Equidox by Onix. Reach everyone. Welcome to Webinar Wednesdays. My name is Dan Tuleta.
I am a sales engineer here with Equidox. Many of you may know me from previous conversations,
previous webinars. But thank you again for attending another one of our sessions. This one
is going to be a little bit different. We do have a new feature that we want to cover. That is the
ability to now support simple PDF forms. So we're going to cover some of the techniques around
tagging forms, and I also wanted to cover a few of the "power tools" as we've labeled it.
So this is going to be a slightly different webinar where we're going to jump around
between a few different things. So the "power tools," as we're calling them,
they don't necessarily all relate to the exact same document. I'm just going to jump around into
a couple of different documents and show you a few different techniques, all of them aimed at helping
you remediate documents more efficiently... just being a little bit quicker, minimizing
the amount of clicking and steps that you have to take. So hopefully these will help you remediate
a little bit more efficiently. With that said, if you are brand new to Equidox and this is your
first time seeing the tool, please feel free to reach out to us at www.Equidox.co or at our
email address EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com. We can definitely set up a side conversation and talk
more about Equidox. Kind of getting started from a baseline level on exactly how everything works.
But with that said, I'm going to jump into Equidox and we'll get started here.
So the first thing I want to do is, I want to cover a few keyboard shortcuts. If you
weren't aware, if you are an existing Equidox user, there's quite a few things that you can
do in Equidox by just using your keyboard. So first things first, is when you arrive at a
document you obviously have your reading zones here. This is a previously tagged document,
and many of you are probably aware of the zone detection tool which allows you to re-detect the
data in the document and give yourself a better starting point. So something along these lines,
but if you weren't aware, there is a button up in the upper right-hand corner. It's the
icon as a lowercase “i” and this is your list of keyboard shortcuts. So it's a menu here with
all of the information about those keyboard shortcuts. Mainly these are aimed around
moving zones left-to-right up, and down. You can change zone types, you can set your headings,
and all of this is to kind of prevent you from having to use all of the drop-down menus and move
your mouse around back and forth. So the most common one that I use on a regular basis is for
setting my heading levels. So if you just select your zone, everything right now is currently set
as a text zone. You can very quickly set your heading levels by just hitting the corresponding
number on your keyboard. So for example, if I want to set this element here as a heading level one,
I can just hit “1” on my keyboard and that changes it to a heading level one. The same thing here for
these heading level twos. I'm just hitting “2” on my keyboard, and that is very quickly changing
them from a text zone to a heading and the corresponding number that you've hit. So that is a
way of saving a lot of time compared to just going to this drop-down menu and selecting heading.
Another one that I commonly use is the arrow keys. So zones can be moved left and right,
up and down. If you have a very tightly spaced document, you can use the arrow keys to help you
move things around the page without having to click. And if you have... if you're clicking
and dragging, sometimes it can get a little bit, you know, shaky, trying to place it exactly where
you want. But when you use the arrow keys, you can move those zones one pixel at a time.
Now there are many other zone types that you can use keyboard shortcuts for.
For example, a table zone. If you were to draw a zone over the top of this table
and if you just hit “t” on your keyboard, you can see that changes the zone type to a table.
And it gives you the option to open up the Table Editor. So all of this is just minimizing the
amount of times that you're interacting with the drop-down menus to change the zone type,
which can really add up when you're remediating, you know, potentially a hundred pages in a single
day. So all of those different drop-down menus, if you can eliminate that step, that really adds up
to quite a bit of time being saved. And your mouse is not having to move as much around on the page.
Now the Table Editor also has keyboard shortcuts as well. If you have... if you use your Table
Detection Slider to kind of give yourself that starting point, you can still move your grid lines
around by clicking and dragging on them. But let's say for example if you wanted to add an additional
column, you can press “c” on your keyboard or you can press d and r to add and remove rows.
I believe it's “c” and “m” to remove columns as well. So if you hover over the buttons at
the very top, you'll be able to see which of the corresponding keys to press for those shortcuts.
And again, it's all just really aimed at simplifying your remediation. So if you have
no columns, you can just press “c” three times and then you have your three columns created.
Alternatively, if you have no rows, sometimes it's easier... oftentimes rows are set up in a
way where they are spaced out evenly, so if you have for example four rows identified…
You can see we have four rows here… If you select in that row right now, and press “r” and “r”
you'll notice that it places those gridlines exactly in the midway point between those.
So it's a little bit of a faster way of creating additional rows and columns.
But good thing for us is we have this Table Detection technology that makes things really
simple to remediate tables. So hopefully you don't have to use those as often.
But they are there if you need to... if you need to use them. Another thing that you might
not be aware of if you are an existing user, is our Table Summary which can be turned on
in your profile. So right now I have my Table Summary set to “auto summarize,” where Equidox
will programmatically write a Table Summary for you. Depending on how you set up your
rows and columns, just to show you where that is located if I leave this document for a moment...
if you go up to your profile... and it's in the upper right-hand corner. You'll notice
that there's an “auto summarize” mode drop-down. And you can select “default to enabled...” and
just make sure you save those properties. And then Equidox will automatically write
that Table Summary for you. So that's another little power tool if you will, to help you save
the process of having to type out a Table Summary every time you're setting up a table in Equidox.
Now another function that I wanted to cover is the ability to use a heading template.
And this is somewhat reliant on the source file in the way that it was designed. And making sure that
things are consistently styled throughout the document. But what you can do in Equidox, is if
you have a document that is pretty consistently formatted in terms of the way that it's put
together with the headings... In this case, you can set your headings very quickly. I'll set this
as my heading level one, and if I were to set this as a heading level two, what I can do is I can
press this “use as template button,” this checkbox here. When I select that “use as template”
button... And if I save the page, when I move on to subsequent pages that I haven't yet visited,
what I'll see is I already have heading level twos identified on those on those future pages so
Equidox looks forward in the document. And anytime it sees a zone with the same styling as that
heading template that you set, it will apply a heading level 2 class to that zone automatically.
So again that is reliant on the source file and the consistency with which it's designed,
but it is really helpful when you're dealing with longer documents
and you want to kind of automatically have that heading template set up.
You can just identify your heading level twos, your heading level threes, so on and so forth,
and let Equidox look forward and apply that same heading template to each of those zones. And
that's available through that checkbox, as I said before, that checkbox on the left-hand side. Once
you have something identified as a heading, the “use as template button” will appear.
You can just hit that checkbox and it will set up that corresponding heading number
heading level to all of those features’ zones that occur throughout the document.
Okay, I also want to take a look at Reading Order, and there's a couple of little tricks
with Reading Order. So sometimes not all pages... not all PDFs are going to be
just standard top-to-bottom Reading Order. Oftentimes it can be strange layouts. Really
no way for the automated Reading Order function of Equidox to automatically assign the Reading
Order that you would like as the remediator. So we do have some extra tools up our sleeve to
set the Reading Order in a, you know, probably a faster way. So if I select this document here,
and this is sort of almost like a flyer, or just some sort of advertisement for an Apple Watch and
some new hearing aid that is compatible with that Apple Watch. But you can see that this is sort of
designed in such a way that it doesn't really have a logical Reading Order applied to it.
So if you use just the standard default Reading Order of left-to-right top-to-bottom…
it does have a somewhat of a strange Reading Order… Where this image of the Apple Watch is
read in the fifth position, and then you go over here to six, and then seven, and then eight,
and then nine... Perhaps as the remediator, you would like all of this text to be read
sequentially. Like in the order that you would like. And you might want it to be following
this other text information about this Apple Watch, and this new function that comes with it.
Maybe you want the images to be read at the very end of the document, for example.
So the reordering function of just top-to-bottom left-to-right, it's not really going to work for
you in this case. Because just the way that the zones are laid out on the page.
So what you can do, is you can actually use what's called a “div” zone. And if you just draw a zone
that touches these, for example, these three zones here, what you will what you can do is
then hit “d” on your keyboard. So “d” will change it to a “div” zone. And then you can pick a master
number. So in this case I want everything to be read before this image of the Apple Watch. So if
I change my master number to “4,” because this is reading zone 5, and if I press “reorder this div,”
I now have, if you notice, it's just reordered this selection of three zones. so I have 4.001,
.002, and .003. We can use the decimal system to set our Reading Order so that we're not
having to play like a merry-go-round with zones. Where if I move one zone, then everything that
falls behind it also has to be shifted down another entire integer. So that can take quite
a while if you imagine, touching every single zone on the page. But this “div” zone allows you to do
a multi-select. If you're in a situation where the Reading Order reorder function for the entire page
is not going to work for you, due to the layout of that page, so when I've set the Reading Order that
way. And when I look at the preview, what I notice is that despite the layout of the page, I have all
of that information that's going to be read before the images of the watch and the hearing aid.
Now I can also set up, you know, my heading structure as well. Let's say I want this heading
level two, this is what the actual flyer is about. Maybe I want this to be my heading level one
so I can hit “1” on my keyboard to set that as a heading level one... and... but now my positioning
is sort of off. If I want my heading level two to be read as the first element on the page, you can
see that this is reading zone four currently. So if I were to switch this to “1” and I'd have
to switch this to “2” and this to “3” and this to “4…” I don't wanna touch all four of those zones.
So what I can do is just put a period in front of the four and I'll make it point four. Now 0.4 is
of course less than one, so when I refreshed my preview, I now have my heading level one at the
top of the Reading Order. And I haven't had to adjust any other zones on the page. And then my
images, which might be the least important element on this in terms of accessibility,
they're going to come at the very end. Where all my actual text information, all that info
about the actual watch and the hearing aid, is going to be read first in the exact order that I
would like it. And all I've had to do is adjust a couple of little tiny things to the Reading Order.
So that's another set of tools that you have to help you speed things up. All right so we've
covered heading templates, we've covered keyboard shortcuts… Keep in mind those keyboard shortcuts
are in this menu up here. So there are quite a few others... we're not going to cover all of them,
but please feel free to browse these and make sure that you know you're aware of at least the
main ones. Because they really do speed things up. It just becomes second nature after a while. You
will start to learn them, you know, you'll have at least, you know, 10 of them in your memory bank
to speed things up. And it really does come in handy especially those headings.
Okay, I also wanted to mention the ability to import documents through URLs.
And what that looks like is, if you go to the Import screen,
this second tab down… As you, as many of you are probably aware,
we of course can take documents off of our hard drive. So if you open up the folders on your hard
drive, you can select PDFs, and drag and drop them into that grey area to import them. But perhaps
you don't have those documents on your hard drive. Maybe you have them posted to the website already,
or if you've done some sort of website scan or audit, perhaps that audit has given you a .csv
file or a spreadsheet full of all of the PDFs that are currently hosted on your website. Well, what
you can do is instead of having to individually download potentially hundreds of those PDFs,
you can just copy and paste the URLs into this URL field. So it's a way of, kind of, you know, you
can do a bit of like a bulk import. And you don't have to plug up your own computer with a bunch of
PDFs that are ultimately going to be just reposted to your website. So if you have a PDF that has got
a public-facing URL, you can just copy that URL, and then you can just paste it into this window
here. And if you have multiple URLs, you can paste multiple URLs. You just have to put one per line.
So if you just jump down to another line you'll be able to paste as many as you'd like.
And then when you press “import,” the process is very much the same as the standard upload of
the PDF. Except Equidox is just going out onto the world wide web to retrieve that PDF. And it
will import it, you know, just the same as if it was coming straight off of your hard drive.
So it's just taking a few seconds there to import. And the other thing is that if you are importing
documents, you don't have to sit here on this page and watch them import. You can be in other areas
of the application. So in the event that you're importing, you know, 20 documents at a time,
you can be elsewhere and just, you know, working on other things,
and Equidox is still importing in the background. Okay great! I also wanted to
touch on the Images Tab. Now we have had a webinar dedicated specifically to images,
but I can't emphasize enough how important this Images Tab is. So when you have a document
that contains a lot of images or repetitive images, what you can do is use this Images Tab
to evaluate your alt text. If there's already any existing alt text associated with that document,
you'll see all of that populate her. So this document, for example, it seems to have a very
repetitive image placed throughout it on multiple pages. If we scroll down here, we can see that
really none of these have alt text, except for this image here. So for whatever reason, this one
image of the many in this document contains alt text. So I'm able to edit my alt text, add it into
the document image by image. If I'm familiar with the content, I have that flexibility to just, you
know, type in my alt text if I'd like to, straight from this Images Ta. You can really streamline
your process, and then alternatively, if you're dealing with documents, you know, for example,
like financial reports or the annual report, it doesn't necessarily contain any critical images,
but maybe it's the same logo or something that repeats on every single page... That can
be very redundant and not all that valuable to an end-user to hear the same repetitive alt text read
page after page after page. So what you can do in that case, is of course use the “hide all zones”
and then unselect “visible.” And what that does is artifact those images so that you do
not have to then provide alt text for them. Now in this specific document, these images seem to
be very important. They all have context within the document itself. So I would not recommend
doing that in this case. So, but if you do have a document that does contain a lot of decorative
images, it's certainly something that's helpful to be able to just artifact them all at once.
Okay, so the other thing that I wanted to maybe mention quickly was the ability to merge. Some
merging documents or merging elements across pages. If we just, for example, if we wanted to
merge two things together, like if we have a paragraph here and that paragraph actually
continued over to the second column, if we look at it with two separate zones…
(my internet's being a little slow... there we go!) ...two separate zones is going to give us
of course two separate... two separate text zones on our preview. And keep in mind that we are just
pretending that this is a continuation of the same paragraph across two columns, but if you want to
merge two paragraphs together, what you can do is hit the “merge” checkbox and the default setting
is to merge with the previous text zone. So if you have it synced up with the Reading Order,
in this case reading zone three will merge into reading zone two. And if you look at the preview,
that will join those two paragraphs together. Now you have other options as well. So if you
don't necessarily have the exact Reading Order that you need for that page, if there
is something disrupting that Reading Order, so if we just go to the reorder very quickly…
So you can see now I have Reading Zone 2, this is reading zone 3, and this is reading zone 4…
Well if I want to merge these two zones together, again what I can do is, I can choose the “merge”
checkbox and merge with a text zone on this page. And then that will give me another drop-down menu
that has all of the viable candidates to merge with. So if I just select the target zone that
I would like to merge with from this drop-down menu, that will still complete the merge
as expected. So you still have that paragraph merged together. And then this is your caption
of that image that was disrupting the Reading Order. But you're still able to
merge around it if you need to. The same thing can be done across multiple pages as well, so if you
were on another page and you needed to merge... if there was a paragraph breaking at the page break,
what you can do is, you can select that zone and you can still merge it across pages. You would
just choose the third option to merge to a text zone on a specific page. It's a text on page “...”
So when you select that, it gives you a drop-down menu with all of your viable pages that you can
merge with. So if I were to choose page 5, for example, I can then hit the drop-down and I see
all of those merge options in this drop-down. So all of those viable candidates to merge with
from that previous page, if I were to select that one, that will complete the merge. There's no way
to preview that at this time because we're just looking at a single page, so you're only going
to see the data that's located on this page if you were to press the preview. But when you export the
document, it will have completed that merge across pages. And that can be done with different zone
types as well. So whether it's a table, whether it's a list, you have flexibility in different
zone types to merge them together. Because with PDFs being broken down at individual page levels,
it's very common for there to be a situation where a paragraph, or a list, or a table gets cut off on
one page and picks up on another page. So you that “merge” feature is really handy to have
as another power tool to use. Okay so we have about 10 minutes left,
and I wanted to make sure that I saved plenty of time for forms.
So if we just jump back into the documents list, I have a form in here. And this form here
is a simple form. And if I just jump into the document. What is important for forms
is that, in terms of Equidox, is that the form is pre-prepared. And what I mean by that is that
there are already fields created in the PDF. So if you notice on this form here, I have fields
that are already present. And these are static in Equidox as of right now. So we're not able
to remove these or change the field type. But what you have is the ability to add the tooltip.
So there are two modes for end-users who are interacting with forms. There is a Reading Mode
where they are reading the actual text elements in the form. So the headings and the text. Like
if these, if you would call these field labels, for example, the labels for all of the different
fields... all of the headings... they're going to be able to read through that form just the same
as if it were a standard PDF document. But when they change over into what's called Edit Mode,
when they're editing the form and filling in the actual fields, the ability to read the headings
and all of the text elements that is no longer available to them. They're simply interacting with
the fields themselves. So it's very critical that when you are producing an accessible PDF form that
the fields have what's called tooltips. And those tooltips can be found over here on the left-hand
side. Now chances are if you haven't made any effort to make that form accessible your tooltips
might be blank to begin with. If you've done any preflight work in another tool to make the form
accessible, and you've added tooltips, perhaps in Acrobat, for example, you might see the tooltips
that can be imported into Equidox. And they will be populating this text field right here.
However, if you are just remediating it from scratch what's important is that you add the
tooltips in. And making sure that you are being very descriptive of what the end-user is supposed
to be filling into that field. So for example, if you have a form like this if I turn my little...
if I turn those off for a second. If you have a field like this where you have...
it's asking for your name. But there's two different fields for the name. There's a
first name and a last name. So if you just were to type in “name” as your tooltip, the end-user
who's filling out this form might be inclined to type out their full name into this form field.
And then they get over into this form field, and if this one is also labeled just “name,” they
might be confused as to why they're being asked to provide their name twice. So it's important
that you're giving them the instructions that they need to actually accurately fill out this
form. So a good tooltip, in this case, would be “enter first name” and in this case “enter
last name.” So the “enter” is just indicating that they're supposed to type out their name.
So giving them that instruction is just a nice thing to do, but then you're also very clearly
labeling it with the right tooltip of “last name.” We're not looking for the middle initial... we're
not looking for the first name... we are simply looking for the last name in this specific field.
The same thing can be done here for email so you can type in “enter email address.”
The same for down here where you have phone numbers. If you just left this tooltip as
“phone number,” well which phone number is it? Many people have multiple phone numbers... my
office number... my cell phone... my work cell phone... my home number…. so it's important to
make sure that you're being very descriptive here where you're telling them to “enter phone number.”
Or enter “home phone number,” rather. And in this case, enter “mobile phone number.”
The same thing can be applied to checkboxes as well. So if it's a question similar to this,
where they're being asked, would they like... how would they prefer to be reached... It's helpful to
give them that description. Don't just leave it as “check for phone” or “check for email…” enter in
“select for home phone.” In fact, you can even do one better, you “select
if you prefer to be reached via home phone…” “mobile phone…” or “email.”
And the great thing is that since we have this text, we can just copy it
and I can actually paste that into the other tooltips to just save yourself the
typing. And then you would just finish it off by typing in “mobile phone.”
And the same thing here for email. So “select if you prefer to be reached via email.” So you're
able to add those tooltips very quickly. If you've done this in Adobe Acrobat before, you probably
know that you spent a lot of time right-clicking on fields, going into the field properties, trying
to navigate to the tooltip section, entering in the tooltip. There's four or five extra clicks for
every single field. And you know it does really add up, especially when you're dealing with a lot
of forms, or forms that have a lot of pages, and a lot of fields on them. I recently saw a form that
had over 400 fields on a single page, so if you're having to do three or four extra clicks per field,
times 400 on a single page, you're talking about something that would take literally all
day in Acrobat. You can really cut down that time dramatically in Equidox by simply just being able
to quickly navigate from field to field to field and typing in that tooltip that it's asking for.
Now the other thing to keep in mind with forms, is that Reading Order can be quite complicated
because of the way that it's laid out. Of course, the name, if I turn my Reading Order back on,
if it's just following that standard left-to-right top-to-bottom
layout, you'll notice that we go from Reading Order three over to reading Reading Order four,
five, six, seven. This is not really a great layout. And if we were to set this up as a
multi-column layout, it would not be great either, because you would be following down
the left-hand column, for example, and you would end up all the way down here before they even
entered in their mobile number, for example. So this is another opportunity to use that “div”
zone as I was showing you before. So if you would like, for example, your first name,
and you're linking those two fields together, you can use that div zone as I've done before,
to reorder this in a more efficient way. Or you can also use the decimal system as well.
So for example, this is reading zone three and I want my first name to directly follow it...Well
if I want that to directly follow it, I could just put a 3. and make that 3.5. And then I
can make this 3.8, so on, and so forth. You can kind of just set up your Reading Order using that
decimal system to just save you a lot of steps, a lot of clicks. Because you're not having to
adjust every single zone on the page. You can just quickly identify where those Reading Order needs
to be adjusted, and squeeze that zone in exactly where it needs to go by using the decimal system.
So it's really just the nature of forms and the way that they're laid out. You don't really have
a standard Reading Order on a document like this. So it's just another tool that you have to speed
things up a bit. I also keep in mind that there are two preview buttons in the upper right-hand
corner. Now everyone is probably familiar with the standard preview button. That looks like a
computer monitor, but we also have this laptop screen. This is a fixed preview. And when you
press this--I haven't finished off this form-- yet I have other tooltips that I would need to enter.
But if you notice in those specific fields that I actually entered the tooltip for, you can see
the tooltip that you have entered in. So this is an HTML rendering of that form. But you're
able to confirm your work by seeing the tooltips that you've added for each one of those fields.
So this is something that you can use really... it's meant for form use. You can see that layout
in that HTML format. Okay, so we are right up against the clock here. It is just about to be
2:30. So I just want to thank everyone again for attending our Equidox Webinar Wednesday.
And if you, again, if you have any questions or if you would like to set up a personal demonstration
to talk more about how you might use Equidox and how it might fit into your organization,
please don't hesitate to reach out. We are happy to chat anytime. So we can be reached
at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com. Or really easy to find through our website www.Equidox.co. So please
don't be a stranger. Feel free to reach out. And also if if any of this was maybe too complicated,
because we were kind of, we weren't really starting with a natural workflow of remediation,
we do have a lot of other webinars that we've done and those are also available on our website. So if
you'd like to view those and kind of take a deeper dive into tables, or lists, or heading structure,
we definitely have a lot of information available on our website.
So please feel free to view those whenever you'd like also. With that said, thank you
again everyone for coming and we will see you soon in about four weeks for our next webinar.