[Dan Tuleta] So it is two o'clock so I think we should get started so welcome everyone
to another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays this week we're going to be talking about
a Path to PDF Accessibility so trying to guide you to a more efficient PDF remediation process
so as always I'd just like to mention as Tammy just briefly mentioned we can be reached at
EquidoxSales@onixnet.com if you would like to discuss your organization's needs or maybe
talk about our software a bit more if you'd like to see a one-on-one type of demo please
don't hesitate to reach out to us our website is also Equidox.co and we can also be reached
via phone at 800-664-9638
so before we get into the presentation talking about a guide to PDF remediation I'm going
to just briefly mention our parent company which is ONix Networking we're headquartered
here in Cleveland Ohio we've been in business for about 28 years and we're primarily a Google
and an Amazon web services partner so we are a cloud consultancy and our mission is to
improve organizational efficiency through cloud computing solutions now Equidox which
we're here talking about today is a division of Onix we are a best-in-class PDF remediation
software we also offer professional PDF remediation services expert accessibility services and
our mission is to ensure for the digital information reaches everyone through accessibility solutions
so before moving forward just a quick slide here with a few of our a few of our clients
that we serve so I'm just gonna let those scan through quickly and then we'll get into
the actual steps to PDF accessibility so first things first is kind of establishing where
do we start when it comes to PDF accessibility so we have an eight-part well eight step process
that we have defined we would certainly encourage you to your organization to use this type
of process or some sort of modification to this process that works best for your specific
organization so the first step would be to assign the staff the second step would be
evaluate the scope the third would be create a written plan
fourth prioritize the documents fifth choose a tool or a vendor sixth remediate the documents
seven validate the documents and eight is maintenance so we're gonna take a deeper dive
into each of these eight topics on the next slides okay so first assigning the staff so
you really wanna choose the correct team so assign a person or a team to manage the project
choose whether you will use an in-house team of remediators or a vendor to do the work
for you also a signing staff for training validation and maintenance so it's really
important to figure out exactly which departments in your organization are going to kind of
take the lead when it comes to managing the PDF content whether it be on your website
or intranet so is it going to be coming from the Marketing and Communications team is it
this Disability Services if you have a division for Disability Resources in your organization
is this something that it or the webmasters are going to take charge of or also figuring
out do you need to hire in outside staff so maybe you don't have the the bandwidth in
your current team maybe you need to look externally and actually make some additional hires to
bring in people that either have accessibility experience or just in general to remediate
documents if you have that type of backlog
the second step would be to evaluate the scope so so many PDFs and so little time so first
removing outdated or unnecessary files to reduce the workload next would be to evaluate
the number of PDFs to be remediated and also their complexity and also decide what will
be done in-house versus what will be outsourced so you really don't want to spend the initial
phase of your PDF remediation work workflow going through outdated backlogs of documents
so this these would be things that you would probably want to put towards the end of the
pipeline so if you've got old advertisements or meeting minutes from 20 years ago these
are the types of documents that would be lower in priority so you really want to try to audit
yourself and figure out what kind of documents do you have currently floating around on the
website are documents being produced on a daily or a weekly or monthly basis figure
out what is going to be most impactful when you are choosing which documents to remediate
first
the third step would be to write a plan so this is going to help you get on that road
map to creating accessible documents so establish a timeline do you have external or internal
deadlines or possibly both you might have to set expectations of responsibilities so
who is supervising this project who is going to be actually doing the remediation who will
be valued validating the documents and who is going to handle the future documents so
documents that are being created on a regular basis you want to make sure that you have
a plan in place to manage those as they're created versus creating another backlog for
yourself that you then have to work through all those documents down the road so having
a written plan may offer some protection from a from legal.. from a lawsuit if you will
but you really have to make sure that you're executing that plan that you write so you
have to take it a step further than just having some written written plan you might want to
make sure that you are putting that plan into action and actually following through on what
you have put in writing
the fourth step would be to prioritize the documents so I did mention this briefly on
the second or a few slides back but what comes first so we would recommend that the most
used documents come first the most recent documents next and then the third ranking
and priority would be the lowest complexity and then the fourth ranking and the priority
would be everything else so we want to make sure that you're you're going to have the
most impact on the most amount of people so the documents if you have these types of metrics
from your website or your internet the documents that are most frequently interacted with so
they're open the most often those are obviously documents that are high priority those are
the ones that the majority of people are going to be using on a regular basis also the most
recent documents so you want to make sure that you are not creating a bigger problem
for yourself as you work through this so those documents that you're producing on a regular
basis the the stuff that has the the most up-to-date information about your organization
you want to make sure that you are also prioritizing those third would be lowest complexity and
the reason for that is because the the complexity of a document can really impact how much time
it takes to make it accessible so if you are able to get through lower complexity documents
you're typically going to be able to work through a lot more content in a shorter amount
of time so if you choose to work on the highest complexity documents then you're not going
to be having as great of an impact because you're going to be spending more time working
on those more complicated elements it's not to say that complicated documents should be
completely ignored but we would say that you can be have a create a you can create more
accessible content quickly if you choose to work through those lower complexity documents
first and then the fourth would be everything else so that would be you know those older
documents something that might be outdated things that you might choose to you know put
in an archive somewhere stuff that's just not necessarily being used on a regular basis
or it's very old or it's highly complex and it's going to take you a little bit of a technical
know-how and some nuance to get through the remediation of it
so the fifth step in this process would be to choose a tool or a vendor so are you going
to do this in-house or are you going to outsource so first do you have the budgets do you have
the staff how much training does your staff require how many people need to be trained
how much content needs to be remediated how much new content is published on a regular
basis and also what is your timeline so kind of understanding all of these different factors
can go into your decision making whether you want to bring in a software tool to remediate
things internally or if you would like to outsource so it really the you know if determining
if you have a budget is really the ideal first step because do you want to spend money on
an annual subscription to a software tool and then of course you have the expense of
human resources having to use that software or you do you want to do you have the budget
to outsource now outsourcing documents can get it can get expensive because if you think
about it you're remediating at the per-page level most remediation services are going
to charge you on a page level so understanding that if you have hundreds of thousands of
old PDF pages outsourcing that can really kind of add up to a pretty a pretty large
invoice at the end of that entire process but also you have to consider do you have
the budget for a lawsuit so these are things that cannot be ignored it's at some point
you have to make you have to make a commitment and choose a path that you want to go because
you know you're you're not going to want to be sued over having your website and your
internet full of inaccessible content so just understanding these types of things can go
into that budgeting decision and also understanding you know the technical expertise of the people
that you have on staff
so step six would be to remediate the documents so making every PDF accessible so working
through the documents using the plan whether that be in-house or outsourcing and tracking
all of the documents to be sure that none are missed so if you're using the tool if
you're using a tool to remediate documents you also need to make sure that you're confirming
that everything is in fact accessible before you post it to the website or distribute it
to your clients whatever it may be if you're outsourcing documents that is typically included
as part of the price of that of that remediation service where they are validating documents
for you but you also need to make sure that of course you are replacing the the old documents
with the new documents that have been provided by the remediation service company and nothing
of course will stop you from doing your own sort of third-party validation of these documents
if you were to outsource them so we would always encourage additional checking and confirmation
that everything is in fact accessible and usable in the documents whether you have done
them yourself or whether you have outsourced the documents to a remediation service so
just touching more on that step seven is to validate the documents so are they all accessible
and are they all usable there is a difference between the two so if if you're using if you
use testing tools to ensure that the documents are compliant or you can validate using assistive
technology to ensure that the documents are usable so the there is just a touch briefly
on the difference between accessible versus usable many organizations are just aiming
for you know what we might call bare minimum compliance so making sure that these documents
can pass an automated checking tool so that they aren't being you know tripped up during
an accessibility audit for saying that “oh your document is inaccessible” but there
is a big gap between what is bare minimum compliance in terms of accessibility versus
what is actually usable there are many ways to trick these sort of validation tools or
these checking tools so we always encourage you to use assistive technology to really
replicate how an end user is going to be interacting with that document to make sure that everything
is navigating as you would expect to confirm that the reading order has been appropriately
set to make sure that links are taking the user to the correct destination all of these
different elements really you really need to use assistive technology to properly check
and validate so the final step in this process would be the maintenance of these documents
so once you get compliant you want to stay compliant we don't want to have to go back
and retroactively you know make all these different types of changes to documents and
we don't want to create a new backlog for ourselves so accessibility isn't “one and
done” and you need to check new content regularly and make staff accountable for the
new content that they're producing so stay on top of it like I said you don't want to
create another mountain of documents that you have to then a year from now or two years
from now go back and retroactively remediate yet again so once you've gone through sort
of the once you've gone through the the trouble of remediating your backlogs of documents
and getting everything up to speed and up to date you want to make sure that you are
staying on top of that it's a lot easier to maintain this at the design level and at the
you know sort of document by document as they're being published level versus you know creating
thousands of new documents that then have to go back and be fixed down the road
okay so this is a quick slide here just talking a bit about our competitors so we are of course
Equidox and mainly in when it comes to PDF accessibility when you think of PDF most people
think of Adobe Acrobat and also another competitor for ours would be Commonlook so this is just
a quick little table here that's just going through a few of the advantages of Equidox
over Adobe and Commonlook
so getting into a few of the details of Equidox so Equidox is PDF remediation software we
feel that it is easier faster and better it automatically detects PDF elements so when
you import documents you're getting either existing tag structure automatically detected
or if there is no existing tag structure Equidox is automatically picking up things like text
hyperlinks images pages that require optical character recognition fillable form fields
so on and so forth so you're getting automatically detected PDF elements just by importing the
document we also have an AI-powered Smart Table Detector that makes PDF remedi or table
remediation in PDFs can be very painstaking and tedious and technical and slow if you
are doing it the manual way with a tool like Adobe Acrobat but we have a different approach
to remediating tables and we can spend literally seconds working on tables rather than hours
if you're doing it the manual way we also have an AI-powered Smart List Detector so
much like tables lists can be a very tedious and technical type of element to properly
tag in a PDF but again we have a different approach to it using artificial intelligence
computer vision and machine learning that allows us to very quickly pick up list tag
structures and develop them whether it's a standard list that's just you know like a
few bullet points whether it's an entire page of lists whether it's a nested list that goes
across multiple pages there are many different types of complicated lists but our AI-powered
Smart List Detector allows you to very very quickly tag them with almost no technical
expertise required we also offer the remediation of PDF forms so fillable forms are sort of
notorious for being technical and challenging to remediate Equidox offers a solution for
that we can very quickly remediate forms by off by adding in the tooltip for the different
form fields it's that's a much faster process for for tagging for tagging forms which are
notoriously slow and take a lot of time we're also able to add alt text for images all in
one place so alt text is something that's required of images if you're not artifacting
the image of course but if what we offer in Equidox is a consolidated list of all of the
images for the document in one location which offers a lot of advantages so if you have
things like repetitive logos that are on every page in the document you can quickly artifact
all of the the the instances of that logo that you don't want to be included in the
PDF and that then you don't have to apply alt text to it or if you require subject matter
expertise let's say you're in a higher ed institution and you've been asked to remediate
a chemistry document that is using all kinds of charts and graphics and tables and things
that you don't really know how to provide alt text for because you're not the chemistry
expert well you're able to then just you know work with the work with the professor or the
teacher's assistant to get accurate alt text for those charts and graphics so that you're
providing that accurate information to the end user you're able to then just quickly
you know copy and paste or have that professor or that teacher's assistant assist you by
adding in the alt text themselves and it makes it very simple because you have all the images
whether it's one page or a hundred pages all of the images can be consolidated to a single
location so that you can very quickly streamline your approach for adding in that alt text
the other another element is the HTML Preview which is a way of kind of checking your work
as you go so as you're working through a document you're looking at this what we would call
the HTML preview it will show you the structure that you've built in the PDF so you're able
to see things like your reading order your headings your lists your tables everything
is populating in this HTML preview and HTML is a very simple linear format and it really
just is a reflection of how a screen reader is going to interact with that PDF page if
you were to export the document so it's a way of checking your work as you go you also
will get compliance warnings when you export the document so although we don't really subscribe
to the idea that PDF accessibility checking can be entirely automated in terms of you
know compliance versus usability you are getting information about the document that you're
exporting so it's it's kind of watching your back for things like illogical heading structure
missing alt text if you have links that don't have a destination set there are a number
of different checks that are being applied when you export the document so it's like
another layer of protection for you when you're remediating documents Equidox is kind of watching
your back making sure that you're exporting a document that has at least logical tag structure
you're also able to collaborate on large and complex documents so because the way that
we work with the PDF we're able to interact with individual pages and Equidox being a
web-based application you can have multiple people working together on a document they
don't have to be hunched over the same computer together they can be in totally separate areas
they can be at home or at the library it doesn't matter they can be working from anywhere but
you can actually have multiple people working on the same documents simultaneously so if
you have a 200-page annual report that needs to be posted right away well maybe you put
your four best remediators on it and every one of them takes 50 pages and they can all
be working together simultaneously without disrupting the other the other person's work
and that will allow them to get through that content very very quickly so that you can
get that document you know remediated validated and posted to the site
so just talking a bit more about Equidox we do offer software licenses and that those
licenses are a concurrent user licensing model so what I mean by that is if your organization
were to purchase let's say 20 concurrent licenses that means 20 people could be logged in working
on Equidox at the same time but you might have additional users that actually have access
to it it's just a matter of how many are working on the on the tool at any given moment we
also can offer organization-wide licenses and we can integrate with single sign-on solutions
so if this is the type of tool that you'd like to deploy to your entire organization
that's definitely something that we can support we also offer free training and support with
Equidox so we want to make sure that everyone is getting the most out of their their subscription
to the license so we we do offer training for all new licensed users and then also support
is built right into the application so if you're having any sort of issues whatsoever
any questions along the way you can always drop us a line through our support ticketing
system we also can offer a cloud-based or an on-premise version so I mentioned that
Equidox is a web-based application so you can operate it directly through a browser
now you can operate through the cloud as we as kind of like what the genesis of Equidox
was was a cloud-based application but we now offer an on-premise version as well so if
you would like to keep this on your own network on your own servers inside your own four walls
whether it be for you know just it security reasons or if you have you know sensitive
data that you would like to keep protected inside of your own servers that's totally
an option that we can support now so happy to talk to anyone after this call if you have
any questions about how that works we can certainly set up a a call to discuss in more
detail and also we offer professional conversion services so we do have a team of expert PDF
remediators on staff so the the conversion services process it kind of goes like this
so first you will request a quote you then you will upload the documents and then our
Equidox are our Equidox remediators our expert remediators they will remediate the documents
using Equidox and then we put those documents through rigorous validation including using
screen readers so there's a multi-step validation process that we put every document through
and then we will return those documents to you so if there if you feel that you have
a you know a large batch of documents that you don't feel comfortable taking on yourself
please feel free to reach out to us we'd love to take a look at the documents and we can
certainly give you a quote for what it will take for us to remediate them for you and
the pr we often get questions about the pricing model for our services so pricing is based
on three parameters first the the volume so how many documents are you working with how
many pages are there that's a main factor in the pricing because we do charge at the
page level the complexity of these pages so are these documents very very complex or are
they simple you know text-based word documents it really can depend and it can impact the
pricing so there's a big difference between you know a simple document that just basically
contains text and headings versus a you know an irs form that has you know 150 fields on
it there's a lot of different a lot of different things that go into remediating a very complex
document so that can impact the price on how we and how we will quote that document and
also the delivery is another factor so how quickly does this need to be completed if
you need the document back tomorrow there are cases when we can certainly support that
but it will impact the price versus if you're kind of pushing things out you know if you
don't need the document back for a week or a month or two months whatever it may be that
will also go into the pricing factor and so as I mentioned before the typical workflow
so documents are submitted for a quote deadlines standards and procedures are agreed upon a
system for document transfer between the parties is developed so whether that be like through
google drive or some of one of your ftp servers or if you want to send it to us through dropbox
whatever it may be just get us the documents one way or another documents are remediated
validated by our team and then returned to our customers and then of course we also offer
a hybrid model so this is always something that we encourage so teamwork makes the dream
work so first you can obtain our software so you're working through the less complex
documents or perhaps the new content that you're producing and then you're able to also
outsource documents to us so if you have documents that you have like a a short timeline on if
you need it back right away if you have complicated documents that you don't feel that you have
the technical expertise to to work through or if you have a large backlog of documents
you're able to offs outsource that to us and also we're going to talk a little bit about
a couple of of case studies about how clients work with Equidox so both using software in-house
are our expert remediation and validation and as well as a hybrid of both software and
services so accomplishing large PDF remediation projects address the backlog through a vendor
service or staff allocations choose software and train the staff make content creators
responsible for accessibility of future content which will both fulfill accessibility goals
and also eliminates the need for future large-scale services down the road and also of course
perform regular maintenance so that's just kind of a quick summary of what we've been
talking about but these are all very important parts of the PDF remediation process and now
we have a few minutes left and I'm just going to turn it over to one of our account managers
Dawn Campbell she's going to talk quickly about a a couple of her clients and how they're
best using Equidox and our services [Dawn Campbell] Thanks Dan thanks for having
me today I'm actually only going to talk about one particular project I have number of customers
and I'm always not sure which which to talk about because so many of them I am very excited
to be working with but this particular project is a county that is located just outside of
Toronto and encompasses seven municipalities within this county government so where there
where they approached us was a couple of years ago because in Ontario there are there is
mandated accessibility legislation and that that deadline actually passed last year now
it is important for again anyone that might be on this call in the united states to also
understand that Canada and the federal government also has mandated accessibility legislation
along with many of the provinces so if you're thinking about doing work here or having business
here you should be familiarize yourself with that now this particular county had a very
proactive accessibility coordinator that was hired where she did a lot of training with
staff around the importance of designing an accessible document in that source so that
really helped again for future now the challenge was was that over the last how many years
of building a website they had all of this inaccessible PDF that was already created
so again this was a team this was a coordinator of this government that knew Acrobat and was
familiar with the challenges of Acrobat and was looking for a tool to that again required
did not require such an in-depth PDF tag tree expertise and one that offered free training
so that's where Equidox came into play Dan can you change the slide for me sure so their
process was actually really really really interesting to watch and again as the account
manager in third party it was exciting process to watch because essentially they'd had to
do an internal audit it's exactly what Dan talked about already they did an internal
audit to discover what and how many PDFs were on their website they divided those PDFs based
on PDFs up based on the departments and each department within that government was asked
to figure out which was most important and where did they want to start prioritize and
then they purchased 10 software licenses and a champion was basically created from each
of those department a champion who understood again and did you know work the most in Equidox
so there was free software training provided for all of the relevant staff Equidox again
this was a really neat hybrid customer because we realized we had to play catch-up from like
the last 20 years of all of this PDF so they I did budget to be able to have Equidox remediation
team help them with again the larger bulk of the historical documents that needed to
be validated and then again they had the software so it was they were able to again do projects
in-house themselves can you change the slide
so again just as an overview multiple departments were responsible we you know this is a customer
who has 39 registered users of Equidox and they come from all of the different departments
Communications Community and Social Services Transportation Corporate Services Finance
Office of the CAO and you know they're in there every day validating and remediating
using the tool the documents that they address are everything from meeting minutes to job
posting to agendas to bylaws to reports a whole array of complexity they're able to
address last slide Dan and and again this is just a quote from myself really working
with this county continues to be a privilege they have been proactive in teaching the fundamentals
of accessible design while addressing both an immediate compliance issue as well ensuring
software and services are in place to remain accessible for their community
[Dan Tuleta] Great thanks again so we we intended on having a few minutes to go into an Equidox
demo but in the interest of time it is 2:30 already I apologize for being long-winded
we will send out this slide deck though however and it will contain a previous short demo
video of Equidox for anyone that would like to just get a quick overview of how the software
works but I would always I would certainly encourage you to reach out to us if you can
to schedule a more one-on-one demo we'd love to talk more about your organization exactly
what type of challenges you're facing what type of documents you're working with and
we can set up a time to discuss both our services as well as our Equidox software so as always
feel free to reach out to us at EquidoxSales@onixnet.com our website is www.Equidox.co
we can also be reached at 800-664-9638
we're also very active on social media, especially LinkedIn so please feel free to follow us
on any of the social media platforms that you'd like and there is also going to be I
believe a short survey sent out to anyone that attended this webinar so after the fact
so we would always appreciate if you could respond to that survey give us some feedback
let us know if there are any topics you'd like to see in upcoming webinars we certainly
would love to hear from you in any capacity so thank everyone for joining today have a
great rest of your day and we will see you next month