Software Overview

Okay I'm showing two o'clock on my phone so I  think it's a good time to get started welcome   everyone thank you all for joining us today for  another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays   it's been a while since we've done just a  standard demonstration of how our software   works so this month we've chosen just to give  any existing users a refresher demonstration   on how the product works or if you are a new  user which if you are welcome this is going   to be just a quick overview about how you can  use Equidox to remediate your PDF documents   so as always you can visit  our website at www.Equidox.co so if you have any follow-up questions or if  you'd like to set up maybe a more one-on-one   topic-specific demo and talk about documents that  might be more relevant to your organization we   would love to chat with you so please feel  free to reach out to us after this webinar at this time I'm going to jump into an actual  demonstration of how the product works so here   I am in my Equidox application if you notice I'm  actually operating directly through a browser the   advantage of Equidox being operated through  a browser is that you don't have to install   or update or maintain software on any given  machine which is really handy to deploy Equidox   to a much larger group of users so we work with a  concurrent user licensing model and what I mean by   that is let's just say your organization were to  purchase 20 concurrent licenses of Equidox that   means 20 different users could be logged in  simultaneously and working on their documents   so we don't necessarily put a cap on how many  people can have access to the tool it's just   about how many are using it at any given time  being that it's web-based there's also a lot   of nice collaboration features built in we're  able to share documents through the application   so if you needed to work with a subject matter  expert on maybe a very technical document or if   they're if you're a new user and you have a very  advanced document you'd like to ask for help with   you can do all of that through the application  you can even have multiple people working on the   same document simultaneously so for a situation  where you have maybe a very long document or a   document with a very tight deadline that you  need to get remediated and posted right away   you could have your best remediators kind of  sharing that workload working simultaneously   from their own individual computers they don't  have to be in the same room nothing like that   they can be totally isolated working on different  pages in that document so that you can kind of   power through those those large volume projects or  those projects with tight deadlines very quickly   now what we're looking at here is just a list  of documents that I've loaded into the tool for   just various demos and trainings that I do so  these documents are are in my Equidox account   and they're ready to be worked on at any time  to show you how to get documents into Equidox   I would first click over here on the import button  so that's the second tab on the left hand side and   that will bring me to this import screen where  I have two options I can either upload documents   directly from my hard drive or I can copy and  paste URLs so this is particularly helpful if   you've done like a website audit you might have a  spreadsheet or a .csv file that contains a bunch   of different URLs for PDFs that are scattered all  over your website so instead of having to go and   download those individual PDFs which could be a  full day project in itself you can actually just   copy and paste the URLs into this field and then  Equidox can go and automatically retrieve those   documents for you through their URL in this case  I've got plenty of PDFs on my hard drive so I'm   going to use the upload tab so if I just open up  my folders I've already selected a few documents   so I'll just drag and drop these four documents  into this gray area and then you'll quickly see   these green check marks indicating that the  documents have been uploaded now once they're   uploaded I get this blue import button that will  appear and pressing this blue import button will   kick off an automated process where Equidox  will begin to evaluate these files and what   it's looking for during this import are things  like existing tag structure so if the document   were previously tagged whether that be coming from  the source file like microsoft word or indesign   when you hit save as PDF there are typically some  PDF tags that are automatically generated however   those are not by any means guaranteed to make  the document accessible and that's really what   a tool like Equidox is for to retroactively look  at those PDF tags and just clean them up make sure   that they are accurate and make sure that that  document is going to be compatible with assistive   technology so you can't always rely on existing  tag structure now the alternative is that maybe   those documents weren't previously tagged in any  way and that's fine as well because what Equidox   does during the import is it will automatically  detect various elements of that PDF and it will   give you a head start on that remediation process  so Equidox will find all of the text elements so   different paragraphs in the in the document  it will find images it will find hyperlinks   fillable form fields pages that require optical  character recognition just different elements that   make up the PDF document are going to be detected  during that import and really it's all aimed at   making your process as you go through a little bit  smoother so that you're not having to do as much   manual manipulation of the individual pages okay  so now those four documents are imported while I   was talking there if I return to the main document  list let me close out of this closed captioning I don't know why my internet is slow there we  go so when I return to the main document list   I will see that I now have these four new  documents here ready to be worked on at any   time I'm actually going to get started with this  document here it's a pretty straightforward simple   document and it was actually previously tagged  it's most likely just a Microsoft Word document   which is very common so it was actually created  in Microsoft Word for Office 365. I can see that   right here on the document detail page one thing  I like to mention on this document detail page is   that you have the ability to change the document  title that's an important part of accessibility   so for example this document if you notice the  file name actually took over the document title   so there was no document title provided you can  update this right here in this title field so   you would certainly want to like make sure that  you're inserting spaces between these words and   then you don't need things like the dot PDF  suffix so a nice clean and consistent clear   document title is really important because  that's typically the first touch point that   a user will have when they are navigating  your site and looking for a specific document   you can also set language attributes at this point  so if you have any documents that are presented in   different languages the primary one being English  that's the default setting of Equidox but let's   say you have a Spanish version of this document  you would just change the language attribute to   Spanish to trigger the screen reader to read  from a Spanish library of words therefore it   won't be an English screen reader mispronouncing a  bunch of Spanish words which will sound very silly   to the native Spanish speaker who is listening to  that document through their screen reading device   you can also share this document with other  users so that's important if you wanted to   ask for help on that document you can share  it with other users in your account so if you   need help with anything you can obviously  collaborate and work together as a team   now I'm going to jump in here into page one and  take a look at what we have so we remember that   this document was previously tagged coming out  of Microsoft Word and if you notice right away   what I'm looking at are these yellow boxes that  are covering up the content on the page this   is all great we've got all of our different  paragraphs recognized for us that's handy but   one thing I notice if I zoom in a bit is I can  see that my heading level one is way down here   so for whatever reason whoever was publishing  this document perhaps they were using heading   styles this got set as the heading level one  for the document for some reason whereas I   would think that the heading level one should  probably be up here at the very top of the page   so these yellow boxes that we're looking at think  of these as a replacement to tags they really do   equate to tags we call them reading zones but all  of these with labeled with the “TX” in the upper   left hand corner of the zone those are going to  equate to P tags when we export the document and   then the number in the right hand corner of the  zone that's indicating the reading order of the   page so the default assumption for the reading  order is that it's left to right top to bottom   which will work fairly well for this document  because it's pretty much a standard just top to   bottom reading order for every one of these  pages so we don't have much to change there   now I'm not too satisfied with this heading level  one being way down here I could change this and   turn this back into like a a Text Zone or maybe a  heading level two and then set this as my heading   level one but before I go any further I want to  show you a really important tool of within Equidox   that kind of helps automate things if I go to the  page tab over here on the left hand side we have   this tool called the Zone Detector now the Zone  Detector is handy if you don't like the initial   tag structure that you've been given or if you  don't like the way that Equidox detected the the   structure and the layout of the page initially so  if you don't like the structure you can use this   tool and you can slide this back and forth left  and right and you'll notice how the granularity   of these reading zones starts to change so this  is a way of helping to automate the process where   if you don't like what you've been given to start  you can kind of change it to find that sweet spot   for the page and then you don't have to make as  many manual adjustments to the individual zones   so just taking a quick look here you can see that  I still have all those paragraphs nicely detected   and if I come up here to my preview button if I  look up here this button in the right hand corner   it looks like a computer monitor if I press this  at any time this is another really helpful tool   within Equidox this is an HTML preview of the  page that I'm currently working on so I'm able   to see the structure that I've built in this very  simple linear HTML view and this is essentially   just a reflection of what a screen reader is going  to read out loud if I were to export this document   right now so as I make changes to my PDF page I  will see those changes come to life over here in   my HTML preview now what I mean by that is let's  say I bring the Zone Detector like way down to the   left and I get like individual paragraphs for each  one of these lines of text this is obviously far   too granular and when I go to the preview you're  going to see like the change that it's instantly   made obviously that's not correct we don't want  each of these lines of text to be read as its own   individual paragraph at the same time if I bring  the detection slider all the way to the right   this is a big giant paragraph over the entire page  and that is going to render as this very clearly   incorrect giant paragraph where I need a I need a  much more granular breakdown of these paragraphs   so I'm going to go back to something like I had  before something along this along these lines in   this in this neighborhood of the Zone Detector and  that's going to give me nice detection and from   here it's just a matter of setting a couple of  headings so I'm gonna set this element here as my   heading level one now it's a Text Zone by default  but I could change it to a heading through the   drop down menu or I can use my keyboard shortcuts  so if I just tap “1” on my keyboard that will set   it to an H1 and when I look at the HTML preview  I'll see much larger font to indicate that I   have in fact set that as a heading level one now  down here I might elect to set this as a heading   level two so this is almost like an outline across  this page it's these are subsections of this much   larger heading level one but if I wanted to set  this as a heading level two I can simply tap “2”   on my keyboard and I will see that I have larger  font here representing the heading level two   so the rest of this page is pretty much  clean I don't really need to do anything   else to it so I can then move on to  the subsequent pages in the document   so again this is another heading level one so I  could just quickly change this to a heading level   two and the rest of this page looks pretty  good if you notice there's a link inside of   this paragraph but Equidox detects that link  automatically so I don't have to worry about   it the anchor point is already provided the  zone is already there waiting for me and all   of my Text Zones have already been detected so  when you get into documents like this you can   move very quickly through them if you know what  you're trying to accomplish it's just a matter   of maybe bumping the detection slider setting  a heading level two and then here we can use   break lines to identify these sort of different  addresses and contact information and that will   render slightly differently in the HTML preview  where you'll see it'll be more reflective of how   it looks in the PDF but essentially it will  put a small pause at the end of each one of   these lines of text to read it a little bit  more smoothly for something like an address   so a document like this once you get into the flow  of using Equidox and you kind of understand what   you're trying to accomplish you can remediate  a document like this literally in seconds   you know 30 seconds to a minute to get through  four pages and then from there I would just save   the document close out of it to return back to  the document detail page and then I would go to   my Output Tab now my Output Tab will allow me to  export this document in multiple formats if I'd   like the primary one being PDF so I can simply  press generate PDF and Equidox will produce a   brand new document for me and it's going to look  and feel exactly the same as the original there's   not going to be anything different about this new  document but it's going to have all of that tag   structure that I've just built so the headings  and the reading order the hyperlinks all of that   is going to be automatically tagged by Equidox  simply by exporting it so this is my new document   it's ready to be sent off wherever it needs to go  posted to the website sent to a client whatever   whatever it needs this is your new PDF that can be  used and replace the old one that might be sitting   on the website that was inaccessible now I'm going  to jump into a different document now that has a   little bit more to it so there's a document that  has well one of the primary challenges of PDF   accessibility is something like tables. tables  can be really quite a burden to deal with so   let's just take a look at like this page here  for example so this page here has some tables   on it and if you've ever done PDF remediation  before you and you've done it probably with Adobe   Acrobat you know that tables are really one of the  hardest elements to tackle there are so many steps   associated with it now this document was again  previously tagged and I already have some table   structure here but let's assume that you don't  have the table structure already maybe you arrive   at the table and it looks something like this very  scary when you've got all these Text Zones for   each individual cell and if you look at the HTML  preview you can see like this is not at all how   a table should be read by a screen reader that's  quite a mess so what I can do to fix this is I can   just simply place a single zone over the entire  table and then hit t on my keyboard t for table   or I could use the drop down menu and then this  blue Table Editor button will appear so when I   pop open the Table Editor I will just be isolating  this portion of the page for myself and you'll see   these green grid lines and this is Equidox's just  initial guess at the basic cell structure of the   table it did an okay job as you can probably tell  but it missed the mark on the columns especially   now we can improve upon this detection using our  Table Detector so this is using a combination of   computer vision and machine learning so as I move  these detection sliders back and forth left and   right you'll see how they the green grid lines  start to change their detection of this table so   moving them around you can just again find like  that ideal sweet spot where you get all of your   cells organized correctly so ins we remember how  ugly this was before when it was just going to   be reading random bits of data in like a left  to right top to bottom way now when I press   the preview button what we're going to have is a  nice clean HTML table and then this will all be   read correctly through a screen reader and allow  that user to navigate the table data so if they   find themselves in this particular cell they know  that they are in the administrative assistant row   and they know that they are in the median lowest  wage column so they can navigate freely through   this table data and always understand where they  are located in terms of the table structure with   the rows and the columns so the beautiful part  of Equidox is that all you're doing to tag this   table is interact with it here like on the surface  level where you place these green grid lines in   the correct locations and then Equidox will show  it to you in this nice clean HTML preview and it   does the hard part when you export the document  it will actually convert this HTML structure   back into a PDF tag tree so you don't have to  understand the many nuances of tagging a PDF table   where a table like this could easily take you an  hour to work through in Equidox it takes I don't   know 10 to 15 seconds and then you would just save  it and close out and if you notice all of those   individual Text Zones that were there before they  have all been replaced by this single Table Zone   now tables can be even more complicated than this  I have another document in here that has quite a   complex table which would literally be like  this document you know would be like a clear   your calendar for the day if you had a document  that was like this or full of tables like this   you have multiple column header levels up here  you have spanning that you need to do and look   at all these data cells there are so many steps  associated with tagging this document correctly   in Acrobat and you think well it's just one page  how bad could it be I'm i'm telling you it could   literally take you many hours to get through a  page like this all we do is hear horror stories of   how long it takes to remediate tables in Acrobat  whenever we're doing product demonstrations or   talking to prospects and clients every single one  of them across the board tells us how difficult   and how time-consuming table remediation is when  you're doing it manually in Acrobat so with this   I'm just going to hit draw zone over the table  hit “T” and open up the Table Editor and even   though this table has quite literally like like  hundreds and hundreds of cells in it again I'm   just using the Table Detector here and it's going  to do all of that hard work for me by giving me   all of these grid these gridlines here which if  you can tell I miss one row at the bottom so I   can quickly just hit “R” for an extra row and  then if I just go to my HTML preview what I'll   see is I've got basic table structure so I'm  pretty close I just have to clean up the top   portion here where I have some spanning to do  so if I go back here I've got a little bit of   a complicated mess up here with the different ways  that the row and column headers are spaced out so   what I'm going to do is I'm going to just get rid  of this row here by hitting “D” on my keyboard,   “D” for delete and then if I just start spanning  all I'm doing is holding SHIFT and pressing “S”   and I'm going to hold SHIFT and press “S” and then  that's going to accomplish those spans for me so   if you notice it turns green to indicate that  you've spanned and then from here I just need   to get rid of this row and span straight down for  these two cells now once I've done that when I go   back to my preview I'll see that I've cleaned  up that top portion but the last thing I need   to address now is the fact that I have three  rows of column headers so the column headers   are represented in that bold font same as the  row headers they are represented with that   bold font to indicate that they will be tagged as  table headers whereas the standard font style is   indicating table data so this table has three rows  of column headers so I would simply just change   that here in my column and row header field so  changing the column header from the defaults one   to three and then when I return to the preview you  will see that now my top three rows all have that   bold font style to indicate table headers whereas  the rest is standard font for table data so that's   how quickly you can tag a very complicated table  like this by comparison if you could do that if   you could do this table in like less than an  hour I would be stunned in Acrobat in Equidox   it doesn't take much to get it to a perfectly  usable accessible version in less than a minute now another tricky element type that I want  to address in in how we kind of address it in   Equidox are things like lists so if I open  up a document that has some lists in it   so let's take a look here at this list so this  list was again previously tagged so Equidox   imports that existing list structure but you  won't always be so lucky you won't always have   existing tag structure so let's say you were to  start with just a Text Zone now if I were to look   at the HTML preview this list is going to be read  sort of just like a strange run-on paragraph if I   were to leave it as is it's not going to have any  list structure to indicate that this is a single   list with three distinct items so what I'll do  is just simply hit “L” on my keyboard and then   I have a List Detector that will appear and if  I bump that slider from left to right that will   instantly detect that there are three list items  in this list and then if I refresh my HTML preview   you'll see the change where now I have a real  list delineated by three individual bullet points   to isolate the three list items so this list is  now tagged and you can move on to other elements   in the document now of course I would want to  clean up some other things on this page but we're   really just looking at this document to talk about  lists I think you can see that just taking a quick   glance here the detection of Equidox it really  gives you that great starting point where I'm   not having to manipulate much on this page maybe  just setting a heading level one and tinkering   around with the reading order slightly I'm going  to jump to page two to show you a nested list so   these nested lists are much more complicated and  this is the type of mess that you can see coming   out of Microsoft Word where it tagged this as a  list but it really made like I don't know what it   was doing whereas it's dragging that entire list  all the way down here so this is an example of   sure the document was previously tagged but  not tagged very well so if we just focus here   on the nested list portion if I just place  again that single zone over this element and   the nested list is much more complicated in  especially when doing it in Acrobat because   you have lists inside of list items so it  really kind of compounds the complexity and   the time that's needed to remediate lists like  this but in Equidox again I just put a single   zone around it hit “L” for list and then move my  detection slider over a bit further when I move   it over and use the different settings it's  going to invoke computer vision and machine   learning so you'll see how it's got the five  main items detected based on the location of   their bullet points but then the computer vision  looks inside of the items and it isolates the fact   that there are other lists in there and it's  already drawn these zones for me so when I go   to my HTML preview what we'll see is I've built  nested list tag structure in just a few seconds   again by comparison this is like maybe a 20 minute  process in Acrobat depending on your skill level   but yeah if you could do it in 20 minutes I'd  be pretty impressed there's just a lot of steps   associated with tagging all of the list labels and  the list items and the list bodies stacking it all   together expanding and collapsing the tag panel  it's very tricky very time consuming very slow   okay so that's lists just to mention a couple  of other features we can instantly reset Reading   Order for a page so if I were to just use this  page for example you're able to change the reading   order for the entire page using the default top to  bottom or two three or four columns depending on   the layout so Equidox can instantly reorder the  page if you don't like the reading order or if   you've made adjustments to the page and inserted  new zones that have taken on a new a new slot   within the reading order you can quickly reset  that reading order for the entire page you can   also click on an individual zone and change the  order of it and you can actually use the decimal   system so if you want to set this zone for example  to the first zone right on the page you might   think well if I change that to one then I have  to change one to two and two to three and three   to four and play a game of like musical chairs  with all of the zones on the page but in fact   you can actually just put a period in front of  the four to make it point for and that will have   that element read first whereas everything else  will fall in line behind it so you have multiple   ways of adjusting reading order in Equidox it's  actually really really helpful and then also   if I jump to a document that has some images in  it I also want to mention the fact that we do give   you a consolidated list of all the images in the  document in one location so this is really handy   because you're able to see how many images there  are the nature of the images are they decorative   things like logos or watermarks or are they  something technical that's actually adding   value to the document so if you know what the  images represent you can instantly apply your   alt text to them from this single list view or if  you need a subject matter expert you can send them   this URL and say hey can you just go to the Images  Tab and insert alt text for the images they might   not be a remediator per se but they can certainly  use the Images Tab to describe the images because   assuming they were the ones that published or  designed the document you can also do things   like artifact images so if you want to artifact  all of the images with just a couple of clicks   you can I would not recommend that for a document  like this but I see so many documents where it's   just a 100 page long report and every page has the  same logo in the upper left hand corner you don't   need to tag the same logo 100 times with the same  description that's very redundant so you have the   ability to artifact images with just a couple  of clicks from this list view and now you can   also go into documents and you're able to click  on images and maybe you need to read a paragraph   to understand the context of this image but you  can actually apply your alt description right   here from this from the document detail view as  well another quick thing we have one minute left   I noticed is setting heading templates so let's  say you wanted to set this as your heading level   two if you hit two on your keyboard and say use  as template when I go to subsequent pages what   Equidox will do is it will find all zones that  have the same font characteristics and it will   automatically set that as your heading level  two style for that document it's really really   helpful for sort of templatized documents that  are consistently designed throughout because you   might have three 400 pages in a document and if  you can set all of your heading level twos all   of your heading level threes if you can do all of  that ahead of time then you don't have to think   as much as you're going through page by page so  these are just a couple of the automated features   within Equidox there's so much more to talk about  I just want to be respectful of everyone's time 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