Automation in PDF Remediation SaaS

foreign thank you everyone for joining for another edition of equidox webinar Wednesdays today we're going to just be focusing a little bit on automation we do have some really exciting technology that's um in development and in beta testing at the moment so we wanted to just kind of give a little sneak preview of that but also kind of combine that with some of the old automation that you might have already seen on previous demos or webinars or if you've ever like scanned our website and looked around at some of our our videos I'm talking a little bit about tables and lists and some of the automation that we're able to apply to your PDF documents so I just thank you everyone for joining as always if there's any sort of follow-up questions if you'd like to have a deeper discussion and talk maybe more about your specific organization and your PDF remediation challenges please feel free to reach out to us either at equidox sales and onyxnet.com or our website which is www.equidox.co there's plenty of ways to get in touch with us through that website as well and there's a wealth of information about all things related to PDF and digital accessibility so um with that said um we just I just a brief intro for anyone that might not be super familiar with equidox we are a software company uh that offers the Best in Class PDF remediation software we also offer expert PDF remediation services so we are able and we're able to automate high volume uh PDF remediation as well so for things like statements and template templatized documents that are being generated on a very high high level high volume we are able to fully automate that type of remediation process so our mission our mission is to enable PDF accessibility through intelligent and automated Solutions so this is just a quick slide about some of the customers that we serve we do work with we do work with customers in all different verticals and of all different size so um whether you're from a large corporation or a small government agency whatever it may be we are able to to help you with any of your PDF remediation challenges um so today I'm actually going to switch out of this slide deck in just a second and we're going to go into equidox and I'm going to give a little bit of a demo about some of our features like the Zone detector the list detector the table detector and then another tool called Zone transfer so Zone transfer is uh is a really cool feature which allows you to basically take the reading zones from one document and apply them to another document that might be very similar in terms of its layout or maybe even an exact version of that document that might have just had like a small typo corrected so I'll explain how that works in just a few minutes um so I'm gonna jump out of this slide deck for just a second and I will uh come over here into equidox so uh with equidox I'm actually operating right in my browser so keep that in mind with equidox this is a web-based application which has a lot of advantages being able to just work from any computer anywhere anytime uh you are able to interact with your documents you don't have to be dedicated to your one machine that has software installed on it and also the ability to scale a tool like equidox is really easy because you're able to deploy this to a lot of different users across your organization because we work with a concurrent user licensing model that means anyone in the organization is able to log in it's just a matter of how many people are using it simultaneously and then also the collaboration aspect of being a web-based application because you're able to uh because you're able to actually remediate uh the same documents simultaneously even so you can share documents to the application you can have multiple remediators tapping into the exact same file so if you have a very large document maybe a 200 Page Long report that has a tight deadline that you'd like to have remediated as quickly as possible you are able to have your best remediators working together on that document if you'd like um so with that said what we're looking at here is just a list of documents that have been imported into the tool just for various demos and and trainings that I do um so uh with that said what we're looking at here uh I'm sorry what what we're looking at here is just some documents that I wanted to show today uh in this demonstration um so I'm actually going to get started with this document right here so I'm going to click on the document or click on the document and arrive at the document detail page from here I'm able to see a thumbnail of all four pages in this document I can interact with some of the properties of the document down below we also have this really nice feature called the images tab which allows you to see all of the images in the document in one location if you've ever worked with PDS before you'd probably know that just having a sense of how many images there are in a document and which images are going to require alt text is really nice to just kind of know that up front and then if you have documents that just have like repetitive logos such as this one you can quickly artifact those because you don't want to be typing out the exact same alt text for the same redundant image page after page so what you can do to quickly automate that is just click on these two check boxes and that will actually artifact those all those images with just a couple of clicks now I'm going to start here on page one and the reason for that is well this document here it has some challenges with the initial tag structure that I've been given so this document was previously tagged coming out of the source file it's probably some sort of like Microsoft Word document and it is got all kinds of crazy zones that we see here on the page so if you look here you can see these yellow boxes that are covering up the content this is not at all how this how this layout should look when we arrive at this page so this is again just coming from the initial tag structure that the document gave us so what we have is this great tool that can help us automate things and that's the tool called Zone detector so this detection slider here if I move this back and forth left and right what you'll see is I'm able to change the way that equidox is picking up all of the content on this page so the Zone detector will allow me to ignore the existing tag structure so I don't have to rely on that tag structure that was provided to me and I don't have to make all kinds of you know clicks around on the page to change the layout I'm able to use this Zone detector just to give myself a better starting point so once I find kind of like The Sweet Spot something that's really nice and close to what I'm looking for that's going to minimize the amount of work that I have to do I don't really have to use the Zone detector anymore on this page and if I find that all pages in the document or the majority of the pages in the document have a similar basic layout or a similar design style in terms of the fonts and the line spacing and just the way that the pages are laid out you can apply that setting to all pages and then equidox will look forward in the document to the subsequent pages and it will apply that same detection level that you've set on whatever page that you've chosen so that's a nice way of kind of automating the not having to even remove this Zone detector around on every page you can kind of consolidate that step into just a couple of clicks now the next thing to do here on this page would be to set set up some heading structure so I have some headings on this page if you can tell on the kind of like sectioning off areas of this uh of this page and organizing the content here now by default equidox just assumes that everything is set up as a Tech Zone on this particular page so I can I can quickly set up my heading structure just by using keyboard shortcuts so I'm just tapping the number on my keyboard that corresponds with the heading level that I'd like to set so uh it blinking you missed it but I said this is an H1 this is an H2 this is another H2 and then the same thing for these zones down here now before moving any for any further I want to just briefly briefly show you another um element of equidox which is this tool that looks like a computer monitor if I press this at any time it will open up a separate tab in my browser and in this in this browser preview what I'm able to see is an HTML rendering of the page that I'm currently working on so you can look here and quickly see the heading structure that you've identified and this will also represent things like the reading order for the page so a screen reader essentially would just read all of this content top to bottom in whatever order it's currently shown here in the HTML preview so if you've never done PDF remediation before if you're not familiar with all of the nuances of setting up pdf tag trees uh think of this HTML preview as a replacement for having to understand all of the complexities of PDF tag structures because you can see here in just this very linear simple HTML layout exactly how a screen reader is going to interact with all of the content on that page so when you see issues with this HTML preview that's your key to just go back to the PDF and make a couple of adjustments to the areas of the page which there are issues now the heading structure of this looks good so far I'm pretty satisfied with the way that the headings look but one glaring issue with this page is this table which if you were looking at the PDF itself you probably noticed that there was a table there but currently there is no table structure applied to it so again the source document did not have this table tagged at all and when I um use that zone detector it's identifying all of the text inside of that table but it's my job really to give it that table structure so if we were to export this right now we would have all of those row headers being read first and then just random bits of data that make up that table would be read after it so it's hard to say like what does this number actually refer to which row which column is this number in so keep this in mind as we work through the table remediation process but when I come back here to the main PDF page you can see these reading zones were just reflected over there in my HTML preview this is not what we want for this type of element so all I'm going to do is just resize one of the zones and place it right on top of the entire table and we can ignore the existing zones underneath we don't need to worry about those and I will just hit t on my keyboard t for table or you can change the Zone type in the drop down menu if you prefer but I like to use keyboard shortcuts it's just a way of being faster and more efficient not having to move your mouse so far and you know interact with drop down menus now if I click this blue table editor button when I open this blue table editor button this is going to show me just that portion of the page and here I have this tool called the table detector so now we're getting into the automation portion of the presentation where developing this table structure can actually take quite a bit of time if you're doing it manually you could easily spend you know half an hour working on a table like this if you're doing it step by step building those tags out completely in a manual in a manual way but if you use our table detector which is using computer vision and machine learning the art the artificial intelligence is able to very quickly almost instantly determine the table and cell structure or the table structure for this portion of the page so now when I go back to my HTML preview instead of having that mess of information that I had before I have a nice clean HTML table as you can see here so this is a pretty straightforward simple table but the automation is really built into this artificial intelligence where I'm literally just bumping a slider from left to right and equidox figures out you know where all the cells and the rows and the columns stop and start so it really works in a it's really really quick really simple people to use and you don't need to be a PDF for mediation expert to get a big benefit out of it and then if you just think about documents that are filled with tables you know it might be a scientific report that's got all kinds of data in it it could be a financial document where it's like the annual report and there's 200 different Financial tables and and balance sheets and income statements and all different kinds of tables uh in in that document those types of documents when you're trying to remediate them manually they can literally take weeks to get through someone just sitting there over their computer and clearing their calendar and spending weeks and weeks just going through and setting up every single table data cell and column header and row header if you just think about the time that you can save just from you know just this one little simple table extrapolating that out over the use of a tool like this for a month or a year or multiple years it's a really mind-boggling amount of time that you can save so I'm going to jump out of this document and uh just to kind of further iterate that point um with the tables if I use even a more complicated table um so perhaps you're looking at that table and going like okay big deal it's not that difficult of a table well a table like this is much more complicated because you have multiple column and row headers and we obviously have a lot more data cells in this table so it's really the same process of just hitting T opening up the table editor and then using the table detector here I'm going to get my columns identified and I'm going to find my rows and then maybe just make a couple of small adjustments just to help out the the computer vision so I'm just making a few small adjustments and I'm going to just get rid of a couple of these extra rows where we have like multiple lines of text up here and then I just have to do some quick spanning so I'm just holding shift on my keyboard and pressing s uh to create these spans where I'm going to join these cells together and then this table actually has three rows of column headers so the top three rows up here our column header so I'm just going to tell equidox that this table is a little bit different it doesn't have the default one-to-one ratio it's got three column headers and so when I go back to the HTML preview you'll see that I've built this beautiful HTML table in a few seconds and if you could remediate this table in acrobat in like an hour I'd be really impressed it's so if you can just think about the time save that took maybe 30 seconds compared to doing it in an hour uh it's it's really um quite astonishing if you think about where you could be if you're using this tool for the course of a year let's say now another really cool art um automated feature is uh list detection so list detection is another one of those parts of PDF remediation that can be very tedious and slow um so just to show you how we would interact with lists if you were to have a series of text zones covering up your list that would render an HTML looking kind of like this where it would just read those lists as like strange run-on sentences with no punctuation that's really not how a list should be Tagged so all we're going to do is hit L on our keyboard and then bump our list detector from left to right so this list detector similar to the table detector uses a combination of computer vision and machine learning to be able to quickly almost instantly identify list items that make up entire lists and then when you get into elements like this where you have a list inside of a list item this is this sort of uh really exaggerates the complexity of how to go about tagging this this takes a lot longer than just a simple list like this uh but in equidox it's really the same process of just hitting L on your keyboard and bumping the list detector from left to right and then that will identify the two main items and then it looks inside of those list items and it finds that there is a sub list in there so that will create actual nested list tag structure so here you have your simple list that I quickly tagged and then here you have your nested list and then the great thing of equidox is that it will automate the process of converting this HTML that we're looking at this will just export automatically as a PDF tag tree for you so you're not having to interact with the PDF tags You're simply just using uh using equidox to identify like okay this is a list you hit L and then you bump the slider over equidox does the hard part of writing the PDF tag tree for you um so uh again it's the just to show you another example of nested list uh tag structure we have a document like this you know this is uh maybe looks a little bit more similar to a nested list that you might see on a day-to-day basis this is again just drawing a Zone hitting L and bumping the list detector from left to right and this will find that we have the two external items here then there's a series of sub items and then a third layer of lists inside and in worst case scenario you might have to just remove a couple of like erroneous zones that equidox kind of overshot itself on but for the most part you're going to see that this just takes a few seconds to create nested list tag structure um now the other con the other um tool that I wanted to mention so we've talked a lot about these reading zones that we're seeing here and when we have these reading zones um we can actually use this output ver uh this output tab called zones now primarily when you're exporting documents most people are going to export it to a PDF meaning that nothing is going to change visually or aesthetically about the document it's truly just going to be setting up the tag structure as you saw in the HTML preview so nothing visually will be altered but those reading zones that we're setting up to organize all of the content what you can do with them is you can actually download those zones so you can extract all of that information about the zones and the exact size the exact location uh all of the Zone properties and then those zones can be instantly and automatically reapplied to other documents that might be exactly like this so if you are let's say it's a you know a rate sheet where it's the same document month after month but maybe just the interest rates or the percentage points just change slightly once you have that foundational layout of those zones you can continue to reapply that same layout to future iterations of that document there are many different use cases for it as part of our remediation Services offering where we have a team of professional remediators you know we would often run into situations where a client would give us a document we would remediate it and then they would tell us you know the day that we delivered it to them in an accessible format they would say oh well we found a couple of typos so here's a new PDF well previously that would cause a lot of tension as to like well we've already remediated the old version and now we have to start over again from scratch but that's not the case anymore because we can take the Zone layout from the version that was already remediated in about 10 seconds we're able to just drop those zones right on a similar or the exact same version of this document and then you don't have to do anything you've just copied the zones from one version to another so it's a really nice feature it can really automate things depending on the the use case that you can find for but it's it's truly an incredible Time Saver when you run into the right set of circumstances to use it so with that said there's about 10 minutes left from the 30 minutes that we scheduled here for the webinar I'm actually going to turn it over to to Zach so Zach is going to give you a little bit of a preview of what we have coming out soon so think of this Zone transfer feature that I've just explained here and how we're able to transfer the zones from one version to another we're actually in in the process of automating this entirely with um with a really cool feature that I'm going to let Zach talk about so Zach I will uh turn it over to you I'm not sure if we got a slide introducing page match so I will um open up the slideshow or Zach would you like to share your screen well I have my screen I hopefully have my screen shared you know for as much as technical background as I have these Zoom meetings sometimes elude me a little bit but let's see what I can do okay I'll stop sharing for now okay I'm gonna give this a shot here and I'm going to share my screen so hopefully you can see that I have my introducing page match template um slideshow up can everybody see my screen again excellent so um as Dan said we've got Zone transfer and Zone transfer works great especially if you know the document that it's coming from or um or you re you can remember doing that document a month ago um and if you know Dan and I are the only people on the remediation team we can talk back and forth and say yes you know Zach I do remember doing a document like that last week let's try let's try our Zone transfer um but let's hit the scene on on a large corporation that has 10 15 20 remediators and they've been using equidox for a few years now um it might be it might be a little bit difficult to remember what we did you know six months ago especially if Dan and I don't work in the same group or don't work on the same types of documents um so we've decided uh decided uh We've we've created this concept called page match and Page match as it kind of States on this slide is a is a set of templates built from your currently remediated documents um uh the neural net defined pattern recognition algorithm I'm going to say that again the neural net defined pattern recognition algorithm that equidox uses we'll go through all of your documents take a look at um a whole bunch of Dimensions that we've defined create a set of templates and then they can be used to kind of automate The Zone transfer and Zone placement during import it's it's related to the import process and basically it's compared to all of these known templates that we've gone through through your organization you don't have to worry we don't cross-contaminate organization with other information um so you know my my insurance company doesn't have any organizational information that your bank has so nothing to worry about there but one of the brilliant things is that the templates are continuously updated and ready for your next import as soon as you hit the validated checkbox so if your company that uses the validated checkbox on a on a day-to-day basis great job if you're an organization that doesn't use validation we might want to suggest that you start using that let me go ahead and log into my demo account here and hopefully we can get everything started I think that's this and I think that's this so right here um hopefully everybody can see that I've got two documents um I've got a document that Dan and I have been working on uh it's this page match white paper and as we were working on it we've noticed that there were some typos uh so we remediated those typos and I brought this document back into equidox um I've not used any Zone transfer features on it this is the first time that we've actually logged into this document and we're going to take a look at it right now I apologize my demo environment is just a little bit slow uh but this loading shouldn't take but another second or so but the idea is that as these documents are imported into equidox um it goes through and takes a look at all of the templates I'm going to turn the enable on for this page and you can see right away that I've already got a template loaded here um it knows that this is a heading one it knows that this is a heading two it's got some images I'm just going to save this I'm going to go to page two and I can already tell you that I know that this is going to have this is going to work because I've I've saved this document so H2 h2h2 that's excellent save this and we'll go to page three now when I enable page three nothing's going to happen well excellent hey uh that's how you know it's live hold this model up directly I actually wasn't expecting that I hadn't uh given it the background on this particular page yet but it automatically knew that this is an H2 that's fantastic um it also recognized that I like this text big and wide that's perfect I'm going to save this and I'm also going to mark it validated now I I can hear the question already well wouldn't this have worked with Zone transfer yes this simplistic example would have worked with Zone transfer but let's take a the idea of a document that maybe um is out of order so I have a reordered version of this document that I'm going to import and you can think of this like um designers all the time I tend to tend to reorganize documents but this is also the same concept of let's say that I needed page one out of my January meeting minutes and page two out of my February meeting minutes and page three out of my uh July meeting minutes page match is able to drop into each one of those documents separately uh compare all of the pages individually and pluck out the ones that it wants best so I need to turn this label off for a second and we'll look at this reordered white paper oh you know what I forgot to do I think I forgot to click the enable um I'm pretty sure I forgot to click the enable page match button during the import I'm sorry guys I'm going to delete this document and re-import it I apologize and that's how you know it's live again because I forgot to click a button we need to turn enable page matching on and import that again this is just the beta version so this checkbox is turned on so that I can that our team can clearly Define and test all of the um all of the attributes of this this new function in the live version we won't have to worry about enabling these page match details it'll be automatically included in the import process but we've got this reordered page now or this reordered document rather so if you were to have tried to Zone transfer this you would have put page a three load layout now on page one and page one on page two and it just wouldn't work right um but if I enable The Zone matching you can see already that the document here has referenced page two of my previous document so on page one of this newly imported I've referenced page two that's exactly right because this really was page two on a previous document that I had already remediated and marked validated uh same thing with let's say yes and it's going to be the same way this is going to be page three as my reference perfect say yes let's save this and we've got page three this will be page one from my reference and yes it is page one for my reference so um the the power there is really letting the computer remember all of the things that you or your team have done in the past it automates the Zone transfer process and it immediately learns all of your new layouts as soon as you click the validate button so it's an instant process it updates on the Fly the computer uh the the neural net algorithm self-inserts itself configures and that new information is available instantly so um I hope that the demonstration even though I I forgot to click the check box has been informative let me know if you have any questions in the Q a otherwise Dan I'm going to give it back to you is that all right sure you can just keep your screen shared and then just maybe pull up the slide deck and go to the final slide so I think we'll just wrap things up of course because it is just about 2 30. um just one more slide that's going to be the so for anyone that's uh maybe checking out this webinar after the fact we will insert a video of like a general demo of equidox um so uh equidox again you can reach out to us at equidox sales at onyxnet.com or our website is www.equidocs.co we're also really active on social media so follow us on LinkedIn uh interact with us there Twitter we have all kinds of YouTube videos that are maybe more training oriented and we're also on Facebook as well and I believe uh Tammy will be sending out like sort of a little follow-up survey we'd love to hear some feedback from you we'd love to know about what you'd be interested to see in next month's uh iteration of webinar Wednesdays so if you have just a moment to fill out that survey that's really appreciated but with that said thank you everyone for joining us today we really appreciate you attending and let us know if you have any questions or would you like this if you'd like to see more of like a one-on-one uh demonstration of of maybe even using your own documents so I'm looking forward to chatting with everyone soon thanks everyone have a great day thanks everybody thank you