Simplifying PDF Accessibility with Equidox

Alright, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. It's 2:00 here, so I'm just gonna get started  and I appreciate everyone joining today. Just so everyone's aware this webinar is being  recorded, so if you have to drop off or if you have any colleagues that might wanna see it, we  will make this recording available after the fact. You can always share it around or catch  up or review things down the road. If you have any questions, you can  feel free to use the Q&A chat feature at the bottom of the interface. It should be for you, and we will do our best to answer those questions either as we  go or probably after would make the most sense. If there's any specific questions. So just a few quick housekeeping things. The topic of the webinar today is  simplifying PDF Accessibility with Equidox and my name is Dan Tuleta. I am a senior Sales Engineer here with the Equidox team. Just a quick crash course here through the agenda. I'm gonna try to keep the slide  presentation somewhat minimized, so that we don't have death by slides here. But just a quick run-through of the agenda. We're gonna talk about who Equidox is, we're gonna  talk a little bit about the legal mandates for PDF accessibility, we're gonna talk a little bit about  WCAG and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, talking about our, automation and artificial  intelligence, how it relates to PDF accessibility. And then we're gonna go through  how to put together a PDF plan. So how do we make documents accessible? How do we prioritize things? How does Equidox specifically  help in this workflow? And then we'll finish things off with a quick  demonstration of Equidox so that if you haven't seen how our software works in the past, you'll  be able to get a general sense of that today. And then one other quick housekeeping thing. We are, of course. Equidox Software Company, our mission  statement here is to enable PDF accessibility through intelligent automated solutions. We are based in Cleveland, Ohio, and we have been a leader in the PDF accessibility  space for about the last decade. And Equidox software helps customers make their PDFs compliant, accessible and most  importantly, usable for everyone. Just a couple of quick terms here. I'm assuming that most people on this call, if not everyone, is at least heard of these  things because that's why you're here, of course. So of course, with PDFs and  with all digital content, we have different mandates for accessibility,  primarily the Americans with Disabilities Act and then there are Section 508 and different  offshoots and subsets of the Americans with Disabilities Act like Section 508 of the  Rehabilitation Act and then most recently, the final ruling on digital accessibility for Title 2. So Title 2 was signed into law by the DOJ back in 2024, and it is mandating that all  organizations are subject to meeting WCAG 2. 1 double a standards for their  web content and their mobile applications. And this will, of course, include all of the  PDFs that might be posted up on your website. So the deadlines they  initially were April of 2026. The updated deadline is April of 2027. So of course, that's, six months away from now or so, but it's coming faster than  you might think, and it comes quick and PDF accessibility is one of those things  that can take some time to sort through. So we definitely wanna start being proactive  and getting to work on those PDF documents. There are also some different limited exceptions  for smaller counties and municipalities that have smaller population sizes  that extend that deadline a little bit. But primarily the date that everyone is  really focused on is April 26th of 2027. Okay. When we're talking about accessibility,  people are mainly referring to WCAG. You might hear it called “WICK-AG.”. People call it WCAG. What the acronym stands for is Web  Content Accessibility Guidelines. And these are the widely accepted standards  developed by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, which is a group of organizations that  basically they write the rules and guidelines on how to make digital content accessible. Because we are so digitally focused now. Um, the Americans with Disabilities Act was  first signed into law back in the early nineties; there was very little day-to-day life being  conducted on computers and of course there were no cell phones to be using. But now everything that we do seems to be based around our computer  screens, our iPads, our phones. So everything now is super digital. And so these web content accessibility guidelines are basically there to write some rules  for how websites, applications, and of course, things like documents are presented to  people that rely on the tag structure and the accessibility of those documents. So we'll talk more about that as we go as well. Okay, under WCAG, uh, the four pillars of WCAG, so these are,  kind things that make WCAG very special. Um, the four pillars are perceivable,  operable, understandable, and robust. Just a quick word on, like, all of this  means,, something to be perceivable,, of an example would be alt text on an image. If you have an image in a document, a blind user that's relying on a screen reader,  that screen reader does not know what that image is, so that information is not perceivable  to that user unless you provide alternative text to explain what that image contains  and why it's important to the document. This would mean something that  is like navigable, for example. So not everyone that's using a computer screen  or scrolling around on their cell phone is using their fingertip or their mouse to do so. A lot of people rely on different methods of navigating sites, navigating documents. So making sure that your website or your documents are encoded properly to be navigable by different  methods is a very critical part of accessibility. Understandable. Now this would mean like navigation and design if you have things that  are very, hard to work through and navigate, everyone has been frustrated by  poorly designed websites before. These are things that need to be cleaned up  so that when you are trying to fill out a form online and you get an error message and you can't  figure out why you're getting that error message, make sure that is clearly resolved  with good understandable navigation tools through your website or your forms or  whatever the content may be and then robust. So that means that something can work with  different types of tools if different browsers, different types of assistive technology,  having clean code that is easy to work with for everyone, not just sighted users who are  scrolling through your site or your document. Okay. Then to put some of this into context, the past, Equidox, we have worked hand in hand  with the National Federation of the blind. And what the National Federation of the Blind, uh, they helped us with a survey of their  users, they told us that two-thirds of PDF documents that blind users interact with  on a day-to-day basis are inaccessible. So you can imagine how frustrating it would be  if every time you were trying to read something or learn something on the internet, you  can't read it two-thirds of the time. So that is challenge here is that the vast  majority of documents and many websites and applications, let's face it, are still  not accessible even today in 2026. Then I also just wanted to mention a quick word  about artificial intelligence and accessible PDFs. Whenever we, about people talking  about AI, I think people give credit to artificial intelligence for  being able to do incredible things. And it certainly can. PDF accessibility is a very, uh, thing. So AI can augment PDF for mediation,  but it cannot fully automate it. Reason being is that PDFs are all unique. Are all different from each other. Everyone designs them in different ways. Is using different tools. Documents get edited and changed over time. There are very unique type of elements, they come from everywhere, some of them are  brand new, some of them are 25 years old. And it's very, difficult to train  artificial intelligence to pick up on all of the nuances and details. Validation is required to confirm that something is accurate and is truly usable so that we can  give an equivalent experience to a blind user when they are interacting with a document. If you over rely on AI automation, it will leave those real world human users confused,  misinformed and excluded from that information. So I just wanna kind the stage that anyone that is  telling you that you can just use a ChatGPT-type of tool to make a PDF accessible. That is not true. There are many, things that cannot be  fully automated within PDF accessibility. And anyone that is telling you that they have  an AI tool that does it all for you and you just upload documents and you're done. It's is absolutely not true. You need to have a level of human  validation to confirm the accuracy. Here are a few pros and cons of using automation. Um, just, you primary way that most people have attacked PDF accessibility over the past 5, 10,  15 years is a fully manual remediation efforts. So this would be your traditional  tools like Adobe Acrobat, where it is the Swiss Army knife of PDF accessibility. You can do anything to a PDF because Adobe, of course owns the PDF format. So they give you a tool that allows you to do anything you'd like with it. Um, to, order to make a document fully compliant, it's extremely technical. It's slow. There's many repetitive tasks that have to be  applied every single time you go to the next element or the next page. It requires a ton of, of expertise and prerequisite knowledge  of how to build an accurate tag tree. You can still have errors that occur  because when you are sitting there all day long working through a document, it is just  a natural part of the human experience to start cutting corners are rushing and going faster than  you should because your eyes are starting to go cross from staring at a tag tree all day. So still you can have human error involved. And it's also very difficult to scale. The time I talk to organizations that have thousands, of PDF documents  that are in their backlog. And there might only be a single person or  a handful of people in that organization that know anything about PDF accessibility. So having that many documents to work through and only having a few sets of hands in order  to accomplish it, incredibly difficult to scale because it's thousands and thousands  of documents and only a couple of people that really know how to remediate them. Now, on the other hand, full automation, compliance is highly unlikely. You might have some simple documents that are just like paragraphs and text on a page and maybe you  can automate certain things around that to make it fully compliant, but PDFs are rarely that simple. Are always, again, details and nuances to them that are, separate from one document to the next. Automation, can be faster, but it's also unpredictable. I've tested AI tools where certain documents that are just a few pages long  for whatever reason take 10 minutes to process. And then other documents that might be dozens  of pages long just get processed in seconds. So it's very hard to predict  like, long is this going to take? And even if you do process everything with AI,  there are still going to be tons of errors. And then you have to go back and figure  out where those errors are located and then retroactively correct them. And sometimes just locating those errors can take just as long as if you  would have tagged it from scratch. Again, not everything can be automated  and we'll talk more about that as we go. So, where Equidox comes in, we  really try to bridge the gap between the two ends of the spectrum here. So the fully manual components of PDF accessibility and the automated components of  accessibility, bridging the gap of the two can help make things faster and less technical  and try to remove some of the repetitive and mundane tasks of remediation. But it stills allow you to be fully compliant and ensure that the document is  completely usable for a screen reader user. Software like Equidox requires less expertise than  a tool like Adobe Acrobat, and it allows you to truly correct the errors in a more efficient way,  so that you can get to the point of validating the document to make sure that it's truly usable  and of course, truly compliant, rather than just auto tagging something and crossing your  fingers that it gets everything right. Okay, as we talk about PDF accessibility,, we  will talk more and go through a demonstration, of course, at the end, but I just wanna, kind  the stage a little bit, so we can go a little bit smoother through the, demonstration. When we talk about PDF accessibility, a very common term is tags. And tags are these small digital identifiers that get applied to  the different pieces of content in a PDF. And they are intended to work with the assistive  of technology, primarily a screen reader. So they set up a roadmap for a screen reader  to read a document in an accurate way. There are different types of tags in a PDF  tag tree, and it's all based on the specific content of the document. Uh, common tag types would be a text tag which is a P tag if  you're coming from an Acrobat background. And text is of course extremely  common and popular in a PDF. On average, it's probably the most frequent piece  of content that you'll find in any given document, is just text on a page. You will also have images. Images will require things like  alternative descriptions to explain what the document or what that image contains. You have heading structure which are critical for navigating a document to be able to skip over  sections of information and jump to the important pieces of text or content that the user is looking  for without having to read every single piece of information on every page of a document. Links, of course, are an important part of documents. So being able to jump to other sections of a document, other pages in a document,  going to external websites, composing emails, all sorts of reasons why links are important. They have their own types of tags. Then you have things like lists and tables,  which will get more into in a minute. And then reading order is probably, in my  opinion, the most important part of accessibility. So reading order, when we're talking  about reading order, what you see on a page as a sighted user is not necessarily  what a screen reader user is going to hear. So digital reading order is not the same  as the content order and how it's laid out. So let's just take this as a hypothetical  example, like a three-column brochure. A sighted user, whether you're doing  this consciously or unconsciously, you are immediately analyzing this as  being a three-column layout for this page. And your eyes will naturally flow down the  left column, then move to the middle column, and then finish up on the right-hand column. However, if you just left this up to an auto-tagger or some sort of AI tool that is just  going to take its best guess at how to read this, it is liable to read the top line of the first  column, then the top line of the middle column, then move over to the right column, and  then jump here back to the middle column, and then back to the right column,  and then back to the middle column, and then over here to the far left column,  and then staying in the far left column. You can see how very quickly  this would just fall apart. And the entire document, although it's very simple  from a visual standpoint and easy to read and understand for a blind user who is hearing this  content being read across the three-column setup here, it renders this document to be really  just useless and a big ball of confusion. So this is something that you always have  to be considerate of, is that not every document is left to right, top to bottom. There are always things to consider about how content should be read, someone  that is relying on a system technology. Okay, let's talk briefly here about  setting up a PDF for mediation plan. Now this is just a few, like, points  to consider when you're starting to, like, and assess your situation. You can, of course, deviate away from this  plan, or maybe the order of operations changes from one organization to the next depending  on the circumstances of your exact situation. Um, in general, here are some  good things to keep in mind. Um, assigning a team or an  individual to oversee the project. You are going to need some level  of, like, expertise, you to really, kind the weight of a project like this. To be a leader that actually really has a, day-to-day focus on making sure that  PDFs are accessible on your website. You wanna evaluate your documents  and choose the right tools. So if it's PDF documents, if it's Word documents,  if it's Google documents, there's all kinds of different documents that you might have. Um, how do you go about assessing those? How do you go about giving yourself the  right sets of tools in order to make sure that those documents are accessible? So just taking a general evaluation of the PDFs that you have and then also removing  unnecessary documents is another important step. Seen all kinds of organizations that have tens of  thousands of documents posted on their website, but many of them could be completely obsolete. They could be just things that were posted and now they're in a corner of the website  that no one ever really goes to anymore, but they're still technically posted, and then  they're therefore giving you a liability because chances are that document is not accessible. So if you have, you things and memos and, you invite to the company picnic  from 1999, you don't need to have every document still up on your website. So maybe just doing like general cleanup, a spring cleaning of your website can  help remove a lot of that backlog. That is not gonna be something that  you need to go and actively remediate. Um, an accessibility notice  is another important step, making sure that you're putting on your website  that, hey, we are an organization that's aware of accessibility, we care about accessibility and  we are taking the steps to become more accessible. As we speak, that accessibility  notice might include information like, are the areas of the website that we are  currently under construction or under, uh, are being fixed and addressed as we speak. And also here is a phone number or email address or some sort of contact form  that you can get in touch with us, and we will do our best to work with you in  a one on one capacity to make accommodations so that you can interact with our content. Um, always wanna start when you get down to the, brass tacks of remediating PDFs. You always wanna start with the most used invisible PDFs and then move into the  easier documents and work on what remains. So it's like the last step  would be like the old stuff or,, stuff that's not interacted with as frequently. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of slides. Um, then also training. So you always wanna make sure  that you are training content creators to handle their own remediation. Part of the problem is that for many, years, people have been creating  PDFs left right and center. And in these documents just create  a big backlog that have been, piling up for years and years and years. And if no one really knows how to remediate them, then that's a big problem. How do you go back and retroactively correct hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of  documents that have accumulated over the years? Well, you really just wanna kind sure that  you're stopping that as quickly as possible by training content creators to be able to  handle their own documentation moving forward. Stop putting more stuff on  the pile in the backlog. Make sure that every document that we  set up and create from this day forward is going to be accessible before it goes up  on the website, not creating more and more problems that have to be fixed in the future. Okay, as I said, your PDF for remediation, and this is kind of something  I was just saying before. We wanna make sure that we are assessing  documents and my general rule of thumb when working with different organizations  is to focus on the most used documents. So those highly interactive  with PDFs, the critical ones that are front and center on your website. Many websites and different CMS systems have, of statistics so you can see how often are  certain links and things being interacted with. So you might wanna do a quick assessment of  that to understand like, these are our 10 or these are our 50 most-used PDFs and prioritize  those to make sure that they're accessible. You would wanna make sure that your most recent  documentation, kind second rung of priority there. Because, face it,a report from yesterday  afternoon is probably more important than a report from 20 years ago. Chances are more people are concerned with the most up-to-date version of a report rather than  something that was produced a very long time ago. It might just be sitting, in the  shadows of the website and not interacted with on a very frequent basis. You also wanna think about the a complexity standpoint, you your time to the best use,,  lower complexity documents, the things that are easier to remediate can actually make more  of an impact because you simply can get through more of it in a shorter amount of time. So if you can spend an hour working through a couple of hundred pages  of PDFs that are relatively simple, that is gonna be more impactful than spending that  same hour working through one very difficult PDF where it might only just be a few pages, but  you get stuck on it because it's super complex. So just think about that as just making  more of a dent in the pile of documents by getting through some of the easier  pages as kind of a third rung of priority. And then everything else that would  be the old stuff, the complex stuff, uh, that you like that can kind put  off like a back burner, maybe even put into an archive for temporary  storage,, get them out of the way. But then those would be the things that I would  say should be kind of the fourth run of priority. The stuff that's not used very often, the very  old stuff that's kind of date and obsolete. Okay. Then the actual workflow for PDF for mediation. So talking about the steps of going through making sure that an individual document  is truly accessible, I'm just as, again, you can deviate away from these steps,  it's not necessarily set in stone. Every document is a little bit different,  but just as a general high level,, wanna make sure that you're tagging all  of the important text in a document. You wanna make sure that you  are setting heading structure. So heading structure is again a  critical part of navigating a PDF. So making sure that you're setting up  that structure so that a screen user can jump around any document  the same way that a sighted user can just glance at a document  and see large bold fonts. And they know that, that means  that there's a heading there. These are things that you always need to be  considered and it's just part of the workflow, uh, all text images and artifacting  any that are not needed. So descriptions of images, it's an  important part of PDFs, making sure that, you have a pie charts that, that is being  described with an alternative text, so that a screen reader user can get the same data from that  pie chart as a sighted user can by looking at it. And then if you have decorative images, things  like background, like shadows, effects or repetitive logos or little decorative doodles  like this that appear all the time and documents, those types of things don't  necessarily need to be described. So you wanna make sure that you're artifacting  them so that you're not wasting your time typing in descriptions, and you're not wasting time of  the screen reader user having to listen to those descriptions of purely decorative information. Of course things like lists and tables, which are very unique, but very  common types of data in a document. Lists have a specific way of being tagged  which we'll talk about in a little bit, and also tables the same way. Tables are really, important part of PDF accessibility and we always spend a lot  of time talking about tables and I'll show you this in the demo because tables, if you've  ever remediated a document before, they are notoriously difficult in time consuming to tag. They can take literally hours to work through. So a single report, you  quarterly financial report, it might have 50 or 100 or 200 tables in it. And you could literally be talking about days or weeks of work for a remediator to go  through all of the tables because it's just a notoriously slow and difficult  thing to work with in the PDF format. But we will show you how we solve that with  Equox are you wanna ensure that links have the correct URLs and that they are actually  going to where they are supposed to go. So that's always an important thing. We don't wanna be sending people to wrong parts of the world wide web because the links are  broken or they're not set up to work correctly. And links, of course, have their own tag types. That's always something worth checking. You want to set your reading order to make  sure that the content reads in a logical flow. And we will always make sure that we're  validating our work, that we are making sure that we as the human remediator can confirm  that this document is going to be read correctly for a screen reader user in the future. Are just some screenshots that, included here in the slide deck. Is the Equidox interface. And so I just wanna walk through a couple of  these screenshots just so that when we get to the demo portion, we can move a little  bit quicker and be a little bit smoother. So we don't have to explain every little step. This is the import screen. This is how you would bring a  document into the Equidox software. Um, you've imported the document,  when you get into the PDF, the first thing that I always like to mention are  looking at the zones that we'll see on the page. And these reading zones really are just tags. So these yellow rectangles here and I like to talk about the slider, so we'll, have  the slider technology that you can move around to read, detect the page if you  don't like the initial starting point. Um, always wanna set headings, of course. So that's usually my first step on a page is using the keyboard shortcuts, which I'll cover  when we get into the demo, and setting up that heading structure to make sure that the user  would have the ability to navigate the PDF. Um, alternative text, so making sure that  the images are described and that they are not going to be just left with a blank  description, which would mean that your document is automatically deemed inaccessible,  tagging unique elements like lists and tables, of course, and we'll touch on that as well. We have links to cover which Equidox picks up automatically when we import the document. And we can artifact elements that we feel are non important or just, uh, just adding extra  clutter to a page because they're there for decorative reasons to design the document  and make it look aesthetically very nice. Then reading order. So reading order is always something that I kind up my process with because again, I feel  it's the most important part of PDF accessibility, making sure that every page what, of what the  layout is, going to present the information in an order that makes sense so that you're not  jumping around from the far right corner to the lower left corner and then back to the middle  of the page and then up to the left corner. It's always something to double-check and  validate: you are looking at any given PDF, and then validating your work  with the HTML preview, which I will touch on when we get into the demo. But this is how you can kind to make sure that a screen reader user is going to have an  equivalent experience and have the information presented to them in an accurate way. And we'll talk about this in the demo, of course. The final step would be to export the PDF. So when you're done remediating it, we will get to the export tab of the application  and I'll show you how to generate a new PDF. That PDF will come out of Equidox looking  exactly the same as the original,, it will have the tag structure that you created  using your step-by-step process inside of Equidox. And so with that said, we're  gonna jump into the demo now. Um, so the demo, if I just back out of the slide  deck here briefly, this is our Equidox interface. So here we have a browser that's open. I'm just operating from my browser. The nice thing about being web-based is that  you don't have to install or update or maintain software on a bunch of different computers  when you have different licenses of Equidox. So you can really be working from anywhere  as long as you have an internet connection. Another advantage to Equidox is that we  work with a concurrent user licensing model. So what that means is, uh, you have,  let's say, 10, concurrent licenses, that would mean any 10 people can log into the  software at any given time and work on PDFs. Most people are not full-time PDF remediators. They don't necessarily have to have  round-the-clock access to a software like Equedox. So with the concurrent licensing model, you  can buy a smaller set of licenses that can be shared with a much larger group of users. So if you have 10 concurrent licenses, maybe you have 30 or 50 or 100  people that have access to those ten. It's just no more than 10 at a time can  be actively logged in and working on PDFs. You also can work together on documents,  which is a huge part of collaborating. Um, accessibility is, kind of  notorious for like very lonely task. You might have a 300 page PDF and it has to be  posted by like tomorrow and you just have to work on it by yourself cause you're sitting there  on your computer with your Adobe Acrobat license. You can't just start breaking documents  up and sending pages all over the place and having different people contribute to it. Um, just have to work through it all by yourself. And so it's a very daunting task to get  through that many pages on your own. But if you have a 300-page document and you pop  it into Equidox, maybe your six best remediators just work together and they all take 50 pages. And instead of one person having to panic and clear their calendar and rush through  the document all by themselves, you might have five or six users working together  and they can work out at any more normal pace and have more attention to detail, and they can meet  that deadline and get that document out the door and posted on time in an accurate way as well. Okay, what I'm gonna do to get started here is I'm gonna go to the Import Document tab. So you might remember this from the slide deck. If I then just open up my folders on my hard  drive, I can do a drag and drop of a document or multiple documents into this rectangular  area, and I'll press the import button. When I press Import, Equidox is gonna start  automatically detecting the content in this PDF. So the first thing I wanna point out is that  this document that I'm currently importing is completely untagged. So if you use Adobe Acrobat, this might look a little bit familiar to you,  but the Accessibility Tags panel is blank. We have no tags whatsoever. If you were to run an accessibility checker on a document like this, you'll see that all of these  red X's pop up and it's not very nice to look at. So we have a lot of work to do. Everything is failing because we have no tags to check. Therefore everything is wrong. During the import, Equidox at the very least will  recognize the text, the images, the hyperlinks, fillable form field if there are any. So that as a remediator we don't have quite as much manual work to do. We can use Equidox as a starting point. That I'm inside of the document detail page,  I have the ability, of course, click on the thumbnail for the one page in this document. I can also modify the document properties down here. It's always worth taking a moment to make sure that you are fixing the document titles. This document here did not have a title. So by default Equidox will take the file name  and plug it into the title field for you. This would be a terrible document title  though, because maybe I'm the only person that really understands what this strange naming  convention means, because I'm the one that created it and it's saved on my hard drive. But someone that's just surfing around on a website, acronyms and abbreviations and  random numbers and letters smooshed together, it's all gonna just sound very silly,  especially through a screen reader. So you just wanna make sure that you give a  nice universally understandable document title. Um, gonna jump into the, page now we'll  talk about the actual remediation. When I'm in the remediation page,  here are those yellow rectangles that we mentioned from the slide deck. These yellow rectangles, as I said, these are called reading zones, and reading  zones are effectively the same thing as tags. These will create the tag structure when we  get to the point of importing the documents. If you don't like the way that your zones are  initially set up by Equidox, you can move this slider and it will read detect the page for you. So really you just wanna use this until you find, kind proper granularity where you have more or  less the correct number of zones on the page. And then you can make your more precise  adjustments from that point forward. So let's just start with this as  a kind of initial starting point. This seems to be pretty reasonable. I have work to do with the table, but I will get to that in just a minute. The other important part of Equidox was that  HTML preview where you're validating your work. That was this button right here. It looks, kind of like a computer monitor. When you are working on a page, you get  this preview of the document in HTML. And the point of this HTML is to really  just show you like, will a screen reader read out loud if you were to stop working  and export the document in this current form. So if you just gave up on this document and said,  good enough, well, yes, everything on the page is gonna be tagged and you might even fly under the  radar of certain accessibility checkers that are completely automated and don't understand context. But if you just look at this HTML preview, imagine a screen reader just reading  all of this at you and just becoming like a runaway train of information. By the time you get down here into this table, you would have no idea what you were hearing. This is not how this information should be presented to someone that's  blind and using a screen reader. So we definitely wanna make sure that we're  addressing some of the details on this page. The first detail I always  address is heading structure uh, to set when you're using your keyboard shortcuts. So just to get a sense of like fast this can go, my heading structure on this  page, I have five headings. So there's five different headings here to  separate these different sections of information. They are covering three separate heading levels. So I'm just gonna use the number on my keypad. So this is heading level 1, these are heading  level twos and these are heading level threes. So I just make five keystrokes and when I  go back to my preview, you'll see the change where you get this big bold fonts to define  where those headings have now been identified. The other, very obvious problem  with this page is the list. So as I mentioned during the slide  deck lists are really just a pain. They are a special type of element that  has a specific way of being tagged. And it really has to be tagged accurately  cause if it's just not going to work the right way for a screen reader user. This is a good example of that. As a sighted user, it's very easy  to see the different styles of bullet points and see how they're indented. And your eyes can just kind you can figure out exactly what all of this information is saying. But to a machine like a screen reader, it is just going to read that as a  big, long, weird run-on sentence. So all of that visual layout that the  bullet points in the indentations give us is lost on a screen reader user. So this needs to be tagged as a list. Right now it's just being set up as a  big kind of text, which is not correct. List remediation is very easy. All I do is hit L on my keyboard and I nudge my list detection slider from left to right. The artificial intelligence we have trained to do a very specific thing, which  is to figure out list structure. And so I pretty much within a couple of seconds  figures out that this list has two distinct list items and there's other layers to that list  that it automatically establishes for us. So when I return to my HTML preview  after making that quick adjustment, instead of having a strange run-on  sentence, I have a true nested list that is identical to the one from the PDF. And that's really what you're looking for. Other, uh, important element on this  page, in my opinion, is the table because right now this table, much like  the list, you can kind of glance at it. You see accounting way over  here is lined up with 50, 000. Way over here and that's lined up with  Q4, and Q4 is lined up with this 2027. So it's easy to just solve this puzzle visually  because it's just laid out in a way that makes sense to a sighted user to interpret. But to a machine like a screen reader, this is just a bunch of clumps of  text and it is just gonna read it in kind of a completely randomized way. And so you end up with just a bunch of gibberish, a bunch of random numbers  and data cells being read as text. And this is impossible to interpret  with any level of accuracy. So what we do with Equidox is we just ignore  all of those crazy zones that we have. Just gonna put a zone right on top of all of it. I'll hit T on my keyboard for table and I'll double-click on the zone and it  will take me into the table editor. When I'm in the table editor,  the artificial intelligence has already found all of the rows and columns for me. You can make adjustments to them if you need to, but in general, the AI is very good  at picking up on table structure. And if we look at our preview after  just doing the bare minimum, which is open the table editor, you can see that  this is a pretty dramatic improvement. We actually have something that resembles a table. We have two things though, that we need to fix. The very top row. We have to span these cells to kind the years, to straddle the  corresponding columns that they relate to. So to span, all you do is hold SHIFT on  your keyboard while you select the cells and then press S; S is the shortcut for  spanning and that will consolidate those cells. So now 2026 can act as a column header for  the four columns that it correlates with. The other thing here is we wanna make  sure that we set up our individual quarters as table headers as well. So the bold fonts on the left-hand column in the top row, that is an indication of  cells that will be tagged as headers versus the standard font is an indication of table data. Equidox by default assumes a 1-to-1 ratio. So one level of column headers,  one level of row headers. We can change our column headers from 1 to  2, and then when we refresh the preview, we will see that we now have bold font  for that second row to indicate that those cells will also be tagged as headers. And if a user is in this particular cell, they know that they are in the sales row, they  know that they are within the scope of 2027 and more specifically Q3 of 2027. So all of those associations of headers versus table data is all  created when you export the document. All gonna be set up to work with a screen  reader now instead of whatever we had before, which was just a bunch of chaos as you can see. So when I close out of the table and I return to the PDF, I'm left with just  one nice clean table zone. And if you refresh your preview, everything  will look pretty normal here by comparison. So everything looks a lot  cleaner than when we started. One thing I noticed though is my reading order. Take note that the footer has jumped in front of the table because I just decided to  add this table zone after the fact. So all I'm gonna do is hit the reorder  button up at the top and that is going to reshuffle my reading order to make  sure that my table comes directly after the heading that is corresponding with. And the footer is the last thing on the page. That photo, of course, contains  a link which goes to our website. And that is a functional link as you can see. We don't really have to do anything to it. If you wanted to give it a description you  could, but it's pretty obvious within the context of this document that Equidox.co.  is going to take you to the Equidox website. So a description might be a little bit redundant  within the context of this specific PDF. We also have two images. So the images, these are pretty simple images, of course. So all I'm really gonna do here is type in Equidox logo and when I do that,  that description will then be applied to that image on the export of the document. This is an image of another logo, but it happens to have a dog in the picture. I would consider this to be really just a decoration. This document has nothing to do with dogs. This is really just there to  take up space on the page. So to artifact it, all I have to  do is hit BACKSPACE on my keyboard. And when I look at my preview,  everything here looks to be pretty much how I would expect this document to be read. I have headings, I have paragraphs, I have a list, I have a table, I have a photo with a link. I'm pretty happy with that. So I will save the document, of  course, and I'll close out of it. And when I do, I will then return to the  document detail page where I will press export. The default setting is PDF and all  I have to do is hit generate PDF. This will then produce a  brand new document for me. This document will then open up in my browser. This PDF is identical to  the version we started with. Nothing is like changed. There's no new fonts. There's nothing that is like about  this document to the naked eye. But if you were to open it up in the Adobe panel  here and look at the accessibility tags, we can see that now we have a fully tagged PDF document. If you wanna look through the tag structure, you certainly can, but it's really just a  representation of what we saw in the, uh, preview. We have our logo with our description, we  have our heading level 1, our heading level 2, our paragraph level 2, paragraph heading level 3. Here's our list. Our list has all of the appropriate labels  and list bodies and goes on and on and on. It's extremely dense tag tree to build manually,  so it takes forever and ever to get through it. We, of course have our heading level 3, we  have our table, our table is tagged correctly. The, footer is just a paragraph,  and that paragraph contains a link, so we can see the objr in the link text. So everything in this document is ready to just work right out of the box. If you even wanna run the accessibility checker, everything is passing. The only two things that would remain are, kind always present with every document, so  you have the reminder for logical reading order, that is just a reminder, it's not a failure of  any kind, and also color contrast is something that really needs to be checked manually. That is just something that Acrobat doesn't check for and it really needs to be kind that  you think about at the design phase of the PDF. So that is a crash course  through an Equidox demonstration. I know it's a little bit fast and furious. Of course, you just using our own like documents if you will. But, if you ever wanna like in the future, we do have, ability to like with our sales team  and you can set up your own personalized demo and happy to go through these similar types of  workflows and discussions with your documents in the slide deck, which we will be  sharing out within the next day or so after the webinar to everyone that's registered. Here are some additional resources, different  links to relevant information that you might like to peruse on your own time. Then this is just a contact page. So if you would like to get in touch with us,  we can be reached at EquidoxSales@Equidox.co. We have our phone number right  here, our website as well, and please follow us on our different social  media platforms, so we always appreciate follows. So if you wanna follow along with some of  the updates, we're on LinkedIn, we're on X, we are on YouTube and Facebook. So thank you everyone for joining. I realize we're a minute or so over, so  I wanna be respectful of everyone's time. Thank you for joining today, and please  reach out if you have any further questions or would like to set up a more personalized  discussion around your organization's needs. 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.