Top 8 User Support FAQs

Learn how to contact Support, how to work with forms, OCR and TOC, and how to resolve Form XObjects and text spacing issues.

Video transcript

[Dan Tuleta] all right so I have I'm showing two o'clock on my phone so I think it's a good time to get started so welcome everyone to another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays so this month we are going to be talking about some of the FAQs so we're going to be answering your top eight most commonly asked user support questions I'm actually joined this month by a couple of my colleagues which I'll introduce in just a second but before I go any further I just want to make sure that everyone's aware that if you have any questions if you are not a client you're just interested here in learning more about Equidox please feel free to reach out to us our website is www.Equidox.co okay so we're going to meet today's team if you've joined us on these webinars before you probably know me my name is Dan Tuleta I'm a sales engineer here with Equidox but today I am joined by two of my favorite colleagues Zach Easterling who is our quality assurance lead and Anah Johnson who is our customer support analyst so they're going to be actually going through the bulk of the webinar today so I'm getting the month off but I'm going to hand it over right now to I believe is it anna you're up first [Anah] I am okay great so take it away all right well I just want to thank everyone for joining us today my name is Suzanah but I also go by Anah Johnson and I do enjoy being a customer support analyst here at Equidox I'm here to talk to you about a few frequently asked application questions so without further ado I'll go ahead and get started with the first one which is going to be password reset so this is one of the more frequently asked questions that we have sometimes people don't receive the email or they're not able to get past the screen so what we advise on these is that you make sure that you've entered your email address correctly sometimes you could get in a rush and maybe miss a letter and so obviously you're not going to get a password reset link if you don't have your email address correct the next thing is you do actually have to check the recaptcha box to to tell Equidox you are not a robot and then you do need to reset your password or you do need to click the reset password button but one of the biggest things that we get with this is you know people say I verified that I entered my email address I've clicked the recaptcha I've clicked the reset button but I still don't have it in my inbox and it's at that point that we usually recommend people to check their junk and spam folders because if you don't have Equidox added to your address book that's exactly where your email will send it is to your junk or spam folders so just make sure to check those if you don't have your link the next issue that we're going to talk about is using the help option within Equidox so if you've worked in Equidox you see the little blue HELP button in there once you click that you'll see the screen that you or this the screen that you have here this is broken into two but it is all one so you definitely want to enter your name your first name is absolutely fine you want to enter the email that is associated with your Equidox account this is really important because it helps us just associate things better from a client aspect priority is not necessary unless you are submitting multiple requests then you'll want to set the priority because that lets us know which one you want us to work on first the subject just a brief summary of the issue or question is necessary and then in description I'm gonna go ahead and say that the first and most important thing that we would like to see in the description area is the document url link a lot of the issues always have to pertain to a document and usually a specific page within a document so it's very helpful to have the document url you can copy it right out of right from your browser and put it right in there the next thing that we would want is your page number if that is applicable and then a clear description of the issue and then also if you are receiving an error message or something is appearing weird you can go ahead and click that take screenshot button and that will take a full screenshot and will allow us to see what's going on we don't usually use the upload files button so we'll go ahead and go on to the next slide This is one of the more commonly asked questions is how do can I remove zones without having to remove each one individually and so in order to do that once you go into a document you will already be on the Page Tab which you'll see on the left side of this screen here and so what you'll want to do is go over to your sensitivity slider and just push it, slide it all the way down to zero and when you do that on the next slide once you see push that down to zero you'll see that everything has been removed now if you happen to have an image that was imported with the document you will not you will continue to see that image zone images are the only thing that the sensitivity zero will not remove so that was important there and next slide um one of the other things that kind of goes along with this is that sometimes people want to remove certain zones but not all of the zones on the page so in order to do this you're gonna draw a zone around the ones that around the zones that you wish to remove when you do that you're going to change that zone type to a sensitivity and I think we're going to yes so in here we want to remove these so we're going to create a zone around these zones here that we want to remove and then we're going to make it a sensitivity zone type and then we're going to and then that automatically removes just those zones and then you can push that down to zero and then you just remove that zone and then you can continue on to remediate the rest of your document so that's just a quick thing that that you can do just to remove some of the zones on the page and then and then we're gonna talk about the table of contents and creating the table of contents so I think we also have an example of this in the there we go so we've already done the base portion of this which is we've created this zone for the table of content so as you can see within this zone here we are actually missing when it imported it just you know we missed a divider here so you can actually manually add that line that divider line there and then and then you can save from there one of them and then in order to get into the layout as far as associating the page link with that you will double click each line option and then down towards the bottom you'll see the link to page option you'll click that check box and then in the page number you're able to either manually enter or you can use the arrows to get the correct page that you want to associate it's usually easier to do the manual option once you get into the double digits it just alleviates a lot of the clicking so you can mainly do that one of the great features about this is that we have we now have are able to artifact the dots in here so we're going to click the show artifacts check box and then if it doesn't appear initially you can go ahead and create those artifacts by using the artifact positional positioners towards the bottom and so we're going to go ahead and up that and we're going to go ahead and enter the see if we can get these to look okay and so we're gonna lay that artifact box over the dots so everything that this artifact box encompasses is not gonna show in the preview or the output so so yes so what it's designed to do is essentially hide everything that it encompasses so we're just gonna work on getting this a little more perfect and then we're gonna show you the preview of what that looks like so in the Preview you can now see that the dots have been removed and you actually you have the link there it's showing that there is a link to that page and so at this point I've covered the top application support request that we received and I'm going to hand it over to Zach to talk about the top four technical requests that we receive [Zach Easterling] well thanks Anah that was awesome let's see I need to get back to our slideshow here and as we covered the table of contents again artifact positions the four items that I'm going to be covering today are basically going to be working with forms it's going to be covering OCR it'll be covering form XObjects from InDesign and it'll also be covering an issue that we call fix fixes for no spaces so let's start off with forms we've got a picture here of a form that's been imported into Equidox and we can see that this is a basic form it's got some fields on it again it looks like the user the end user of this document should be entering their surname and their first name and some other information about their it looks like a school day so the idea here is to give the screen reader some content about what they're going to be entering and to do that we use a thing called tooltips and those tooltips should contain an action word those action words are things that the user should be doing clicking entering selecting typing so in this particular example we've got this surname field the tooltip that I would probably use in this is enter the applicant's surname if we've got a check box something down here, for example, the option would say something like select this option for yes individual education plan on this second page here we've got some checkboxes and in this case this check box might read check here to indicate reference two references written in English have been completed and a couple of things to remember about forms we want to avoid the use of drawn table zones tables look great on-screen but don't flow as we would like them to in a screen reader so avoid using tables to create a visual formatting form fields simply use your document ordering as well form field should have unique names so if for example you had multiple city fields you would want to name those form those city fields maybe home city and work city or maybe there's an individualized education plan yes and an individualized education plan no and again in this scenario here we might want to say that this form field would be called references completed and this form field might be called references in progress now again most of that information is going to be handled before you import it into Equidox so those will be form fields created within the perhaps auto form field generator in Adobe or in then let's say the native program that the form was created in the next question that we get in in our support stack is when and why does Equidox produce an OCR result OCR stands for optical character recognition and it basically just means that there's an image of text but there isn't selectable text underneath Equidox does a does a good job of ocring text we use a an OCR engine called Tesseract it's kind of been tweaked by our machine learning scientists and what Equidox wants to do is detect text if the if an image excuse me if a full page image exists on the screen you can see in this example that a full page image and this is a in this example we've got an Equidox thumbnail overlay on top of the content page of a PDF and we can see that this content in the PDF is one full page and Equidox has recognized that as something that should be ocr'd why does it do that well because it knows that it's a full page document and that there is no other content within that page as opposed to this one in this particular example oc Equidox won't OCR this at least not automatically you can still force it to OCR by using the OCR zone in the page editor but as an automatic it won't and it won't because the image of text is smaller than full page as well as individualized text content within the PDF content pane so again Equidox does not do an auto OCR with mixed content but you can still force it well I shouldn't say force you can still request it to do OCR on any zone that you said and our next topic is going to be form XObjects and I'm going to spend just a little bit more prevalent now that the newer versions of InDesign support this feature InDesign supports the form XObject mainly to streamline repetitive actions that are within the document so we can think of repetitive actions as logos in a header in the same place in a document or footers that describe the document content and even page numbers can be included in this in these formats contents additionally form X will be used to transform documents from one size to another and even from one type to another so you may see an excel spreadsheet that has been pasted into an InDesign document that may be transformed using the form x object and we're going to go over a live example on that in just a second there are also transforms it up that are performed on images so the form XObjects while it they used to be kind of siloed into only repetitive objects or repetitive things within your document they have adobe has expanded its features in InDesign to place form XObjects around other things so I'm going to switch my screen back to Equidox and we're going to cover I'm going to close my table of contents first but we're going to cover a specific example of a form XObject so in this form XObject example I have two tables here you can see that in Equidox I've zoned on the kind of upper right-hand side table one and I'm zoned on the bottom right-hand side table two and when I go to the upper right-hand corner and click my preview page we can see that this table was laid out fairly well when I go to the Equidox export I'm going to say no here I am faced with an option down at the bottom that says flatten form XObjects the use of this flatten form XObject should should be used when your preview of your of your tags don't line up with the content and let me show an example of what I mean if I were to output this document right now we would see that the tags inside the inside Acrobat don't align with the text that they're assigned to what this does is provides a very bad experience for the end-user it's not going to read this document very it's not going to read completely read this document we'll be getting, for example, noon community center ores outdoor but we won't be getting any of this additional content around the outside this is because and if I click on the left here in the content pane you can see that all of this information is wrapped up into a form XObject what Equidox can do is flatten that information out and we've taken the specific steps that adobe has suggested to us or not us specifically but suggested to the accessibility community to move those pieces of content out of the form XObject and direct an up into the page level and as we can see then if I click on the tabs pane on the left and select one of these two table tags now all of that content is correctly tagged it's highlighted appropriately within the table itself and will be a good user experience this will read properly it will work as exactly as intended it's got all of our table rows and our table headers and our table data so again if you were to export this document and it doesn't read correctly or if you export this and perhaps your accessibility checker has indicated that not all the content is flagged and tagged my best suggestion would be to use the flatten form XObjects especially if you have the ability to take a look in the content tree and see those form XObjects and again while this is a table example it does affect images and repetitive content lastly the last thing that I'd like to discuss is fixing no space documents… no space documents generally occur when when content is width justified so in this example here as I zoom in we can see that this document is width justified across the screen it's not left justified it's not right justified or centered it's it's currently taking up the entire the distance between the left and the right we see this a lot in educational documents in literature and in reports such as this what happens with this document when it's exported is that the content doesn't actually contain spaces these words on the screen are positioned with coordinates and those coordinates say that the word at should be you know at zero and the word the should be at 10 but it doesn't actually contain all of the textual information to help us produce spaces and what the user experience is on that is that all of these words are run together not a very good user experience and it's very hard to understand however Equidox has the ability to kind of to solve that what we can do to solve that is we have a fix for no space checkbox it's on the output screen and let me go back to my document here if I were ready to output this I would select the output tab go to PDF and use this fix for no space documents Equidox is then going to determine where spaces need to be within those words and it's going to actually insert spaces with all of that information into the alt text of the tag, it doesn't change any of the visual content on the page but it does allow for a good user experience because that tag will contain proper reading alt text um so with that information that's the four top technical support requests that we usually handle here on in the the support desk and I will turn it back over to dan to kind of roll us out here [Tammy] before you get going we do have one question in the Q&A since we do a few minutes someone is asking what would that look like in the preview before you output with the no-space fix [Zach] that's an excellent question let's go back into Equidox and we can actually review that I hope everyone can still see my screen yes we can perfect I'm going to shrink this page here and we'll just handle one zone because Equidox has the ability to read the content from… read the individualized content what you're you're going to get is a straight text preview within Equidox itself what it looks like in Acrobat is this you'll see the text selected and even though it appears to be all run together in the tag really what your screen reader is going to provide to the user excuse me I'm looking for properties here is the proper alt text here i hope that answers that question [Tammy] right thanks that seems to be the only question at the moment [Dan Tuleta] yeah so there is just everyone's aware there is a demo embedded in the slide deck so everyone that's registered will be getting a recording of this not only the webinar itself but the slide deck and this slide contains a link to a short Equidox demonstration it's about 10 minutes long so if you or anyone else in your organization might be interested to see the general workflow of how the Equidox software works please feel free to view this video it will be there for you in the slide deck so Zach if you can just jump to the next slide we'll wrap things up 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

Top 8 User Support FAQs

You asked, we answered! Our support team is made up of real people who answer your questions while you’re using Equidox software. We’ve compiled a list of the questions Equidox users ask most often. In this webinar, our support team specialists will review these questions and answers so you can optimize your Equidox experience. These FAQs cover a variety of topics from using automated features to working with form fields and OCR to contacting support.

Join host Dan Tuleta as he leads our discussion with our support team guests, Zachary Easterling and Suzanah Johnson.

 

 

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