you change the slide so again just as an overview multiple departments were responsible we you know this is a customer who has 39 registered users of Equidox and they come from all of the different departments Communications Community and Social Services Transportation Corporate Services Finance Office of the CAO and you know they're in there every day validating and remediating using the tool the documents that they address are everything from meeting minutes to job posting to agendas to bylaws to reports a whole array of complexity they're able to address last slide Dan and and again this is just a quote from myself really working with this county continues to be a privilege  they have been proactive in  teaching the fundamentals of accessible design while addressing both an immediate compliance issue as well ensuring software and services are in place to remain accessible for their community [Dan Tuleta] Great thanks again so we we intended on having a few minutes to go into an Equidox demo but in the interest of time it is 2:30 already I apologize for being long-winded we will send out this slide deck though however and it will contain a previous short demo video of Equidox for anyone that would like to just get a quick overview of how the software works but I would always I would certainly encourage you to reach out to us For more information about how  Equidox Software Company can help you  with PDF accessibility Email us at EquidoxSales@equidox.co  Or give us a call at 216-529-3030  Or visit our website at www.equidox.co