Equidox by Onix. Reach Everyone
[Dan] All right, let me share my screen here.
Do you have anything that you'd like to say before we get started? [Tammy] I do want to
just reiterate that we have dedicated support staff. So I know a lot of you have gotten used to
emailing questions to your account manager, which is fine. But I think you will get a better and
faster response if you use the Help feature within Equidox. That's what it's there for,
and our support people, you know, are armed with answers and screenshots and how-tos. So if you run
up against something that you cannot figure out for yourself, or can't find in the User Guide,
that Help feature is there for you. So please use it. They like their existence to be justified. So
we're always happy to have you talk to them. Over to yo, Dan. [Dan} All right. Thanks, Tammy.
Yeah and I'llmake sure to mention once we share the Equidox interface. I'llshow you
exactly where that Help button is, just in case anyone wasn't aware of it or needs a reminder.
So welcome everyone to another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays. This one we're doing a little
bit of a feature review. So if anyone is an existing user on the call, you probably
are aware that we did have five separate major releases throughout the year of 2020.
So we just want to make sure that in case anyone has missed previous webinars, or if anyone's….
the training that you might have received prior to 2020 might be a little bit outdated. So just
want to make sure everyone is aware of these new features and exactly how they all work at a high
level. Now there was quite a few enhancements to existing features and a bunch of small features
that were released that we're not going to have time to cover in entirety today during the 30
minutes. But I'm going to make sure that I touch on a few of the major ones. So as always if you'd
like to get in touch with us after this webinar today, you feel free to reach out to us either
at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com or directly through our website at www.Equidox.co. Or if you have
an existing account manager, feel free to reach out to them if you'd like to have any further
discussions about how Equidox might fit into your organization or any of these new features. We're.
Now before we jump into Equidox I just also wanted to mention a little bit about our parent company,
which is Onix Networking. So many of you might be familiar with our company that we call Equidox,
just because that's the name of our software. But we're actually a division of Onix which is
a a larger organization. And Onix is primarily a partner with Google. We're actually google's
first official enterprise partner. So we have a very long, I think nearly 20-year relationship,
with google so a lot of our core business actually focuses around cloud consulting. So we're like a
very well-rounded cloud consultancy group. So we can help your organization with a variety of
different things as it relates to cloud computing. So if you have any further questions on that or
would like to have a discussion bringing someone else from your organization into that, please feel
free to reach out to us, and we can definitely set up a conversation with the right people on
our end. Now we... I just also wanted to show you a couple of logos we do have some very large
notable clients so just to put these up on the screen there just to show you just a few of the
organizations that we work with. Now that said I am going to jump into Equidox. And we will
take a look here at a few of the new features that we've released.
So as I mentioned we did have five releases during the year of 2020. Some of the major features that
I'm going to cover today are the Table Editor which is now powered by artificial intelligence,
as well as the List Editor, also powered by artificial intelligence.
We also have... we had a major update around form support. So we're now able to support simple forms
and being able to remediate those and export those from Equidox to make those forms more accessible.
Also some other major enhancements: the Merge feature was a big one that kind of
changed a lot of things for people, as well as our ability to check for certain things on
outputs when you're exporting documents. You're getting some feedback from the application
which is looking for some high-level accessibility issues. So we'll warn you when you're exporting
documents if you have any issues with the way that you have things structured within Equidox.
So I'm going to start actually with this very first document. And this is just a simple form.
So one thing to keep in mind when you're dealing with forms and working with them in Equidox:
it's very important to make sure that you have those form fields are already built. So that's
something to keep in mind. If you've set up form fields, whether it be in Acrobat, for example,
you'll be able to import that document into Equidox. And when you open it up you will
see that those forms are already there. Or those fields rather, are already there waiting for you.
So the great thing about using Equidox to remediate forms is that... the main thing is
that when you're remediating these fields, you have to add in a Tooltip. So the Tooltip will
actually be populated for you over here on the left-hand side. And you're able to very quickly go
through the fields and update or add the Tooltip that is required to make it... to make the field
accessible to end-users. So if you aren't aware of how screen reader users are interacting with
fillable forms, keep in mind that there is a read-only mode where they are interacting with
the sort of... the labels... the text elements around the document. And then when they switch
to the interactive mode, they are then interacting with the fields. So the fields need to be given
these Tooltips which indicate exactly what that user needs to do…. what they need to enter into
that field. Whether it be a checkbox, a drop-down menu, a text field, a radio button. There are
different types of fields, and they all require different types of Tooltips, which are really just
hints or explanations as to what exactly they need to fill in. So the great thing about Equidox is
that you don't have to go into and right-click and go into the properties of the field
and navigate through a bunch of different menu items to be able to add the Tooltip.
You can very quickly just scan through these fields and update or add the Tooltips whenever
needed. Over here into this text field, and then of course you have the power of Equidox to do all
the other remediation that comes along with forms. Because not all forms are simply the fields.
You also have headings and text elements. You also need to worry about your Reading Order.
So you have the ability to use Equidox and all of its great tools in that category to be able
to very quickly set up this document in a way that will be compatible with a screen reader.
Now another sort of sub-feature that came with the form support is a new Preview button. And
that's up here in the upper right-hand corner. So if you've used Equidox before, chances are you're
familiar with the main Preview button, which looks kind of like a computer monitor or a television
screen. But the button next to it looks a bit like a laptop. So when you press this button,
what actually happens, it will open up a separate tab in your browser. And this will give you an
HTML preview of the form field that you have of the form that you are working on. And it
will also show you the basic layout that you have structured. So, for example, you can also see the
Tooltips within the fields themselves. Just as a way of validating your work
before you move on to other pages in the document or different documents altogether.
So if you have any missing form fields you'll be able to see that and check your work. Here
you can look at your drop-down menu and see all the options that you have assigned. With that
drop-down menu, you have radio buttons here that you're able to check out. So this is just another
way of validating your work. And keep in mind that you can also use Equidox for all the other
features in terms of remediating it. So using the Zone Detection, using the Reading Order features
within Equidox. Because that's a very important part of form remediation. This is all now possible
within Equidox. Something that was definitely a huge challenge before, was form remediation. But
this new update and enhancement to it have made it a lot easier. It really is as simple as
typing in the field. The Tooltips into each field, setting your headings, setting your reading order,
checking your Preview, and then when you're satisfied, you can export that document.
So please feel free to start experimenting and working with the new form enhancement. It really
is a huge time saver comparative to using Adobe Acrobat or other manual tagging tools.
So that's a quick crash course through the new form editing. So now let's jump out of this
document and take a look at something else. Now another one of the major features that I mentioned
was the artificial intelligence List Detector. So if I take a look at a document such as this,
any of our old users perhaps remember the way that we used to interact with lists, where
we would have to identify all the different list items in their individual text zone, and then we'd
have to layer a list zone on top of that, to then turn them into list items. A very tedious and very
slow process compared to what we're able to do now. So now that we have our List Detection tool,
we can identify the entire list itself with a single zone. And it's currently just a text zone
because this is a completely untagged document. So we need to make sure that we're identifying
this as a list zone. So we can either use the drop-down menu to identify the zone as a list,
or we can change the zone type with our keyboard shortcut by just hitting “L” instead of
“U.” As opposed to “L.” So when I hit “L” I now change the zone type to a list.
And I get this green bar that comes down the left-hand side. And if I just get that layered
on top of the outside bullet points... so you can see these bullet points are underneath that green
bar. I now have a List Detection slider down here. So similar to the Zone Detector slider, this is
just changing the detection level. Except this time the List Detector is actually powered with
machine learning and artificial intelligence. So as I slide this from left to right, if I slide
it over to the second setting for example, I'm actually invoking machine learning where Equidox
is able to detect the structure in the layout of this list. So it's taken that single zone that I
previously had, and it has broken it up into two main list items. And it has given me inside of
each of those list items another sub-list which is actually made up of two two list items. And in
those, I even have another layer of sub-lists. So all of that happens basically instantly once you
use the artificial intelligence List Detector. And when you look at the Preview on how this looks,
on the HTML Preview, you can see that we have created a perfect HTML nested list exactly as
it appears on that source document. So that's how easy and fast we're able to remediate nested lists
using the artificial intelligence tools. So just for comparison's sake, a list like this, if you
were to remediate this in Acrobat… If you could do it in less than 20 minutes I’d be impressed.
It's quite a tedious process to create all of these different layers. Three layers of nesting,
identifying all of the list items, the list labels, and stacking everything together within
the tag tree. It's just no matter how technically gifted you are or how well trained you are,
it's just a lot of steps to get to this ultimately to this endpoint of a nested list.
So by comparison, the time savings are really remarkable if you're dealing with a lot of lists.
It is so much faster in Equidox because of our different approach and because of our technology
using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify the structure and being able to create
those reading zones automatically. And then of course when Equidox exports the document as a PDF.
It will take all of this HTML source code that we've created and it will automatically convert it
back into a PDF tag tree for you. So that you're not having to interact with those individual tags.
You're simply checking your structure here on your HTML preview, and when you feel satisfied that you
have set the list up properly, you then can save the page and move on to other elements. Now that's
a quick crash course through the automated List Detection. Now there was another enhancement to
list as well that came out more recently. think on our November release. I mean that is the ability
to convert lists into a Table of Contents. So if you work with a lot of documents perhaps longer
documents you might have Table of Contents pages within them. So many people have asked
us about incorporating a TOC tag type. And that is something that we have added to Equidox recently.
So basically what you do to convert a list into a Table of Contents is exactly what I've just done
here. Setting up the list using the artificial intelligence List Detection. And then we have
a checkbox here which you can press on any given list. So if you select the main list then you can
press the “Convert to Table of Contents” checkbox. Nothing visually will change in your HTML preview.
So when you look at the HTML, nothing is going to be different about how it looks visually.
But when you export the document, you will see that instead of list and list item tags you will
have TOC and TOCL Itags for the Table of Contents. So it's as simple as just setting up a list as
normal and then using the checkbox here to select that, to identify it as a Table of Contents.
So that's another feature that will save you a few steps, that you won't have to worry about anything
once you've exported the file. You'll be able to set up those Tables of Contents within Equidox.
Now another important update that we've made to Equidox in the year 2020. This came
earlier in 2020, but that is our artificial intelligence Table Detection. So many of you,
if you've used Equidox prior to 2020, you would have remembered the ability that we have to
to to use the Table Editor to save a lot of time in terms of tagging tables. Which can be again,
using manual tagging tools, very tedious and very slow. But with our artificial intelligence
Table Detection, we're actually speeding that up even further. So if we just identify the
entire table with a single zone, then I can press “T” on my keyboard to identify that as
a table. Or I could use the drop-down if I’d like. And then I can open up the Table Editor,
and prior to 2020, you might have remembered dragging grid lines around and manually adding
and subtracting columns and rows wherever needed. So that was the way that we used to do things.
Which was still much faster than manually doing everything in Acrobat... Setting up
the tag tree completely. But now what we're able to do is actually use our Table Detection sliders.
So again, these are using artificial intelligence and machine learning. And as I move these around
I'm able to just redetect the table and give myself a better starting point. So the initial
guess by Equidox, in this case, was pretty solid. It gave me the rows pretty much spot on.
But I'm able to use this to basically find a better setting. So I'm not having to make as many
manual adjustments. So once I find that sort of match between the columns and the rows, I now have
grid lines pretty much exactly where they need to be. Now they might be slightly offset, so just the
rows themselves are maybe just a hair below the actual line itself. But we've also added a new
feature where we can actually nudge all of our rows up. So on the Cells tab, you can go to the
Nudge button, where you can nudge all of your rows up. You can nudge them down, you can nudge your
columns to the left, you can nudge them to the right. They don't have to be perfect. This is...
the green lines that you're seeing are not there for aesthetics. This is simply to capture the data
within the cell. So as long as the data is present within the cell, everything will be fine. But they
are... it is handy to have if you're dealing with very tightly spaced tables. If you think
of like a financial table, where it might have 75 rows in it, and if every grid line is just a hair
below where it needs to be... That nudge feature really comes in handy because you can just bump
them all up together in unison without having to grab every single individual row. It can save
a ton of time and a ton of clicks. Now taking a look at the Preview, what I will see is a
nice clean HTML table. I still have a few things that I would need to update to a table like this.
Mainly that I have, like, the top row up here. If you notice, I have a duplication of the years,
and I also have... the sub the sub-column headers below it are still in that standard font.
So this is a bit of a unique table because we have some spanning that we need to do across this top
row where 2017 actually has four columns that are correlated with it. And the same thing with 2018.
And I also have two rows of column headers. So both the year and the quarter within the
year need to be identified as column headers. So what I'll do is I'll address the spanning first.
If I just select here in this cell above Q1, and hold down SHIFT and then select above Q4,
I can now span across those cells. So I can either press the Span button up here, which will appear.
Or I can just press “S” on my keyboard. So “S” will also achieve that span that I need.
And when I refresh the Preview, what I will see is I've gotten rid of that duplicated year and those
empty cells on either side. I've spanned across those four columns. Now I also need to identify
my Q1 through Q4 as column headers so that this table will be properly structured. And that the
end-users who are navigating through the table data will know exactly which department they are
in, which year, in which quarter. So all I need to do to fix that is I need to just update my column
header from 1… Which is the default setting, by default it's just a one-to-one ratio, meaning that
the farthest left column are your row headers, and the far... in the top, the top row are your
column headers. So that's just the default setting of Equidox. But if you have two column headers,
for example, you just change the one from to two. And then if you refresh the Preview you will now
have that bold font where you previously didn't have. You previously have these standard fonts.
So we are able to structure this table exactly as it needs to be. So that way when an end-user
is navigating, for example, through the sales department, when they arrive at this cell here,
they know that they are in the year 2018, and the quarter is the second quarter. So they have all
that information properly structured for them in the table, and we can see it right here in HTML.
And then when we're satisfied with this, we're able to save the table and close out and move on
to other elements in the document. So a lot faster than doing it manually. Again if you
were doing this manually, in a manual tagging tool… If you could do this in under, you know,
half an hour it would be impressive. With Equidox it literally can be done in 10 to 15 seconds.
Once you kind of figure out the proper setting for your columns and rows, everything else just
kind of falls in place. And it's very intuitive to use. Now another update that we've made to
the table... to the Table Editor is the ability of Equidox to write the Table Summary for you.
So if you notice, while I was setting up the gridlines here within this table, the Table
Summary itself has been auto-populating. So that's a really nice feature because what it will do is,
it'll allow your organization to produce very consistent and very accurate Table Summaries.
Many people think that the table summary is supposed to be like a description of, you know,
the context of the table and what's the table all about. Ideally the actual document itself
will provide enough context for the... what's actually contained within the Table Summary is
really supposed to be more about navigation. So indicating how many rows and columns there... are
the fact that I have spans going across the top row. That is indicated here in my Table Summary.
So the fact that I have multiple column headers is indicated in my Table Summary. So all of that is
actually automatically written for me in the Table Summary and I don't have to type anything out.
You can still add additional information into the Table Summary if you'd like add or remove
information as needed. But it is really nice that Equidox does that heavy lifting for you.
So that's a new enhancement that we've that we have added to the Table Editor that's
really just intended for improved accuracy and better... and just better usability.
Now another feature that we have added is the...
the well actually we've enhanced... is actually the Merge feature. So merging was somewhat
problematic before because things had to fall in line within the Reading Order. So for example
Reading Zone 5 could only merge into Reading Zone four. This presented problems if you were dealing
with, for example, page breaks where a paragraph cut off at one page and then carried over onto
the next. If there was a header or footer data information that was disrupting that Reading
Order, for example, that would make the merge from one paragraph to another impossible. However,
we've actually added the ability to to merge a little bit more of a complex level.
So if if you press the Merge checkbox, a drop-down menu will occur. O it will appear here and you can
either merge with the previous Text Zone. Or if it was a List Zone that I had selected, it would
give me the option to merge with a previous List Zone, for example. But you can merge still using
the Reading Order feature. So Reading Zone five would merge into Reading Zone four. You can also
merge to a target zone on this specific page. So if I select the second option, it will give me
another drop-down where I can choose all of the viable candidates on this page to merge with.
So any of the zones on this page that I need to merge this specific paragraph with, I can
think of like a two-column or a three-column page where something is disrupting the reading order,
for example. You can still merge to a target zone. You can also
merge with a zone on a specific page. So in this case I'd only have one page in this document.
But if I wanted to merge to a different page in the document, I could press this Page drop-down,
and it would give me a list of all of the viable pages that I can merge with. And then from there,
it would give me another drop-down menu where I could see all of the zones within that page that
I can merge with. So think of like a magazine spread, where it's a multi-page article,
and halfway through the article there's a cologne advertisement or something in the middle of the
page, where it's not even allowing you to merge to that the previous page. You actually have to merge
to a different target page. So this will give you the option to merge to a specific page within the
document. Even like circumnavigating things that might be disrupting the logical reading order.
Now another cool trick with the merging is the ability to change the zone name. So this might
be something that many people are not aware of, but if you're merging to a different page or a
target zone on that page, there might be a hundred different text zones. And it might be difficult to
select the exact correct zone that you're trying to merge with. So you can actually change the zone
name. It's this top field up here. I'm just going to change this something to like “merge with me”
and then when I go back to that merge drop-down menu... if I want to merge to a text zone
on this page, I can see in the drop-down menu here… This now this one zone is identified as
“merge with me.” So the other ones are still kind of stuck with that standard
naming convention that is automatically assigned by Equidox, but you can change the zone name and
make it very obvious. So that you know that you're merging with the correct paragraph...
you're not merging with something that would lead to confusion. Because you're bringing together
two paragraphs that don't belong. So that's another thing to keep in mind. Changing the
zone name is a great way of just ensuring that you are making the correct merge.
Okay, so some of the minor features that we’ve actually added. There's been... those are sort
of the main ones that I wanted to cover with within Equidox. Some of the minor ones that we
have also added are things like the ability to turn images on and off for the entire page. So
many people you know struggle with image remediation because it is one of those
slower and more manual processes within Equidox. So before you would have had to, if you wanted to
artifact images, it would have had to have been done individually by reversing these checkmarks,
pressing the Hide Zone, and then unselecting Visible. A little bit slow and tedious. If
you decide that you would like to remove or artifact all of the images on a single page,
one thing you can do now is you can go to the Page Tab, and you can actually hit this checkbox to
turn all of the images on and off for the entire page. So this can be very handy in the right set
of circumstances. Because sometimes you want to artifact all of the images on a specific page.
If you've seen the image list from the Document Detail page, you know that you can do this for the
entire document. Where you can artifact, you know, every image in the entire document. If you have,
like, repetitive logos, for example, but this is an instance where you might want to artifact all
of the images, just an on a specific page. So you can use this checkbox to turn them on and off as
you wish. You can also individually select them. So if you want to just artifact a single image
itself, you can now hit BACKSPACE and that will do the same exact task, where it will artifact that
single image. That is a new enhancement that we have made. The ability to interact with images.
Another quick update that we've added is the use of break lines. If you've ever dealt with,
like, for example, like, an index or something that has got a lot of individuals text stacked
on top of each other with very little spacing in between, it can be very tedious to try to,
you know, manipulate the individual text zones and try to grab all of that in their own individual P
tags. So something that we have added in 2020 is the break lines checkbox here. So when you use the
break lines checkbox, it will take that paragraph and it will break all of those. Every individual
line will then be wrapped up in its own individual P tag when you export the document to PDF. So that
can be handy in the right set of circumstances, if you don't want to then have to go through and try
to very tediously use a bunch of individual P tags or individual text zones to identify those. Every
single line of text. That can be somewhat tedious. So break lines is a new option that you have...
If you've ever used the Validation checkbox before, this might be something that to keep in
mind. When you press the Validation checkbox, that will turn this checkmark up here green.
And also when you look at the list of pages, it will you'll see this green status right
here indicating that the document, or that page, has been marked as completed. Also, when you save
the page and close out of it, when you return to the main Documents list, you can see there's the
green checkmark there when you return to the main Documents list. You'll also see that you now have
a status bar here that is present. So one out of one: 100 percent complete. So everything has
been marked. Every page within this document (it's just a single page) has been marked as validated.
So you can see that status there. So that can be handy for project management purposes, just to
make sure that everyone is moving along with their documents. So that's a new feature that
we've added is that status bar on the main page. If you are an administrator, and you're kind of
working with a bunch of people underneath you that are remediating documents on a daily basis,
you'll also be able to see the date that it was Validated. So there's now a time signature, and
who was the one that actually validated the page. So you can kind of keep track of who's working on
what, and how well they are doing. Now back to the main... sort of the main interface here. I
wanted to mention turning on our profile settings. So this is a new enhancement that we have made.
You can now change the highlight border around your zones. So this is something to keep in mind.
A little bit of a minor enhancement, but some people that want to see a larger border around
the zones versus a smaller one. Or you can turn it off altogether. The option is yours. You can
also turn on your Auto Summary Mode. So for the Table Summary, you can turn that to always be on,
always be off, or completely hidden. I would recommend putting it to default to “enabled.”
And then also you can choose your default output. So if you find that you are always exporting to
PDF, you can choose the output... the default Output Tab to be PDF if you'd like. And then
once you've chosen all of those settings, just make sure to save it. And then when you back out,
you'll have all of those... all of those properties will be saved for you. So when
you start using Equidox, your Table Summary will automatically be written, you'll always be
exporting the PDF when you choose your Output Tab, so on and so forth. Now the Help and Support Tag
Tab is down here below. I mentioned... I said I would mention this. So I'll just keep that
in mind. That we have this Help and Support ticketing system down here. So that can be used
at any point. So make sure that you are using that. That really helps us keep on... you know,
keep track of any issues you're having and make sure that you're getting the answers
in a timely manner. So using that is is pretty straightforward, through that help widget system.
Also another... I don't want to forget about this, because this is something that we want to
encourage as well, is, we've also integrated with single sign-on solutions. So if you authenticate
your applications through Microsoft or Google, we now have SSO integration. So we can you can use
your password for your email profile essentially, and link it to your other applications within your
organization. So if you would like to integrate with a single sign-on solution, whether it be
Google or Microsoft, please let us know and we can configure that very quickly for you.
And you know there's really just too many, like, little enhancements to get through and name
all of them. I do want to mention though that in 2021, we do have a lot of very interesting
and very exciting stuff coming. Right now the development team is making a bunch of enhancements
and updates to the back end architecture of the application. I mean with that is going to come.
A new user interface. So we're very excited about that. It's been a while since Equidox's interface
has been spruced up. So that is something that we are really excited to see moving forward. So when
that comes, you will all obviously be aware of it when you log in the next time. You'll see a new
interface and we'll definitely make sure that we put out a webinar. Kind of going through anything
that's changed. But the core functionality should be pretty much exactly the same. It's just
going to look a lot nicer and flow a lot better through the workflow of remediating a document.
Now I do realize that it is 2:30 and I want to be mindful of everyone's time. So I'm going to
wrap it up there I just will remind everyone to please feel free to reach out to us if you have
any questions, or if you'd like to, you know, see another demonstration or go through some of your
specific documents. I'd love to talk more to you more with you about how Equidox might fit into
your organization's workflow. This was just a very quick crash course through a few main features.
There is so much more to talk about. Of course so please don't be shy feel free to reach out to
us through EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com or our website www.Equidox.co. And please join us
in March when we are doing our next webinar. And that's going to be talking about batch processing,
which is sort of bulk remediation in a very automated way that can be applied to documents
that fall within the same template. So that's something that's very exciting.
A new technology that we have and we are we're really excited about it. So please feel free to
join us for that as well. So Tammy I'll wrap it up there and turn it back over to you.