Advanced Table Training
Advanced remediation techniques for Tables using Equidox software.
Advanced remediation techniques for Tables using Equidox software.
All right so it is 2 o'clock. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us again for another addition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays Advanced Table Training. So today we're mainly going to be talking about advanced table remediation techniques. So I have quite a few different examples pulled up of different tables that can present some unique challenges. So if you deal with a lot of tables, this should be a helpful guide to showing you like the best and most efficient ways to deal with those unique tables. So, as always, what I'd like to mention is if you have any, follow-up questions. Or if you are not a current user or client of Equidox, and you'd like to have a more personal one-on-one demonstration where we can talk about your challenges with PDF remediation and any of your use cases. we can look at some of your specific documents and challenges that you have. Please feel free to reach out to us our website is Www.Equidox.co And we're gonna jump now into the Equidox demonstration. So if anyone is able to stay for the duration of this webinar, we will insert the video of it here into the slide deck, and you'll receive this after the call is over. Okay, So well now, I'm in Equidox our PDF remediation tool. So anyone on the webinar that is a current user, this should look fairly familiar to you, but for anyone that isn't a current Equidox user. I just want to get started with a simple example of how we can remediate a table. So if I were to open up a simple standard document like this where there’s a simple table inside of this page. Sometimes you'll arrive at a document and you will see a setup of the reading zones that will look something like this, and using the HTML preview to just look at how this would be read by a screen reader, You can probably tell that this is not actual table structure each one of those cells inside of that table will just be read in this particular order, rendering this pretty much useless to a screen reader, user, because they're not really sure which row or column that they are currently situated in so in Equidox. All we need to do is draw a single zone over the top of the entire table. I'll use my keyboard shortcut and hit “T” to change the zones to a table, and that will give me this button here for the Table Editor. So when I press the Table Editor button this will isolate the table, and I will see the green gridlines here, which I'm free to move around and get a line manually, if I'd like so you can see that the green gridlines, for the most part, are lined up with the rows and columns. There are a few adjustments that can be made so to make those adjustments. If I don't want to do that manually, I can also use our Table Detector. So the Table Detector is using computer vision and machine learning to better understand the cell structure of these tables, and it will automatically draw those gridlines in the location that they need to be. So. so we remember what the HTML preview looked like just a moment ago, with no table structure whatsoever. But if I were to refresh that preview you'll see that now I have a real table Now this is rendered in HTML. But the beautiful thing about Equidox is that it will take this HTML structure and it will automatically convert it into a PDF tag tree for you. So anyone that has done manual PDF. for remediation of tables, you know, in a a tool where you have to tag every individual cell. there are so many steps associated with working through tables that a simple little table like this can take upwards of, you know, 1015 min. In some cases. In many cases it can take a lot longer. Tables, of course, get much more complicated than this, So you can see that within Equidox we have the automation of with the detection tool and just a much cleaner workflow in an interface that allows for simple and fast table remediation, even if you are a novice user. Okay, so let's jump out of this document. forgive me as I jump around from documents to documents. So I wanted to make sure that we covered a bunch of different bases. So I'm gonna do some simple table I that was a simple table, and I'll jump into a slightly more complicated example here. So. So this this table, as you can tell, is quite large, quite dense. This can be kind of intimidating to look at there's also a multiple column headers in this particular table. So you have different levels of column headers here that all correlate with the table data which falls below. Now it's the same concept where I'm just gonna draw a single table on top of, or a single zone on top of the table as I just drag it all the way to the bottom can Then again. Press t on my keyboard and the Table Editor Button will appear so I'll press the Table Editor Button and I'm gonna zoom out a bit to make this a little bit easier. To see. But you can tell here that there's so much going on that equodox didn't even bother to draw the roads. So again we're going to use our table detection sliders here. So, as I move these around, I can just find the best possible starting point where I don't have to make too many manual adjustments, so you can see that the sliders here are able to land pretty much spot on with all of the rows and the columns might need just a tiny little adjustment. If I just drag these a little bit left to right you'll see that I'm able to get everything pretty much aligned with the table. So, taking a look at the preview for this table now you'll see that I have pretty clean table structure. There are a few things that I need to adjust up here because of the way that this table is set up. There is some spanning that needs to be done within the within the column headers. So to span. This is another technique in Equidox, where you need to join multiple cells together. I can just click in one cell that I'd like to join hold down the shift key, and then select in another cell as well. So wherever I would like to span to a span button will appear at the top, or you can also use your keyboard shortcut and press s, and that will complete the spam. so just quickly going back to the preview you'll see that Now I have proposal falling. in one cell that sits at the very top of the table, so there's some other spanning that needs to be done here. I actually don't even need this extra row if I zoom in You'll see that Equidox was maybe thrown off because this this text. Was it's situated on 2 separate lines so I could do using the computer vision was thinking, Maybe that this is a situation where you've got 2 separate rows there. I don't really need that extra row, though so what I can do is I can either press the delete row button, or I can just press D on my keyboard. And that will that will basically merge down where it will get rid of that extra row that I don't actually need. Now I need to span across these 4 cells for the for this second level of column headers. So if I click in the cell hold shift and again. just clicking to the other cell, I'd like to join with, then press us Another situation here where I don't need this row you can see that the the double lines of text was to make, maybe thinking, or maybe made aqueducts think that this could be 2 separate rows. So again I'll just press d to get rid of that extra row, and then I will spam the trust fund cell over here, so I'll just again click in my 2 cells. and press s Now, if I go back to the HTML preview you'll see that we've cleaned this up quite a bit, so we have our we've kind of fixed the structure where it looks a little bit better in each Tml but we still have a few things to adjust. So the next thing to adjust is addressing the column and row headers. So by default products, assumes that your table will have one column header, which will be the top row, and the farthest left column, will be the row headers. That's just the default assumption. Now in this particular example because of the way this table is designed. I have a column header here I have another row of column headers here, and I even have a third row of column headers. So what I'll do is I'll come over here to the column header field, and as you can see these in the little text input fields. Here they are automatically set one to one, and if I just adjust that one to 3 that will, that will change the the output of this table where the top 3 rows will be tagged as column headers now the year over here, which is again by defaults going to be tagged as a row. Header. This is not necessarily a row header I think this is the table really. That's just consists of column headers. so I can change my row header from one to 0. Now, if I go back to the HTML preview what we'll see is I now have bold fonts for the top 3 rows, and this is just giving you that visual confirmation that you've adjusted the table to export with 3 with 3 rows of column headers. You'll also notice that in the far left column where the years are situated. You don't have that bold font anymore. indicating that the years themselves will be tagged as table data. So all of these cells here, where you're just seeing a standard font will be tagged as table data, and will be attributed to whichever series of column headers they fall under. So the another thing that I can talk about in this table, and is sometimes because of the computer vision. And you have such small fonts in this table, and things can be very tightly spaced. You might have a situation where the green gridlines fall maybe one or 2 pixels away from where they should. And if that's ever the case it would be extremely tedious to have to go through and individually adjust every single one of these rows, and new up like a pixel or 2, it could be done if you had the patients to do it, but that can be tedious and time-consuming, and so to address that occasional issue that you might run into on a very dense table. We have this tool here underneath the cells tab called nudge, where you're able to nudge the rows up or down. So if you, if you click the nudge button, your rows will move in unison where they will all just bump up one pixel out of time, so you can get things more closely aligned to where they need to be so there can be. Did I have a little bit of an Internet glitch? Wonder am I Still, we can still hear you interesting. I was wondering if I, my Internet cut out for a second. That's odd so we'll I'll show you in in fast pace. How quickly we can get back to where we were so again just going, talking about how to do this manually in a tool like, or a manual tagging tool table like this could really be a big problem where you're spending upwards of an hour to working through this single table, and then extrapolating that out over a document that might have dozens of tables in it, if not hundreds of tables and sort of financial reports and things of that nature you can spend a lot of time working through working through documents where you are actually spending just seconds on tables like this. So pretty dramatic pretty dramatic time savings, especially when you're thinking about longer documents, as I said before. So again we're back to the same table structure that I had I would just need to. Then again fix my column and row headers. Another feature of Equidox is the auto summarized mode. So if your current Equidox user, you may or may not know that this is a feature. But table summaries are one of those requirements for tagging tables where you need to have a table summary to give that end user. Who's using a screen reader, a general overview of what? what? that table consists of in terms of the structure of it. So what Equidox is able to do is programmatically write the table summary for you. If you turn the auto summarize mode on So by doing that, it's giving the user the indication that. Okay, they're 79 rows in this table there are 5 columns. It's letting them know that there are multiple column headers. There are no row headers it's letting them know that there are spans going on inside of the data cells and the the column headers. So it's giving them that that sort of navigation key right up front that that they can that can they can find helpful when they're trying to navigate through a very dense table like this that contains a whole bunch of cells which could be you know quite challenging to work through So again, we'll. we'll finish up with this table, and since I'm talking about the table summary what I'll do is for any existing users of Equidox. I will show you how to turn that auto summarized mode on in your profile. So if I just close out out, out very quickly if I go to my profile, what you'll see is and that's in the upper right hand corner, you can go to your profile, and there is an auto summarized mode dropdown. You can turn that on to default, to enable default to disabled, or you can hide it all together. So I have mindset to default to enabled so that way when I'm working on a table, I oxygen is automatically summarizing that table for you. There are quite a few advantages to that so especially if you're working on a long document, and perhaps collaborating on that document with multiple users or mediating tables. It will ensure that your table summaries are very much consistent where you don't have different people interpreting what they think. A table summary is supposed to be, it will also ensure accuracy. So if you're thinking about a table like this if I just jump back in for a second. But a table that has 79 rows. If you were trying to manually count how many rows there are, you could easily come up with a an incorrect number. So just for the sake of consistency and accuracy. The table summary feature is very very helpful you're also able to, of course, enhance that table summary. So you're able to insert more information about that table if you feel that it's necessary. But it's just nice that Equidox will programmatically write it for you, so that you don't have to necessarily think about table summaries as you're working through documents that are full of dozens and dozens of tables, and on the next table can you demonstrate the nudging again. So I'm going to ask for that, sure, and I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but I'm I'm happy to to nudge again. So let's talk about I want to talk about a table that contains a few different are different elements inside of the table. So a table like this, you actually have links inside of it. So if I were to use our zone detector, which many of you will be familiar with, we actually have links that are situated inside of this table. So this is very much a simple table by comparison to what we just looked at. There's really just a little bit of spanning that needs to go on. But when you have different elements nested inside of tables, Equidox is also able to handle this. So again, just drawing a single zone, capturing the entire table, opening up my Table Editor. And if you notice there's a slight blue hue that is covering up these different elements, indicating that the there is a another zone sat on top of that when we return to the PDF. When we turn to the entire PDF. page, not just looking at the Table Editor. So again, using my detection tools here. we will get this as close as we can, and that looks pretty good. I think I want. I might have drawn the table a little bit too large. I have one extra column over there. but now I'll just quickly go through the spanning process which we've already covered, and you can see here, we've got basically our our table set up as neat as we need so just maybe a couple of minor adjustments to the gridlines, and I'll add an extra row here for some reason it missed that row. But looking at the HTML preview because I have those links you can see I actually have the links inside of the HTML preview here, and these will actually go to the destination point as defined in the source. PDF: So whatever the encoded link was directing that user to these links will actually be active in the exported version, so really helpful. If you're dealing with like directories, and you have a bunch of email addresses, or in this example, you have different web pages with more information about the person's health needs so you're able to go straight to those links through the table structure. So it's a common thing that can occur in many different tables. But as you can see there's really nothing different in Equidox, the main recommendation that I would have would be just to address the links before you create the table, because that table is a very large zone. So once You've created it, it's can be kind of tedious to try to like draw zones outside of it and drag it in place, So I would recommend creating the links first which were in this case created automatically because they were encoded into the source file. But once you got those links identified, when you place that table on top, those links will be maintained, and they will, of course, have the anchor point that came in with the source file. So as you click on these links, you can see the anchor point is right here. So those are now going to be working links inside of this table structure. Now the the nudge feature I'm sorry I forgot about that. For a second the nudge feature again. where, if I go to the cells tab, I can nudge all of my columns left. So if you see they're all kind of moving just very slightly left, I can nudge them to the right. I don't really need to in this example because this is pretty a pretty well spaced out table. But sometimes I see like financial tables where like the previous example. you have so many rows and so many columns, and they're very, very small. You don't want to be in a situation we're having to like click on every single one, and just bump it up and down. You can spend a lot of time doing, that so we've been we've incorporated this nudge feature, where everything will move together in unison, depending and if you need to move the rows up or down or left or right Now I find that this is a tool that I don't use very often because the computer vision and machine learning is very good at detecting the table structure just automatically. So. But there, there will be the occasional, instance, where like I said you have a very dense table, and it needs just a slight adjustment. So it's it's there when you need it But I probably use it on less than 5% of the tables that I see Now let's Let me go to the next page here. This is another example of different elements that can fall inside of table structure. So here. This is not necessarily a table, but I can use it as an example just to keep us in the same document here. So we have a list. We have lists inside of table structure, so what I can do is I can just draw, like, I said before, with the similar to the links. I like to address the list first, and then create the table on top of it. So I'm just drawing a zone over the list and I'm! Hitting L. and Then I'm bumping the list detection Slider from left to right, so as I bumped that list detection. Slider I'm picking up the list items automatically So I'm just bumping it left to right and left to right. So I'm able to create those 3 separate lists inside of these 3 separate cells. Now, once I've done that I can draw that table zone on top, and I will again hit t and open up the table. Editor. So, because I have these lists here I don't really need any extra rows. I just need one column, and I don't need the extra rows there and then. I can just span across up here. So when I span and I take a look at the HTML preview, I don't know why that I must be having some sort of glitch with my Internet or something to get that error message but here I am in the HTML preview. You can see I have the list structure inside of the table. Now, just because by defaults, Equidox, assumes that your first column is a row header, it's giving me that bold frontier to just give me that visual, and for that visual confirmation through the interface. But again I can change my row header from one to and when I go back to my preview you'll see that I have just that some font for the individual lists. So those are the 2 common elements that I see Often inside of tables are are lists and links. Another one that you might uncover, are things like footnote links which we have an example of. Actually, I believe, a client sent this in if I take a look at this document here. We'll just pull up like page 2 and we can look there's actually footnotes that fall underneath this table. Now there's footnotes are not really ideal for tables, because what the footnote is going to do, It's going to direct the user outside of the table, and then it's going to return them to the top left cell essentially of the table, and they have to renavigate through. So it's really not an ideal it's really not ideal for usability purposes. But it many cases you are not the designer of the document you've just been given a document and you've been asked to tag it. So won't work for through it with using Equidox. So I'm gonna just build this kind of manually here to show you the the step-by-step process. So. so I have 2 tech zones capturing my 2 footnotes. What I'll do, is I will direct these I'll change these to footnotes through the drop-down menu. You'll see Now they say fn and fn fn and fn for the zone types instead of text. And then here are those reference points inside of the table. So if I draw 2 zones and I'm just going to put it over the entire, the entire character there. I'm just gonna these can be it can be kind of tedious to deal with tiny little these tiny little superscripts for the footnote reference links. But what I'll do, is I'll draw the 2 zones and place them on top of those and then I will create these as footnote links, and I I'll direct these footnote links to the the corresponding footnote down here. So I have a drop-down menu that will tell me which zone. I want you directed to. so I want to direct the first footnote to this footnote here, and I want to direct the second footnote to the second footnote: Right here. So once I've created that I can then just draw my table and and then open up the table. Editor, and again you'll see that those blue bars are those blue boxes there, indicating that I have that I have. Footnote Links zones place their back on the PDF. And again, just using my detection. Slider. None of this is very. This is all getting kind of repetitive but I think I hope you're able to see how simple this is by comparison, especially if you've done this before. But once I've got those rows and columns in their general location. If I take a look at the HTML preview you'll see that I have some sort of duplication here. I wonder what that's from there. we go so you can see we have the developed category, and the number one. And then there's your little superscript with the footnote reference, and the same thing. Here you have the number 2, and if you look closely it is highlighted blue, and it's actually an active hyperlink that you can click on. So I will save this table, and I will close out. So that is what table remediation looks like when you have footnotes, and if you look at the full page preview, you can see you have your footnotes down below, and those references will direct them to the corresponding Footnote: Okay, So we have about 5 min left, and I wanted to just cover one other example. If I were to look at a table like this, and forgive me for jumping around to so many documents. I know it can be kind of a lot to look at as we go from document to document. But there really is no perfect single document that covers all of these sort of unique instances. but this table here is kind of unique, because if you look at it, there is this temperature which is actually a row header that pertains to these 6 rows here, and per person again pertains to these 6 rows, but they're not visually situated in the table in in such a way that can be accurately tag where you tag the temperature and precipitation as row headers that have these child rows underneath it but I'm going to show you in Equidox how we can fix this. So I'm going to draw a table I'm going to draw a zone, and if you notice I've left a little bit of a margin down the left-hand side and again I'm gonna hit t for table and I will open up the Table Editor So, creating my rows and columns. Okay, that looks pretty good, and I will just drag this one over a hair. So that will give us our our basic table structure, not going to span. Get get rid of some of these spannings and then I'm going to create an extra column over here on the far left side, and I'll explain why, in just a second. So by creating that extra column. what I'm going to do then, is I'm going to actually migrate this information. So precipitation and temperature I'm going to place them over here in this extra column, and span down these blanks cells to make it so that this is a row header for these 6 rows So what I'll do to accomplish this is I'm gonna get rid of this extra row here because I won't need it and I don't need all these blank cells over here and I'm going to go to the cells tab and then in the cells tab. If I go to custom in the drop-down menu for the cell source, I go to custom, I can can actually cut the temperature right out of this this particular cell, and I can paste it into this cell here and once I've done that I can then span the corresponding rows, and by doing that before I do the precipitation I'll show you where you now have temperature as a row header for these rows here so this is a way of kind of making without making visual edits to the templates, or going back and redesigning the table. You're able to make these adjustments to how this will be tagged on export simply by going through these steps, so it can be a little bit confusing in the beginning. But once you get the hang of it it becomes second nature where you're just taking what doesn't belong there, and placing it where it does belong, which is over here in this column, which is actually doesn't have any content in it, but we're able to place that content in it using custom so I'm able to then set myself up with 2 row headers, and I have one and 2 column headers, so I will I'll have my ratio at 2 to 2, and when I look at the HTML preview have temperature, precipitation, and then the the other categories here that fall underneath those sort of parent row headers, One other thing that I can mention here with our last moment is that these months are actually labeled with just the letter which can be a little bit confusing if you're if you're not quite sure exactly that these are referring to months. So instead of J I can again go into the cell source, and I can change it to custom. And I can actually type out January, and I could repeat that for these 12 months. But the idea is that if you don't have like the full context, or something of a table needs to be edited. Maybe it's the use of acronyms maybe it's blank cells. Maybe it's dashes instead of you know zeros or it could be different. Symbols that are non-standard. and a screen reader might not be able to read you're able to go in and actually insert additional contexts, and it really increase the value of that table by providing the full word which can be enunciated by a screen reader rather than just. Jfm. A. M. So on, and so forth so that's and part of the problem that is jay and J for June and July that can cause confusion. So Which which column are you actually in? Are you in the June month, or are you in the July month? So just going through like extra steps like that can really increase the value of a table for an end user. Okay, So it is 2, 30, and I wanted to I just thank everyone for joining. I'm gonna jump back to the slide deck here and get us to our contact screen. So I just I want to thank everyone again for joining us for another edition of Equodox Webinar Wednesdays. I don't know. That was kind of a fast-paced training, if you will, showing some different table examples. But I hope that you found value in it. and like, I said, for anyone that that is on this call that is not an existing ecodox user or client. Please feel free to reach out to us at Equidox sales, and Onix net com or visit our website and get in touch with us to talk more about your specific use case your PDF challenges. We'd be we'd love to learn about it and we'd love to talk to you about how we can help. We're also very active. social media so Linkedin Twitter. We have a whole bunch of information up on. Youtube So please follow us on any of these social media platforms that you use. And I believe Tammy will be sending out a short survey after this. After this webinar. So if you could just take a moment to fill out that survey, we really appreciate the feedback. It really helps us kind of address challenges or questions that any people might be having, and helps us kind of tailor. These webinars to be as relevant as possible for the most amount of people. So thank you very much. Everyone have a great rest of your afternoon. ll right so it is 2 o'clock. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us again for another addition of Equidox, webinar Wednesdays path to PDF. Accessibility. So today we're mainly going to be talking about advanced table remediation techniques. So I have quite a few different examples pulled up of different tables that can present some unique challenges. So if you deal with a lot of tables, this should be a helpful guide to showing you like the best and most efficient ways to deal with those unique tables. So, as always, what I'd like to mention is if you have any, follow-up questions. Or if you are not a current user or client of Equidox, and you'd like to have a more personal one-on-one demonstration where we can talk about your challenges with PDF remediation and any of your use cases. we can look at some of your specific documents and challenges that you have. Please feel free to reach out to us at Equidox sales at Onix net Com website is Www. Dot, Ecodox Co. and we also can be reached by phone at 806, 6, 4, 9, 6, 3, 8. So before moving into the demonstration, I just want to quickly remind everyone that Equidox is a division of Onix networking. So Onix is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. We have employees all over North America. so we've been in business for about 28 years, and we're primarily a Google cloud partner, a Cloud consultancy as well. We're also partnered with amazon web services as well. our mission is to improve organizational efficiency through cloud computing solutions. Now Equidox is a division of Onix, and we are primarily focused on PDF accessibility. So we have the best-class PDF remediation software. We also offer professional remediation services for organizations. that have large volumes of documents, and the don't have the bandwidth to deal with that type of volume. You can outsource to our services. We also can provide all kinds of accessibility services regarding training or website help. Really anything related to digital accessibility, and our mission is to ensure that digital information reaches everyone through accessibility solutions. So this is just a quick slide with a few of our customers. So I'm just gonna let those play through. and we're gonna jump now into the Equidox demonstration. So if anyone is able to stay for the duration of this webinar, we will insert the the video of it here into the slide deck, and you'll receive this after after the call is over. Okay, So well now, I'm in Equidox our PDF remediation tool. So anyone on the webinar that is a current user. This should look fairly familiar to you, but for anyone that isn't current Equidox user. I just want to get started with a simple example of how we can remediate a table. So if I were to open up a simple standard document like this where they simple table inside of this page. Sometimes you'll arrive at a document and you will see a setup of the reading zones that will look something like this, and using the HTML preview to just look at how this would be read by a screen reader, You can probably tell that this is not actual table structure each one of those cells inside of that table will just be read in this particular order, rendering this pretty much useless to a screen reader, user, because they're not really sure which row or column that they are currently situated in so in Equidox. All we need to do is draw a single zone over the top of the entire table. I'll use my keyboard shortcut and hit t to change the zones to a table, and that will give me this button here for the Table Editor. So when I press the Table Editor button this will isolate the table, and I will see the green gridlines here, which I'm free to move around and get a line manually, if I'd like so you can see that the green grid line, for the most part are lined up with the rows and columns. There are a few adjustments that can be made so to make those adjustments. If I don't want to do that manually, I can also use our Table Detector. So the Table Detector is using computer vision and machine learning to better understand the cell structure of these tables, and it will automatically draw those gridlines in the location that they need to be. So. so we remember what the HTML preview looked like just a moment ago, with no table structure whatsoever. But if I were to refresh that preview you'll see that now I have a real table. Now this is rendered in HTML. But the beautiful thing about Equidox is that it will take this HTML structure and it will automatically convert it into a PDF tag tree for you. So anyone that has done manual PDF. for remediation of tables, you know, in a tool where you have to tag every individual cell. there are so many steps associated with working through tables that a simple little table like This can take upwards of, you know, 10-15 min. In some cases. In many cases, it can take a lot longer. Tables, of course, get much more complicated than this, So you can see that within Equidox we have the automation of with the detection tool and just a much cleaner workflow in an interface that allows for simple and fast table remediation, even if you are a novice user. Okay, so let's jump out of this document. forgive me as I jump around from documents to documents. So I wanted to make sure that we covered a bunch of different bases. So I'm gonna do some simple table. That was a simple table, and I'll jump into a slightly more complicated example here. So. So this table, as you can tell, is quite large, quite dense. This can be kind of intimidating to look at there's also multiple column headers in this particular table. So you have different levels of column headers here that all correlate with the table data which falls below. Now it's the same concept where I'm just gonna draw a single table on top of, or a single zone on top of the table as I just drag it all the way to the bottom can Then again. Press t on my keyboard and the Table Editor Button will appear so I'll press the Table Editor Button and I'm gonna zoom out a bit to make this a little bit easier. To see. But you can tell here that there's so much going on that Equidox didn't even bother to draw the zones. So again we're going to use our Table Detection sliders here. So, as I move these around, I can just find the best possible starting point where I don't have to make too many manual adjustments, so you can see that the sliders here are able to land pretty much spot on with all of the rows and the columns might need just a tiny little adjustment. If I just drag these a little bit left to right you'll see that I'm able to get everything pretty much aligned with the table. So, taking a look at the preview for this table now you'll see that I have pretty clean table structure. There are a few things that I need to adjust up here because of the way that this table is set up. There is some spanning that needs to be done within the column headers. So to span. This is another technique in Equidox, where you need to join multiple cells together. I can just click in one cell that I'd like to join hold down the shift key, and then select in another cell as well. So wherever I would like to span to a span button will appear at the top, or you can also use your keyboard shortcut and press “S” and that will complete the spam. so just quickly going back to the preview you'll see that Now I have overlap in one cell that sits at the very top of the table, so there's some other spanning that needs to be done here. I actually don't even need this extra row if I zoom in you'll see that Equidox was maybe thrown off because this text… it's situated on 2 separate lines so I could do using the computer vision was thinking, Maybe that this is a situation where you've got 2 separate rows there. I don't really need that extra row, though so what I can do is I can either press the delete row button, or I can just press “D” on my keyboard. And that will basically merge down where it will get rid of that extra row that I don't actually need. Now I need to span across these 4 cells for this second level of column headers. So if I click in the cell hold shift and again. just clicking to the other cell, I'd like to join with, then press us Another situation here where I don't need this row you can see that the double lines of text was to make, maybe thinking, or maybe made Equidox thinks that this could be 2 separate rows. So again I'll just press d to get rid of that extra row, and then I will spam the trust fund cell over here, so I'll just again click in my 2 cells. and press “S” Now, if I go back to the HTML preview you'll see that we've cleaned this up quite a bit, so we have kind of fixed the structure where it looks a little bit better in HTML but we still have a few things to adjust. So the next thing to adjust is addressing the column and row headers. So by default products, assumes that your table will have one column header, which will be the top row, and the farthest left column, will be the row headers. That's just the default assumption. Now in this particular example because of the way this table is designed. I have a column header here I have another row of column headers here, and I even have a third row of column headers. So what I'll do is I'll come over here to the column header field, and as you can see these in the little text input fields. Here they are automatically set one to one, and if I just adjust that one to 3 that will, that will change the output of this table where the top 3 rows will be tagged as column headers now the year over here, which is again by default is going to be tagged as a row. Header. This is not necessarily a row header I think this is the table really. That just consists of column headers. so I can change my row header from one to 0. Now, if I go back to the HTML preview what we'll see is I now have bold fonts for the top 3 rows, and this is just giving you that visual confirmation that you've adjusted the table to export with 3 rows of column headers. You'll also notice that in the far left column where the years are situated. You don't have that bold font anymore. indicating that the years themselves will be tagged as table data. So all of these cells here, where you're just seeing a standard font will be tagged as table data, and will be attributed to whichever series of column headers they fall under. So another thing that I can talk about in this table, and is sometimes because of the computer vision. And you have such small fonts in this table, and things can be very tightly spaced. You might have a situation where the green gridlines fall maybe one or 2 pixels away from where they should. And if that's ever the case it would be extremely tedious to have to go through and individually adjust every single one of these rows, and new up like a pixel or 2, it could be done if you had the patients to do it, but that can be tedious and time-consuming, and so to address that occasional issue that you might run into on a very dense table. We have this tool here underneath the cells tab called nudge, where you're able to nudge the rows up or down. So if you click the Nudge button, your rows will move in unison where they will all just bump up one pixel out of time, so you can get things more closely aligned to where they need to be so there can be. Did I have a little bit of an Internet glitch? Wonder am I Still, we can still hear you interesting. I was wondering if my Internet cut out for a second. That's odd so we'll I'll show you in fast pace. How quickly we can get back to where we were so again just going, talking about how to do this manually in a tool like, or a manual tagging tool table like this could really be a big problem where you're spending upwards of an hour to working through this single table, and then extrapolating that out over a document that might have dozens of tables in it, if not hundreds of tables and sort of financial reports and things of that nature you can spend a lot of time working through working through documents where you are actually spending just seconds on tables like this. So pretty dramatic pretty dramatic time savings, especially when you're thinking about longer documents, as I said before. So again we're back to the same table structure that I had I would just need to. Then again fix my column and row headers. Another feature of Equidox is the auto summarized mode. So if your current Equidox user, you may or may not know that this is a feature. But table summaries are one of those requirements for tagging tables where you need to have a table summary to give that end user. Who's using a screen reader, a general overview of what? what? that table consists of in terms of the structure of it. So what Equidox is able to do is programmatically write the table summary for you. If you turn the auto summarize mode on So by doing that, it's giving the user the indication that. Okay, they're 79 rows in this table there are 5 columns. It's letting them know that there are multiple column headers. There are no row headers it's letting them know that there are spans going on inside of the data cells and the column headers. So it's giving them that that sort of navigation key right up front that they can that can they can find helpful when they're trying to navigate through a very dense table like this that contains a whole bunch of cells which could be you know quite challenging to work through So again, we'll. we'll finish up with this table, and since I'm talking about the table summary what I'll do is for any existing users of Equidox. I will show you how to turn that auto summarized mode on in your profile. So if I just close out very quickly if I go to my profile, what you'll see is and that's in the upper right-hand corner, you can go to your profile, and there is an auto summarized mode dropdown. You can turn that on to default, to enable default to disabled, or you can hide it all together. So I have mine set to default to “Enabled” so that way when I'm working on a table, machine learning is automatically summarizing that table for you. There are quite a few advantages to that so especially if you're working on a long document, and perhaps collaborating on that document with multiple users or mediating tables. It will ensure that your table summaries are very much consistent where you don't have different people interpreting what they think. A table summary is supposed to be, it will also ensure accuracy. So if you're thinking about a table like this if I just jump back in for a second. But a table that has 79 rows. If you were trying to manually count how many rows there are, you could easily come up with an incorrect number. So just for the sake of consistency and accuracy. The table summary feature is very very helpful you're also able to, of course, enhance that table summary. So you're able to insert more information about that table if you feel that it's necessary. But it's just nice that Equidox will programmatically write it for you, so that you don't have to necessarily think about table summaries as you're working through documents that are full of dozens and dozens of tables. So I'm going to ask for that, sure, and I'm not sure exactly what happened there, but I'm happy to nudge again. So let's talk about I want to talk about a table that contains a few different elements inside of the table. So a table like this, you actually have links inside of it. So if I were to use our Zone Detector, which many of you will be familiar with, we actually have links that are situated inside of this table. So this is very much a simple table by comparison to what we just looked at. There's really just a little bit of spanning that needs to go on. But when you have different elements nested inside of tables, Equidox is also able to handle this. So again, just drawing a single zone, capturing the entire table, opening up my Table Editor. And if you notice there's a slight blue hue that is covering up these different elements, indicating that there is a another zone sat on top of that when we return to the PDF. When we turn to the entire PDF page, not just looking at the Table Editor. So again, using my detection tools here. we will get this as close as we can, and that looks pretty good. I think I want. I might have drawn the table a little bit too large. I have one extra column over there. but now I'll just quickly go through the spanning process which we've already covered, and you can see here, we've got basically our table set up as neat as we need so just maybe a couple of minor adjustments to the gridlines, and I'll add an extra row here for some reason it missed that row. But looking at the HTML preview because I have those links you can see I actually have the links inside of the HTML preview here, and these will actually go to the destination point as defined in the source. PDF: So whatever the encoded link was directing that user to these links will actually be active in the exported version, so really helpful. If you're dealing with directories, and you have a bunch of email addresses, or in this example, you have different web pages with more information about the person's health needs so you're able to go straight to those links through the table structure. So it's a common thing that can occur in many different tables. But as you can see there's really nothing different in Equidox, the main recommendation that I would have would be just to address the links before you create the table, because that table is a very large zone. So once you've created it, it's can be kind of tedious to try to like draw zones outside of it and drag it in place, So I would recommend creating the links first which were in this case created automatically because they were encoded into the source file. But once you got those links identified, when you place that table on top, those links will be maintained, and they will, of course, have the anchor point that came in with the source file. So as you click on these links, you can see the anchor point is right here. So those are now going to be working links inside of this table structure. Now the nudge feature I'm sorry I forgot about that for a second. the Nudge feature again. where, if I go to the cells tab, I can nudge all of my columns left. So if you see they're all kind of moving just very slightly left, I can nudge them to the right. I don't really need to in this example because this is pretty a pretty well-spaced table. But sometimes I see like financial tables where like the previous example. you have so many rows and so many columns, and they're very, very small. You don't want to be in a situation we're having to like click on every single one, and just bump it up and down. You can spend a lot of time doing, that so we've been we've incorporated this nudge feature, where everything will move together in unison, depending and if you need to move the rows up or down or left or right Now I find that this is a tool that I don't use very often because the computer vision and machine learning is very good at detecting the table structure just automatically. So. But there, there will be the occasional, instance, where like I said you have a very dense table, and it needs just a slight adjustment. So it's there when you need it But I probably use it on less than 5% of the tables that I see Now let's Let me go to the next page here. This is another example of different elements that can fall inside of table structure. So here. This is not necessarily a table, but I can use it as an example just to keep us in the same document here. So we have a list. We have lists inside of table structure, so what I can do is I can just draw, like, I said before, the similar to the links. I like to address the list first, and then create the table on top of it. So I'm just drawing a zone over the list and I'm! Hitting L. and Then I'm bumping the list detection Slider from left to right, so as I bumped that list detection. Slider I'm picking up the list items automatically So I'm just bumping it left to right and left to right. So I'm able to create those 3 separate lists inside of these 3 separate cells. Now, once I've done that I can draw that table zone on top, and I will again hit t and open up the table. Editor. So, because I have these lists here I don't really need any extra rows. I just need one column, and I don't need the extra rows there and then. I can just span across up here. So when I span and I take a look at the HTML preview, I don't know why that I must be having some sort of glitch with my Internet or something to get that error message but here I am in the HTML preview. You can see I have the list structure inside of the table. Now, just because by defaults, Equidox, assumes that your first column is a row header, it's giving me that bold frontier to just give me that visual, and for that visual confirmation through the interface. But again I can change my row header from one to and when I go back to my preview you'll see that I have just that some font for the individual lists. So those are the 2 common elements that I see Often inside of tables are lists and links. Another one that you might uncover, are things like footnote links which we have an example of. Actually, I believe, a client sent this in if I take a look at this document here. We'll just pull up like page 2 and we can look there's actually footnotes that fall underneath this table. Now ootnotes are not really ideal for tables, because what the footnote is going to do, It's going to direct the user outside of the table, and then it's going to return them to the top left cell essentially of the table, and they have to renavigate through. So it's really not ideal for usability purposes. But in many cases you are not the designer of the document you've just been given a document and you've been asked to tag it. So we’ll work through it with using Equidox. So I'm gonna just build this kind of manually here to show you the step-by-step process. So. so I have 2 tech zones capturing my 2 footnotes. What I'll do, is I will direct these I'll change these to footnotes through the drop-down menu. You'll see Now they say FN and FN and FN for the zone types instead of text. And then here are those reference points inside of the table. So if I draw 2 zones and I'm just going to put it over the entire, the entire character there. I'm just gonna these can be it can be kind of tedious to deal with tiny little these tiny little superscripts for the footnote reference links. But what I'll do, is I'll draw the 2 zones and place them on top of those and then I will create these as footnote links, and I'll direct these footnote links to the corresponding footnote down here. So I have a drop-down menu that will tell me which zone I want you directed to. so I want to direct the first footnote to this footnote here, and I want to direct the second footnote to the second footnote: Right here. So once I've created that I can then just draw my table and then open up the table. Editor, and again you'll see that those blue bars are those blue boxes there, indicating that I have that I have. footnote Links zones place their back on the PDF. And again, just using my Detection Slider. None of this is very hard. This is all getting kind of repetitive but I think I hope you're able to see how simple this is by comparison, especially if you've done this before. But once I've got those rows and columns in their general location. If I take a look at the HTML preview you'll see that I have some sort of duplication here. I wonder what that's from there. we go so you can see we have the developed category, and the number one. And then there's your little superscript with the footnote reference, and the same thing. Here you have the number 2, and if you look closely it is highlighted blue, and it's actually an active hyperlink that you can click on. So I will save this table, and I will close out. So that is what table remediation looks like when you have footnotes, and if you look at the full-page preview, you can see you have your footnotes down below, and those references will direct them to the corresponding Footnote: Okay, So we have about 5 min left, and I wanted to just cover one other example. If I were to look at a table like this, and forgive me for jumping around to so many documents. I know it can be kind of a lot to look at as we go from document to document. But there really is no perfect single document that covers all of these sorts of unique instances. but this table here is kind of unique, because if you look at it, there is this temperature which is actually a row header that pertains to these 6 rows here, and per person again pertains to these 6 rows, but they're not visually situated in the table in such a way that can accurately tag where you tag the temperature and precipitation as row headers that have these child rows underneath it but I'm going to show you in Equidox how we can fix this. So I'm going to draw a table I'm going to draw a zone, and if you notice I've left a little bit of a margin down the left-hand side and again I'm gonna hit t for table and I will open up the Table Editor So, creating my rows and columns. Okay, that looks pretty good, and I will just drag this one over a hair. So that will give us our basic table structure, not going to span. Get rid of some of these spannings and then I'm going to create an extra column over here on the far left side, and I'll explain why, in just a second. So by creating that extra column. what I'm going to do then, is I'm going to actually migrate this information. So precipitation and temperature I'm going to place them over here in this extra column, and span down these blanks cells to make it so that this is a row header for these 6 rows So what I'll do to accomplish this is I'm gonna get rid of this extra row here because I won't need it and I don't need all these blank cells over here and I'm going to go to the cells tab and then in the cells tab. If I go to custom in the drop-down menu for the cell source, I go to custom, I can actually cut the temperature right out of this particular cell, and I can paste it into this cell here and once I've done that I can then span the corresponding rows, and by doing that before I do the precipitation I'll show you where you now have temperature as a row header for these rows here so this is a way of kind of making without making visual edits to the templates, or going back and redesigning the table. You're able to make these adjustments to how this will be tagged on export simply by going through these steps, so it can be a little bit confusing in the beginning. But once you get the hang of it it becomes second nature where you're just taking what doesn't belong there, and placing it where it does belong, which is over here in this column, which is actually doesn't have any content in it, but we're able to place that content in it using custom so I'm able to then set myself up with 2 row headers, and I have one and 2 column headers, so I will I'll have my ratio at 2 to 2, and when I look at the HTML preview have temperature, precipitation, and then the other categories here that fall underneath those sort of parent row headers, One other thing that I can mention here with our last moment is that these months are actually labeled with just the letter which can be a little bit confusing if you're not quite sure exactly that these are referring to months. So instead of J, I can again go into the cell source, and I can change it to custom. And I can actually type out January, and I could repeat that for these 12 months. But the idea is that if you don't have like the full context, or something of a table needs to be edited. Maybe it's the use of acronyms maybe it's blank cells. Maybe it's dashes instead of you know zeros or it could be different. Symbols that are non-standard. and a screen reader might not be able to read you're able to go in and actually insert additional contexts, and it really increase the value of that table by providing the full word which can be enunciated by a screen reader rather than just “JFMAM” and so on, and so forth so that's part of the problem that is J and J for June and July that can cause confusion. So Which which column are you actually in? Are you in June month, or are you in July month? So just going through like extra steps like that can really increase the value of a table for an end-user. Okay, So it is 2, 30, and I wanted to I just thank everyone for joining. I'm gonna jump back to the slide deck here and get us to our contact screen. 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
A survey of our customers and prospects revealed tables to be the most difficult task in PDF remediation. This webinar will demonstrate just how easy it is to work through large and complex tables using Equidox software.
We will cover the following and more:
1) Setting header rows
2) Cell merging and spanning
3) Table summaries
4) Links and lists within tables
5) Multi-page tables
[This webinar is primarily a demonstration and has no associated slide deck.]
Speak with an expert to learn how Equidox solutions make PDF accessibility easy.