Equidox by Onix. Reach Everyone.
Okay, I think we're ready to get started it's just about two o'clock... so welcome everyone to
another episode of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays. For those of you who might not know me my name is Dan
Tuleta. I am a sales engineer here with Equidox and today on this webinar we're going to do an
overview of the software. So we're going to talk a few of the basics about the interface but also get
into what general, you know, sort of day-to-day PDF remediation looks like using Equidox.
As always if you have any questions related to Equidox, what we do here regarding our software
or services... If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at
EquidoxSales@onixnet.com or through our website at Equidox.co. Alright so let's get started!
Okay so welcome everyone to Equidox. This is our PDF remediation tool.
For those of you who've never seen Equidox before, if you're not current users, what Equidox is,
is a PDF remediation software. The first thing I'd like to mention that it is web-based. So there's a
lot of advantages to it being web-based. It allows you to collaborate and work together
with team members. So if you are not the resident PDF accessibility expert in your organization...
if you're stuck on pages... if you have a huge volume of documents...
Being web-based, everything is centralized in one location in this account and you can share
documents and work together, even simultaneously, with other teammates on a specific document.
So it allows you to sort of collaborate and share work and distribute sort of projects around to
different users throughout the account. We do work on a concurrent user model, which is really
helpful, meaning that you don't have to install any software on anyone's computer because this
is just working right in a browser. So you don't have to update or maintain or install software.
It allows for really easy deployment across an organization to get a lot of different people
involved in PDF remediation. Not everyone is going to be remediating documents for 40 hours a week,
so this allows people to log in and log out whenever they might have a handful of documents
or pages that they need to work on. Okay, so what we're looking at right now is the very is the home
page of Equidox. So this is something similar to what you'll see when you log in. This is my own
personal account that I have here, so your view of this would probably be blank when you get started.
So this is just a list of documents that can be remediated at any given time.
They're saved in here for you to begin working whenever you'd like.
The way that we get documents into Equidox is we have to import them. So on the left-hand side we
have some different tabs that you can use and the second tab down is for importing. So if I
navigate to this tab right here, what I can do is I can open up the folders on my hard drive,
and I'm able to just grab some documents, whatever I would like, to bring into into Equidox. I'm able
to select PDFs off of my hard drive, and I can just do a quick drag and drop into this gray area.
So you can do a multi-select you can bring in really as many documents as you like within
reason. So if you have 10 PDFs that you want to work on, you can select all 10 and drag
them into this gray box. Once you've done that you'll get a green checkmark indicating that
the document has been uploaded. So now it's in a format that's ready for Equidox to import,
and then this blue import button will then appear. So when I press this import button,
Equidox is going to start looking at that source file. If there is no existing tag structure with
this PDF, what Equidox will do is it will start automatically detecting data and elements within
the document to give you a head start on your remediation process, so that you're not
having to make as many manual adjustments and manual manipulations to the document.
So if there is existing tag structure, which may be the case in some instances. That tag structure
is not necessarily correct or accurate nor does it mean that the document is accessible. So what
Equidox will do is it will import that existing tag structure automatically, and it gives you
the choice to either use Equidox to start from scratch to rebuild the tag structure completely,
or if you'd like to just build off on top of that existing tag structure, you also have that option.
Another thing I'll mention is the ability to import from URLs. So this is really handy if
you've done a website audit or if you've just gathered a bunch of PDF documents that might
already be posted to your website. If those are in a spreadsheet or a CSV file, you don't have to
download you know hundreds of PDF documents to your hard drive you can just copy and
paste those URLs into this window here, and then the import process is exactly the same.
Equidox will automatically go and retrieve those from the web wherever they're located.
Okay so I imported basically the same document twice, I did it just before the webinar started,
but I do have two notifications over here... just letting you know the documents are in the system
and ready to be worked on. So if you're doing a bulk import, you don't have to be stuck on
this import page... You can be in other areas of the application working on documents. One other
thing I'll mention about the interface before jumping into remediation is our Help tab. So this
is really helpful for new users. So we know that PDF remediation is not something that is natural
and intuitive for every single person. This is a new concept for most people. It's becoming
more and more of a requirement these days. So we know that training and support are very helpful
for these people, getting over the learning curve. So we do offer an end-user guide which
opens up in a separate tab. And it's a Drupal website, and there's a ton of resources in here,
including training videos, as well. That will basically walk you through
the application and help you get started... help you get over that learning curve...
answer the majority of those, you know, how to type of questions for you. We also have the
ability to submit a support ticket from within the application. So we have a dedicated support
staff that is standing by ready to assist you if you do run into any trouble using equidox.
So training and support are very important to us, and we are here to help. Okay, so here's the
document that I just imported a couple of minutes ago. Let's select this document and jump in.
So when I select the document, I'm presented with the document detail page.
From the document detail page I have the option to share it. So if I wanted to share this document
with other users in the account, I would certainly be able to do that, So if you're asking for help,
or if you need someone to collaborate with on this document, it's really simple to share this
file with others. Maybe you're not the subject matter expert... maybe it's a little bit too
technical for your experience... but you're certainly able to share it with other users
in the document detail page. We have a few separate tabs down here that we can work from:
the Properties Tab is not overly exciting, but it just gives you some basic feedback about the
document. So the title of the document, for example... you can set the default language
for the document so you can you know.... setting the language attribute will call
up the correct language pack from the screen reader. So that if you have a Spanish document
you don't have an English screen reader mispronouncing every Spanish word, for example.
Then some simple metadata about the document can appear if there is metadata available from
that source file. One important tab here on the Document Detail Page that I want to make sure
I mention is the Images Tab. So the Images Tab... what this does is it gives you a consolidated list
of all of the images in the document in one location.
So this is very helpful, because tagging images with descriptions is one of those unavoidable
parts of PDF remediation. We need to make sure that we're giving alternate text to these images
so that they have a relevant description to describe how they fit within the document.
So the Images Tab consolidates all of the images, even if it's scattered across hundreds of pages,
into one list for you. So that if you're familiar with the content, you're able to go through and
start providing descriptions for these images in one location. It's also a great way of making
sure that you haven't skipped over any images or forgotten to tag anything, because you get this
big red warning reminding you that you don't have any alt text applied to that image. Now
in this case since I have this consolidated list of images, I can very easily see that these are
the same logo repeating time and time again. So across all five pages, I have the same exact logo.
This is an example of when images can become redundant and not very helpful to end-users.
So we don't need to provide the exact same alt text five different times to the exact same logo.
That I think end users will have, like have, the understanding that this is a document created by
Equidox. So we don't need to keep reminding them that their logo is present in the corner of every
page. So in this instance what I would do or what I would recommend- it's- it's up to you if you'd
like to tag all of these images you could, but what i would recommend is you can hit Hide All
Zones, and then unselect the visible checkbox. And what this does is it artifacts the images,
so it removes your responsibility of providing alt text for them. So I'm able to handle all that very
quickly just by hitting a couple of checkboxes and all of those images are automatically going
to be artifacted for me. And now I don't have to spend time typing out alt descriptions.
Now perhaps best practices will call for me to provide an alt text for it on the very first page,
or the first instance of that logo, so what I can do is I can type in my alt text here for my
first occurrence of that image on page one, so I'll just type in "Equidox
logo." And I will make sure to save my image properties so that that will carry
over when I'm looking at the document in the Page Editor. Okay so now I've handled my images. All
my images are done for the document. I'm able to take care of those very quickly,
and now what I'll do is I'll jump into the first page of this document and just take a
look at what we have. All right, so here we are on page one of five, And within this page I can tell
now that there's a little bit of a different look to it. Because I have these yellow boxes
that are scattered across the page, based on where Equidox was automatically detecting the text and
the elements that comprised this PDF. So all I've done so far to this document was import it. There
was no existing tag structure. I haven't done anything to trick this document up, this is simply
text on a page, and Equidox is able to recognize the breakdown of the paragraph structure, and it's
given me all of these text zones to work from so that I'm not having to draw a bunch of zones
manually and identify where my paragraphs are. I can let Equidox do that heavy lifting for me.
One really handy tool within Equidox is this button up here, which looks like a computer
monitor. So this is for previewing the page that you're currently working on. Whenever
I select this preview button this is going to open up a separate tab for me in my browser.
And in this in preview page what I'm seeing is an HTML preview of all of the data that currently
makes up that PDF page. So when I have this HTML preview page open, I'm able to do sort
of a spot check or a validation of my structure on that page that I'm currently working on. So
whenever I make changes to the page that I was working on, I'm going to see those changes be
reflected here in my HTML preview page. So, for example, if I go back to the PDF Page Editor,
this is certainly a Heading level one, because this document didn't have any existing tag
structure... it's up to me as the remediator to make sure that I'm setting this as a heading.
So I'm gonna change this zone type--which is just by default text-- I'm gonna change it to
a heading and I'm gonna make it a Heading level one. And all I'm gonna do is select the zone
and press "1" on my keyboard. And that's gonna change it to a Heading level one. And by doing
that... when I refresh my preview, here I have much larger fonts, indicating that I have,
in fact, set that zone as a heading. So we can see that change come to life very quickly.
And so one other thing I'll show you here on this document, or on this page, rather, is sometimes
I see and I talk to a lot of clients that really struggle with redundant information in headers and
footers. We have a way of automatically handling something like this. So if you have... if you
find that every page has header data that is, you know, redundant... and just gets too much to tag,
too much information, that's repeating itself page after page, one thing we can do... is we
can draw a very small zone... and we can actually tag this as an Ignore zone. So I'm gonna hit "I"
on my keyboard "I" for "Ignore," and what this will do is, it will copy an Ignore zone
to all pages in the document. And I'm able to handle all of the header and footer information
automatically just by creating one Ignore zone. So if I don't want to include my headers, because
this is just not really important information to the document... it's just letting you know
that I created this document... So this is pretty common. I find in PDFs where you have
pretty useless information that's plugging up the headers on every single page. You're able
to artifact all of the all of that header data just by simply creating one Ignore zone. And then
we'll see that be repeated on every single page from here on out. So looking at my preview now,
I'm gonna see that that information that was contained in that text zone has been
now artifacted, and gotten out of the way. I find that that's really helpful for a lot of our users
that struggle with tagging a lot of redundant information in headers and footers. You can wipe
it out for 100 pages in one swoop. Okay, and I did mention the keyboard shortcuts. And in fact,
I used a couple on this page. Keep in mind that we have a menu of keyboard shortcuts in
the upper right-hand corner. It's the little "i" icon--the lowercase "i"-- and this will
give you a menu of keyboard shortcuts that you are free to start using at your leisure. So as
you get more comfortable with the application, you can use these and incorporate them into your
workflow to speed things up... to be a little bit more efficient with your... with your movements.
Otherwise, you're spending a lot of time moving in and using drop down menus, for example, which
can be a little bit um taxing on your mouse hand, for example. So the keyboard shortcuts
are a way of speeding things up and being more efficient. Okay so let's move on to page two.
Now we move on to page two. We can see at the top here, here's our Ignore zone again. So it's
been copied even though I haven't yet visited this page... It's been copied to this page. I do have
a few changes to make to this page, however. So one thing I notice immediately when arriving at
this page is I have different fonts. So I have different line spacing, different font sizes,
different font styles. Not every page is going to be completely uniform. And when I imported this
document, maybe Equidox was thrown off a little bit by the double-spacing, or maybe someone was
using carriage returns where they shouldn't have been. So Equidox has given me a little
bit too-- a few too many text zones. As you can see, if I look at my Preview, as it sits right now
you can tell very quickly that I have all of these extra text zones... all these extra paragraphs,
essentially. Which is not going to be a very good reading experience for end-users. So what I'll do
is I will go to my Page Tab, which we haven't yet visited, over in the left-hand side in the upper
left-hand corner is the Page Tab. And what we have here is this tool that we call the Zone Detector.
If I zoom out a little bit, we'll see here that if I move my Zone Detector back and forth,
what it's doing is it's automatically changing the detection level of Equidox. So it's focusing
in the more I drag it to the left, and if I drag it to the right, it's focusing out. Sort of taking
that 10,000-foot view of the page. So I need to find a balance in here, something that gives me
the best possible starting point. And if I find a sensitivity setting that seems to work best,
where I have the proper paragraph structure, this is sort of my indication to then, you know,
just rely on this setting, and then make any further adjustments that I need. So after just
using the Zone Detector slider just for a few seconds there, if I refresh my preview,
now we have a much better breakdown of all of our paragraphs, which is ...which is super helpful. We
don't have to then go through and manually delete a bunch of zones. We don't have to resize and draw
a bunch of new zones. Equidox is automatically able to detect all of those paragraphs for us
just by moving that detection slider. We can also set that detection slider to all pages,
so if you find after a couple of pages that your same detection level is...
seems to be pretty repetitive on every page, if you want to apply that to all pages, Equidox will
then go forward in the document and on all subsequent pages it will have that detection
setting for you. So that you're not having to move this around on every page. So there's quite a few
features within Equidox that you can use to apply to all pages. That way you won't have to manually
adjust them time and time again. Same thing can be said for Reading Order, which in fact we'll get to
in just a second now. The only other element on this page was this bolded section here... so I
was kind of intending to turn this into a Heading level two. So I made a larger font... I made it
bold just going through an example of, you know, varying text and line spacing. So to set this as a
heading level two, I'm just going to select the zone and I'm going to tap "2" on my keyboard.
And that has quickly changed it to a heading level two just by simply hitting the "2" key. So very
fast, very easy to set your heading structure. Another great feature of Equidox is the ability to
set up a heading template. So if your document is consistently formatted, and consistently designed,
you can set a heading level two and then hit the checkbox for the heading template. And
what Equidox will do is it will look forward in the document, in all zones that have the
same properties, so the same font styles it will automatically set that as a heading
level two for you so that you're not having to handle your headings manually on every page.
That is somewhat reliant on the quality of the source file, of course, because not all documents
have exactly consistent structure and layout throughout the entire document. But if that
is the case, you can certainly use the heading template which will save you a lot of steps.
Okay so let's move on to page three. So here we are on page three, and again a different sort of
layout here. Where we have ...we have a small issue here with our reading order because of
this three-column layout. So this is just another example of something that you might come across
in day to day PDF remediation You're stuck with a different sort of layout than you were... than
you saw on the previous page. So we have three columns here. And really this is about setting the
reading order. So the reading order is indicated on Equidox in the upper right-hand corner of the
zone. There's a little green flag that has a number in it. And so every one of these numbers
is... it corresponds to the reading order of the page. So in this case... this being reading zone
4... this over here is reading zone 5, this is 6, this is 7 this is 8... I think you can understand
the problem... where we're reading across three separate columns here... rather than actually
setting it up uh properly with reading down the left-hand column then moving to the middle
column and then over to the right-hand column. So to very quickly handle this type of issue,
what I can do is I can just go to my Page Tab. I can set the reading order. So I'm here I'm on the
Page Tab where I was using the zone detector before. If I want to change my reading order,
the default is just left-to-right, top-to-bottom, as most pages will be, but here we have definitely
a unique layout where we have this three-column setup. So I can choose three columns for my
reading order and press the reorder button. And after doing that, now I have zone 4
and I have zone 5 down here, up here is 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. So I'm now reading in the left-hand
column then down the middle column and then over to the right-hand column, exactly as it should be
read. So I've fixed the reading order, really by just pressing a couple of buttons. Very simple.
I'm also going to set this as a heading level two as well, just for consistency's sake. And then
when we take a look at the preview we're going to see a nice clean structure here where we have the
proper reading order, we have our heading level 2 set... There is one other little trick here on
this document, or on this page rather, that I wanted to show you, and that's an issue where
sometimes paragraphs are split across columns, or across pages, for example, And if you notice,
down here, this sentence doesn't end with any sort of punctuation. And it's picked up up here in this
next paragraph. This is an instance where we need to merge the two paragraphs together so that it's
not being read as two separate complete sentences. So what I'll do is, if I just select this zone
which is currently zone 6, I'll just hit the Merge checkbox and I believe there's another incident
of it as well on zone 9... so I'll also hit the Merge checkbox there as well. And when I refresh
the preview, we're going to see that we've gotten rid of a couple of those extra small paragraphs.
And now we're back to the exact structure that we need, where we have five distinct paragraphs and
a heading. That's really all we need on this page okay so let's move on to the next page.
And here we are getting into some of the more complicated elements.
So in if you've ever done PDF remediation manually, in manual tagging tools you'll probably
know that things like tables and lists are very tedious and technical, and time-consuming.
So with Equidox we've really solved that with our proprietary table and list editors
which use computer vision and machine learning to understand table structure. So something like this
a table where this might take you a half an hour to fiddle around with in a manual tagging tool...
In Equidox we can handle this table literally in seconds. So just for consistency's sake, I'm going
to set my headings on this page. So I'm going to set a heading level two and a heading level three.
But then down here I have this table and if you notice every cell currently has a text
zone wrapped around it because this document had no existing tag structure. There is no
table structure to for Equidox to look at so it's just assuming that this is a very weird
layout of paragraphs. So if we look at the preview for how this currently looks,
you can see what a disaster this would be for someone using assistive technology to try to
understand that table. It would be virtually impossible. So this table as it sits right now
is not helpful in any way. But with Equidox all we have to do is draw a zone around the entire table.
So I'm just going to click and drag to create one zone over the entire table itself. I'm going to
hit "T" on my keyboard to change the zone type to "table." And then I have a blue button over
here for Table Editor. So when I select the Table Editor I'm now just interacting with the table
itself. So the rest of the page has vanished from view, and I'm just isolating the table.
And if I take a look at this table, there are some grid lines now where Equidox has drawn these green
gridlines that I'm able to move around and adjust if needed. But we also have a Table Detection tool
that is really helpful for instances like this. So if you're not satisfied with the sort of instant
detection that Equidox gave you you can use these detection sliders to move them around and change
the algorithm at which Equidox is picking up the data in this table. And if you find just
the best starting point this will help you a lot so you're not having to create and move a bunch of
gridlines around. You're just letting Equidox's computer vision and machine learning handle that
for you. So just by moving these Detection sliders around a bit, I now have pretty much perfect table
structure. All of my green grid lines are matched up with the cell structure of that source table
pretty much instantaneously. Just a couple of clicks and I'm able to get a very nice clean table
structure. So if I take a look at the preview, we remember how bad it looked before with just
that long string of data which was useless, now we actually have real table structure.
There's a few things that we need to adjust still because this is a slightly more complex table.
For example 2019 and 2020, these two years, they need to span across two separate cells.
So what I can do is I can select this cell here in 2019, and hold down "shift" and then select in the
other cell and I'll press "S" on my keyboard to span across. And I'll repeat that same process for
202. So I'll just hold down "shift" and select in both cells and hit "S" to span across. The
other little curveball here is this second row is actually a second layer of column headers.
So in this table, we have both 2019 and 2020 are our main parent headers, and then we have these
other headers here for budget and expense. So by default Equidox just assumes that your headers
are at a one-to-one ratio meaning one row header and one column header. So that's just the default
setting that it gives you here in these two little windows for one and one. But if I want to change
my column header to include two rows of column headers, I can do that by hitting the "2" or just
the arrow button to make it change from one to two. And by doing that when I refresh my preview,
now I can now see that the span has occurred where I've gotten rid of those extra cells
and I now have bold font where budget and expense were previously. Just that standard
font indicating that they were going to be read as table data. So that's a very simple way to handle
tables in Equidox. And one other thing I want to draw your attention to is the fact that the
table summary has automatically populated. So Equidox is automatically able to write
a table summary for you so that you're not having to write these summaries yourself.
You're not having to stop in the middle of your remediation and type out a bunch of things.
You're also... if you have a lot of users in your organization you're going to get
nice clean and consistent table summaries from everyone regardless of who is remediating them.
Okay, so I'm going to save this table and close out of the Table Editor.
And if you notice when we get back to the main page all of those individual text zones that
were covering up every single one of the cells in the table, they have now disappeared. They've been
overwritten by the Table zone. So now I'm just left with one clean table zone... and everything
else on this page looks great, except for down here, where I do have this list which is currently
not tagged as a list at all. There is one large text zone over the top of the entire list.
So what I can do to change this from a text zone to a list, is I can just hit "L" on my keyboard
for List. And we have a List Detection slider down here as well. So another tool that makes it very
simple to tag a complicated element. If I just move that from left to right, what what that does
is Equidox will then pick up where those list labels are... the bullet points in this case. And
it's automatically going to identify those list items for me. So that list is that single text
zone has quickly been split into six individual list items. And when I refresh the preview,
we are going to see a nice clean list exactly as it should appear. Bow we do have one other issue
here, where we have a reading order problem. And the reason for that is because I created
that zone manually, so it went to the very end of the reading order. But very quickly I
can fix that by just going to my Page Tab and pressing "Reorder," which will reorder things
in that top-to-bottom layout. And so now I'm very much satisfied with the way that this page looks.
We do have one other example of a more complicated list. Something that you might
come across on a regular basis, which are nested lists, where you actually have sub-lists inside
of list items. So you can see here, this is an example of a two-layered list. We can handle
larger lists as well, it really doesn't matter to Equidox, because of the amazing computer
vision that we've developed. But if we want to quickly tag this, all we have to do again is hit
"L" on the keyboard. And I'm just going to move my list detector over a little bit further,
so that it's going to go deeper into the list. So it's going to give me two layers now. So my main
list has been converted into six main list items, and each one of those list items now contains its
own sub-list, and all of that has happened automatically for me just by moving a List
Detection slider from left to right. And when I refresh the preview, now we have a nice, perfect,
beautiful nested list. Exactly as it appears in the PDF. So now that we're done with this
document I would save this page, close out of the document, and return back to the Document Detail
page where I began. And if I go to the Output Tab, assuming that I want to export this as PDF,
it's really as simple as hitting generate PDF. And Equidox is going to produce a brand new file
for me. It's going to have all of the same visual appearances as this source file does,
except it's going to have all of the tag structure automatically put together for it based on how I
just set up all of those reading zones. So that's really all there is to it with Equidox. When
you're remediating, you just lay out the reading zones according to what you're seeing on the page,
checking your HTML preview to confirm and validate your work, and then when you return
to the Document Detail page, you select the format of your choice and hit generate.
Keep in mind we can also export to HTML and ePUB as well. So three separate formats.
Okay, so we are right up against 2:30. Tammy I'm not sure if there were any questions...
The only other thing I might mention is the fact that if you are interested in
learning more about Equidox (this is really just a high-level overview),
if you would like to see a more comprehensive demo or talk about how this might fit into your own
organization's workflow, we are more than happy to give demos on an individual level. So please feel
free to reach out to our sales team and they can be found either at EquidoxSales@onixnet.com, or
Equidox.co. Or we're very active on LinkedIn. Or you can contact us by phone as well.
Tammy: We did not have any questions that I was unable to answer.
I just want to let everyone know that we will be doing another webinar next month on power tools,
which will review some of the time-saving features of Equidox in just a little bit more
detail. Again we'll be looking at the Smart Detection tools, our reading order
decimal system, keyboard shortcuts, and how to collaborate on large documents.
So we'll be doing that on November 18th. And we may have a surprise webinar slotted in before
or after that with a really exciting new feature that I'm not going to tell you guys about. But
you can keep an eye out for it. You'll all get an invite. Thanks for coming everybody!
Dan: Yup! Thank you everyone. have a great rest of your day!