[Dan Tuleta] Thank you, everyone.
Welcome to another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays.
Today we are going to be covering a couple of new features and some old ones as well.
Mainly the Table of Contents feature, which was a popular request for a lot of users.
We're going to be talking a little bit about links and footnotes and footnote links, as
well as the Zone Source feature which I don't believe we've covered in any of our previous
webinars.
We have a new addition to that Zone Source drop-down menu called Actual Text.
So I'm going to go through a couple of practical use cases for these new features and we'll
get everyone kind of up to speed on how they work and how to use them.
As always, if anyone would like to chat with us one-on-one, have a more formal discussion
on exactly how Equidox might fit into your organization, please feel free to
visit our website www.Equidox.co, and feel free to call us or get in touch with your
account manager at any point.
We're also very active on LinkedIn and social media.
If you'd like to just stay up to date on the latest happenings within Equidox.
So that said I'm going to get started here.
I'm going to close out of this Powerpoint and I'm going to jump into Equidox.
Now I'm going to start here with a document.
The main kind of new feature that we've introduced to Equidox is the Table of Contents feature.
Previously we were able to tag what would be considered a Table of Contents, but now
we're actually able to export with the proper TOC and TOCI tag types within the PDF, so
that when you run an accessibility report or check through the tag structure of the
document, you will see the actual Table of Contents tagged correctly.
This can be quickly explained as simply as tagging the Table of Contents as a list, and
then simply pressing a check box to mark it as a Table of Content.
As that will automatically convert that list into a TOC in the TOCI tag types.
But I'm going to go through a quick example just to show everyone how it works.
And it's right here on this first page.
So I'm just going to open up this first page, and this document is for the most part remediated
from start to finish, but I do have this one element that I've completely left out.
And that is of course the Table of Contents.
Now what I'm going to do to tag this Table of Contents is, I'm going to click and drag
a zone and just create a single zone over the entire Table of Contents.
And then I will hit “L” on my keyboard so I'm changing it to a List Zone.
Or you can of course hit the drop-down menu and change it to a List.
And now, since this is... from a technical standpoint we are tagging this as a list for
the time being, but we don't have any list labels, as is pretty common with Table of
Contents.
So if you don't have any bullet points or numbers or roman numerals to identify the
individual list items, the list detector is not going to work as well because it's not
quite sure how to deliminate between individual list items.
But if that's the case, never fear because you can still manually create list items through
the list items field down here.
So in this case, I have six different items in this Table of Contents.
So I can simply hit the arrow key to indicate that I want six items in my list, and then
you're able to just drag these sliders into place.
So if you just start moving these up and down and just placing them exactly where they need
to go.
So now I've identified the six distinct items in my list, and when I take a look at the
HTML preview, what I see is essentially a list.
So nothing too different than what you would typically encounter whether you're using the
detection slider or not, but you see basic list structure here.
And now the key for converting this into an actual Table of Contents…
When we go to export the document, you're actually just going to hit this check box
here where it says Convert to Table of Contents.
So when you create a list now you're going to have this option to hit this check box
to convert your TOC into the proper tag structure.
So that when you export it, it will show you the exact tag structure that you're looking
for with that Table of Contents.
In the Table of Contents items.
Now once you've hit that checkbox, nothing is going to visually change in your HTML preview.
So you're not going to get that confirmation from the HTML.
However, if you look at the tag structure…
So I've previously exported this file just to show you what the tag structure will look
like.
So if I open up the actual tag structure for this specific page, this is the same page
here…
What you're going to expect to see is your TOC tagging over here on the left-hand side
when you're looking at the individual tag structure.
So you can clearly see that you have TOC and TOCI tags within this area here.
So that is something that you can look forward to if you have documents that contain Table
of Contents.
You can now properly tag them with the correct tag type.
And also just to show you the accessibility report, once you've remediated the full document.
I just always like to remind people that when you run an accessibility report on a document,
all PDFs, oftentimes, or well actually every time, you're going to see two question marks
next to two items on that accessibility report.
This is a question that I am asked on a regular basis.
So I just like to remind people that these question marks are not error messages.
They are not; they're not like warning you that your document is inaccessible.
They are simply reminding you that the logical reading order is something that requires a
manual check, and then the color contrast is also something that requires a manual check.
So oftentimes people will export a document from Equidox, and they'll see a tag structure
that looks like this.
And they're just concerned that there's still two errors with their document.
But it's typically always going to be that logical reading order and the color contrast
which are going to be present in every document no matter what.
So this is just something that it's just letting you know that you need to take a deeper look
if you're concerned about the color contrast or just making sure that you're checking the
reading order of these pages.
That is not something that can be programmatically checked for within any accessibility checker
that you're probably using.
Okay, so that is a very quick example of a Table of Contents.
Now this being a only an eight-page document, Table of Contents for documents that are under
20 pages from a technical standpoint do not need to be linked.
Meaning that the actual items themselves are interactive where you can click on them and
direct the user to that specific page where that content is.
So if you have documents that are larger, and are over 20 pages, you you will definitely
want to make sure that you are creating interactive links within your Table of Contents... within
the list.
So that the end user who is navigating the document, if they are reading through their
Table of Contents and the section that they are looking for is now on page 400, they can
go directly to that page by clicking that interactive item.
So if you have a document that does contain a linked Table of Contents, which is often
the case if you have a very large document, you might find that the Table of Contents
and the links that are in the document are already there for you.
That's great, because those links will be present for you on import and you can just
rely on those links that were there from the source file.
However, if you have a document that does not actually contain a linked Table of Contents,
you can still create it.
So if this is if this is something that you need to do, what you all you really have to
do is just draw a zone outside of the Table of Contents, drag it inside of the list item,
and now you have a text zone inside of the list item.
And then if you just hit “U” on your keyboard, or hit the drop-down menu and change the
Properties that will appear, and you have a URL and an anchor, so that you're able to
add in the exact destination of this link.
So in this case this particular element goes to page one.
We're on page one, so this is a bit redundant, but if I want to type in the anchor point
I just type in “#Page_1” and that is the prefix that is required for linking, like
within the document itself.
So to link to a different page within the document the prefix is “#Page_1” and I
can just repeat that again really quickly.
So if I just go... let's just use this one for example policy if I just hit “U” on
my keyboard to change it to a link and I hit “#Page_2,” so I'm able to turn those into
actual interactive links.
And if you look at the preview, (I've got some spacing issues here) but the idea is
that you've actually turned it into a link itself.
The item itself is now a link.
So that when the end user is interacting with this, they can actually click on this item
and it will take them to the direct page they're trying to navigate to.
Now there's also... the question comes up a lot... about how do I deal with links in
a document in general.
Not necessarily related to Table of Contents.
So if you have documents that already contain links within the source file, Equidox will
import those links.
And it will have the anchor point that that link is actually directed to.
It will contain a link zone similar to this around the actual interactive content.
And it will have the anchor point pre-defined for you based on that source file.
However, if you have a document that you would like to add a link to, to make sure that you
can, for example, link directly to an email address or link to a web page, an external
web page, for example, you can still create those manually if needed.
And all you need to do in order to create those links is just draw a zone over some
content.
So, for example, this is something in the footer down here.
But if I just wanted to turn this Synovus into an actual interactive link, I just draw
a zone.
I can hit “U” on my keyboard for the keyboard shortcut, and now I can type in “https:/”
and then “www.synovus.com.”
And then when you look at the preview, you will have an actual interactive link here.
And if you click on this, it will take you to their actual website.
So that is one way of manually creating links.
And as I said before, if the link is already encoded into the source file, you do not need
to worry about it, like in terms of creating it manually.
It will already have the link zone type and will have the anchor point waiting for you.
Now another question that comes up a lot regarding somewhat similar to links, are footnotes and
footnote links.
Which is another common element type in documents.
Now this page here doesn't have an actual dedicated footnote on it, but we can still
pretend that things are footnotes.
So for example, if we just pretend that this “page one” was actually a footnote, all
I have to do is draw a zone around it to just tag that content.
It's by default a text zone, of course, but if I change the zone type to a Footnote in
the drop-down menu, that is now marking this as a footnote.
And then let's just pretend that in the document here I have the word “consultants” is
a footnote link that is directing that end user down to the footnote at the bottom of
the page.
I would then change this zone type to a Footnote Link.
And once I've done that, I have... the Footnote Link Properties will appear and this drop-down
menu will give me a list of all of the viable candidates that I have to link to.
So if I have 10 footnotes on a single page, this list will contain all 10 of those footnotes.
And you just make sure that you link the footnote link to the correct footnote in that corresponding
list.
You can tell the name by the actual, or the correct footnote by the actual zone name.
So this is another thing that people might not be too familiar working with.
But you can actually change the name of a zone just to make it more clear as to which
zone you're linking to.
So they just get a default setting when you import the document.
The exact zone name is predefined by Equidox.
But if you want to change it to make it more obvious, you can.
So you can say like “footnote 1,” for example, and then when you hit the drop-down
menu, you'll now see in the list you have “footnote one.”
So you can label your footnotes, like you know, in a way that makes sense to you.
See that?
You know you're directing the end user from that footnote to that footnote link... to
the correct footnote.
So now when you hit this drop-down, and if you look at the preview again, we will see
that now “consultants” is actually linked.
And then down here is that footnote that I've created.
So that is sort of the logic of using the Footnote and the Footnote Link feature within
Equidox.
So I hope that helps.
If anyone has any further questions about that, we are happy to chat in more detail.
If you have specific examples that you would like to cover…
Now the other thing that we wanted to make sure that we went over today was the change
in the Zone Source menu.
So I'm going to jump out of this document and jump into something else.
This document here, and the Zone Source for those of you on the call that have used the
Zone Source feature before, you are probably very familiar with the three options that
we used to have, which were PDF, OCR, and Custom.
We have since added a new zone type, or a new zone source type, which is called Actual
Text.
So I just want to make sure that everyone's aware of how to use these different features
within Equidox.
So “PDF” is your default zone source for the majority of PDF documents.
And what “PDF” means, is that it's just pulling the data from that source file.
So when you have a document like this, you have a text zone here for the “breakfast
takeout,” for example.
Nothing is special about this zone.
It's just a standard text zone.
And if I look at the preview, I get on the preview exactly what I saw in the PDF.
I get “breakfast takeout.”
So that's the zone source.
Meaning it's just pulling that data from the file itself.
Now the other zone sources that you're probably mostly familiar with are Custom, where you're
actually able to insert additional context into the document by typing something into
the Custom Zone Source.
So, for example, a reason where you might want to use a custom zone on a document like
this...
I'm actually going to turn my Zone Types off just so you can see better.
If anyone has seen a menu in the last 10 years or, so it's very common now to see a sort
of a key like this.
Where it tells you that there are gluten-free options, vegan, vegetarian, nut-free... maybe
dairy-free.
All these different types of options that you might find on a menu.
So a good use for the Custom Zone Source might be to add in something here.
Because as an end user that's navigating through this with a screen reader, they're just going
to have these four options read aloud to them.
But without much context as to what is this referring to.
Gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, nut-free.
It's like.
“okay great...
well what is that actually?
What does that actually mean?”
Well what you can do is you can type it... create a blank zone, for example, and you
can make that a custom zone.
And now you can type in a dietary preferences key.
(If I can spell preferences correctly.)
And then let me make sure that my reading order is correct.
So this is more obvious.
So I'm going to fix this very quickly, and when I look at the preview, here is that “dietary
preferences” key that I've added in.
So you're able to add in that additional context for this page to let that end user know that
they're about to hear some random words: gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, and nut-free.
And that gives them a better idea as to what they're about to hear.
And you know, sort of, what it might mean for this menu that they're about to start
reading through.
Now that's one way of using the Custom Zone Source.
There are many ways of using the Custom Zone Source.
For example, another….
just another practical thing that you might do to a document like this…
Perhaps this restaurant has a Braille menu as an option as well.
So maybe at the very top of the page you can type in a Custom Zone where it says “Braille
menu available upon request.”
And then let me just make sure that's in the correct reading order...
so when I look at the preview now, the first thing that end user is going to hear when
they arrive at this menu is that if they want a Braille menu, it is available upon request.
So you've taken something that is not at all included in the content of this document,
and you've added it in to provide just additional help... additional resources to that end user
who is navigating through this page non-visually.
If they would prefer a Braille menu, they now have that option.
And they are... that is well known to them because it's the first thing that is read
aloud to them.
So that content is not actually existing on this PDF, but I'm able to add it in without
making any visual alterations to this document.
Nothing is going to change for a sighted user that is looking at this document.
Text is not suddenly going to appear up here in the top margin.
It is just going to be there for end users who are using assistive technology, to let
them know that they do have other alternative formats if they would like to access this
document via a Braille menu.
So that's just one other sort of idea that you could use it for.
Perhaps another way that you could use it is to add in, like, contact information for
the menu.
Maybe someone shares this menu on Facebook or something, and there's no phone number
or website or email address or anything available to get in touch with this restaurant.
So what you might end up doing is just putting a Custom Zone Source to say, you know, call
us to place your order, at you know 1-800-GOOD-FOOD.
And then when you look at the preview down at the bottom, now you've inserted in that
extra context.
So nothing is there in terms of a phone number or contact information towards this restaurant,
but you're able to add additional value simply using that Custom Zone Source.
Now the other zone sources...
I'm going to save OCR for the very end...
But the newest Zone Source is actually, is actually called Actual Text.
And Actual Text and Custom have a lot of similarities.
The difference between Actual Text and Custom is...What you're going to want to do now is,
you're going to want to use Custom when you are adding something in that has no actual
content there already.
So where you place that Custom zone matters.
If you're placing it over a blank space on the page, you can use Custom.
You can use Actual Text to edit something that might already be present.
So there's already content on these in these zones.
So if you use the Actual Text, you can actually edit what is read aloud through the screen
reader to the end user.
So, for example, we remember this key, this dietary preference key, at the top of the
page... you have these like symbols for “G” for gluten-free and then this sort of creative
little “V” looking shape for vegan, and a “V” with a circle around it for vegetarian.
Now these little symbols are not going to be encoded in the text themselves.
If we look at the preview, there's no actual indication...
there's no actual encoded text that's telling them that this is a vegan plate or this is
a vegetarian plate.
So what you can do is you can use the Actual Text zone type to actually take an element
that is already there.
So this market fruit and berries plate, it's already there.
And you're able to actually add in that.
This is in fact a gluten-free and a vegan dish.
Now nothing is going to change in the HTML preview.
So nothing is going to be visually altered.
But when you export the file, and you look at the actual tag structure, what you will
see is that what is going to be read aloud to the end user is now this new information
that you have provided with the gluten-free and vegan dish.
So you've actually taken the time to type that in to provide that additional context.
Otherwise someone that might have a nut allergy or a dairy allergy or a gluten allergy they
might be ordering a plate that is full of gluten and they're not even aware of it because
these little encoded, or these little non-encoded symbols, mean really nothing to the end user
who can't visually see them on the page.
So that is what an actual... the Actual Text is used for, you know, there are other practical
uses for this.
Like, for example, if you wanted to add in, you know, dollar signs so that they're aware
that this number 10 is actually regarding... is actually related to the price that they're
going to pay.
So you can type in a dollar sign for the price just to provide that additional context.
Otherwise, they might be thinking like am I ordering 10 plates of fruit and berries.
You know it's... it could be somewhat ambiguous.
So you can add in things like dollar signs.
Other things that you might choose to edit are, if we just... let's see here.
This is the element here that I wanted to talk about.
So if you read through this specific menu item, you get to the end here, and it's going
to read “mushrooms, peppers, onions, tomatoes, bacon, hammer, sausage, 15, additional toppings,”
too.
That could be read in a number of ways.
Someone might think that you can get an additional 15 toppings for two dollars.
That could be misconstrued in that way.
So if you look at the Actual Text for that, for this one specific element, (you might
need to copy and paste it from the HTML) and now you're able to actually paste it into
this field here.
And you can edit it as such.
So you could now type in the “15” by adding the dollar sign and then you can also put
a colon or a slash or something to indicate that additional toppings are now two dollars,
by typing that additional context in.
So this is what you can use the Actual Text for.
And it is not specifically for, you know, restaurant menus.
This is just a practical example.
And what you might use it for.
You can find... you can certainly find real reasons to use it within your document.
But it's just a new feature that we want to make sure that everyone is aware of how it
works, and what is the distinction between the Custom Zone Source and the Actual Text.
Keeping in mind that when you make edits to the Actual Text, they are not going to appear
in the HTML preview.
But they will be there in the PDF document when you export the file.
So one other... a couple of other just practical examples of when you might use Actual Text.
Acronyms, for example.
So if you have, like, acronyms that are describing, you know, something important within that
document.
Acronyms can be ambiguous.
You know, a single acronym could relate to 50 different things, depending on the context.
So what you can do is, you can take that zone that's covering up that acronym, and then
you can actually go into the Actual Text and type out the words that that acronym is representing.
So instead of it just saying “lol” you can actually type in laugh out loud.
You know, just for one random example.
Also another way that you could use it are stylized letters.
So if you can visualize like a document that contains the first letter of the document
is like a big creative “B” instead of it saying breakfast here.
If we just had like a big creative artistic “B” and then the rest of the word was
breakfast, and that b is not actually part of the... it's not part of the text, it might
actually be an image…
So you can select the “breakfast” and actually add in the “B” so that will be
actually read aloud correctly.
Other things might be to remove hyphens.
So if you have breaks in words that are ending at the end of a line, and it jumps down to
another line, and that word has been cut in half, you can remove that hyphen so that when
the screen reader user is reading it, they're not hearing two halves of a single word.
They're hearing one smooth word being read all the way through.
So this is exactly what the Actual Text zone source is for.
You can probably find a number of reasons to use it in.
Ways to use it within your documents.
I just wanted to share a couple of examples and hopefully this kind of gets your... gets
you up to speed with this new feature, and gets you thinking about how this might apply
to you.
Now the last zone source that we want to cover is OCR.
And I'm actually going to leave this document.
So I'm going to jump out of here, and I am going to jump go to the import page, and I'm
going to actually import a document that is in fact an OCR page.
So OCR stands for “optical character recognition.”
And this is... this will happen when you have a document that doesn't actually have any
encoded text in it.
So there's no text elements within this page.
It might be a scan, it might be an infographic that actually contains text within that image…
But what you'll find is, that there is no actual searchable selectable text in that
page.
And if that's the case, what Equidox will do is it will assume that it's an OCR situation.
And you might get an import message that looks like this.
Where it says “there's no content on page, one sending to OCR.”
So when I go into the document now (this is the page that we just imported), when I jump
into the document now, I see now that I have an OCR little flag here, letting me know that
this is an OCR page.
And when I open up the document, I have this big image zone.
As you can tell there's this large zone that's covering the entire page.
And then behind it I actually have a layer that is now a blue zone.
There are three separate blue zones.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of the image zone by hitting that checkbox.
And now I'm just left with the text.
And now Equidox recognized that there was no actual text on this page so it automatically
ran an OCR process.
And when I look down here at the Zone Source it's already preset as an OCR zone for me.
And it's given me that text already inside of this field.
And I'm able to edit this, or change this.
If there are spelling errors, for example.
Like the word is... it looks like here that the “L,” the lowercase “I” was recognized
as a one.
So I can just hit backspace and replace it with a lowercase “I” down here in the
little text field.
I'm able to make those small edits to this page.
Which is something to keep an eye on when you have OCR.
Hopefully you don't have a lot of OCR.
This is definitely a challenge for accessibility.
But something that Equidox is certainly capable of handling.
Now when you have an OCR page, you can also use the Zone Detector and Equidox will still
recognize where the text is located on the page.
However, when you use the Zone Detector, you will lose those initial results that the initial
OCR scan gave you.
So if you look inside of the OCR zone now, there's actually no text in there.
You can either hit “convert to text,” for this one single zone, or on the Page Tab
you can hit “OCR all zones.”
And it will OCR the entire page for you based on where those zones are located.
So once you've done that, you can take a look at the preview, and you will have... all of
that text is now searchable, selectable.
Whereas before it was simply an image of text.
So this is how we can use the OCR feature within Equidox to kind of work around those
problems with OCR pages, which can be quite pesky when you're trying to make a document
accessible.
No one wants to deal with scanned pages.
They are a pain.
They do take a little bit more time to kind of make sure that you have everything accurately
typed out and spelled correctly.
But this is something that Equidox is capable of.
Now we're just about at 2:30.
Okay great so yeah we look forward to February's webinar as well.
So I hope everyone can join us, and just to wrap up, here thank you again, everyone, for
joining today for another Equidox Webinar Wednesday.
Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions.
Or if you'd like more of a one-on-one demonstration or discussion to talk about how Equidox can
fit into your organization.
Please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
Our contact information is readily available on our website www.Equidox.co,
For more information about how Equidox Software Company can help you
with PDF accessibility Email us at EquidoxSales@equidox.co
Or give us a call at 216-529-3030
Or visit our website at www.equidox.co