Okay I'm showing two o'clock on my phone so I think it's a good time to get started welcome
everyone thank you all for joining us today for another edition of Equidox Webinar Wednesdays
it's been a while since we've done just a standard demonstration of how our software works so this
month we've chosen just to give any existing users a refresher demonstration on how the product works
or if you are a new user which if you are welcome this is going to be just a
quick overview about how you can use Equidox to remediate your PDF documents so as always you
can reach out to us at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com or you can visit our website at www.Equidox.co
or our 800 number is 800-664-9638
so if you have any follow-up questions or if you'd like to set up maybe a more one-on-one
topic-specific demo and talk about documents that might be more relevant to your organization
we would love to chat with you so please feel free to reach out to us after this webinar
so just a quick word about our parent company Onix networking we are headquartered here in Cleveland,
Ohio but we do have employees across North America and we also have an extra office in Canada
we've been in business for over 28 years now supporting our customers technology initiatives
we are primarily known as a Google partner we've been 11 times the Google Partner of the Year
award winner we're also partnered with Amazon web services and we're an advanced consulting partner
our company's mission is to improve organizational efficiency through cloud computing solutions
now Equidox is a division of Onix and we are we are primarily focused on PDF accessibility
although we do offer other consulting services around digital accessibility like websites
mobile applications things of that nature but we are best known for our best-in-class PDF
remediation software as well as our professional PDF remediation services so any any organizations
that might not have the bandwidth or feel that they don't have the expertise required
to remediate their own documents you are able to send documents to us and our team of remediators
will work on your documents validate them and get them back to you in an accessible as well as a
compliant version of them we do also offer expert accessibility services and our mission is to
ensure that digital information reaches everyone through accessibility solutions now this is just
a quick slide of some of our customers so I'll just let these run through now we do work with
organizations of all different sizes small medium large and in many different verticals really to us
a PDF document is a PDF document so just about every organization out there is producing and
using PDFs on a regular basis so if you're focused on digital accessibility we are the people to see
and I also just want to briefly mention and I'll remind everyone at the end of the demonstration
that we will be at the we will be hosting a happy hour party at the AHEAD conference coming up
the AHEAD conference is more of a it's it's primarily an education conference but it's
hosted in our hometown of Cleveland this year it's July 21st so if anyone on this webinar is joining
or is attending the AHEAD conference please feel free to drop by and see us at the booth
and we will be glad to invite you to our happy hour that we're hosting so I'll mention that again
at the end but at this time I'm going to jump into an actual demonstration of how the product works
so here I am in my Equidox application if you notice I'm actually operating directly
through a browser the advantage of Equidox being operated through a browser is that you don't have
to install or update or maintain software on any given machine which is really handy
to deploy Equidox to a much larger group of users so we work with a concurrent user licensing model
and what I mean by that is let's just say your organization were to purchase 20 concurrent
licenses of Equidox that means 20 different users could be logged in simultaneously and working on
their documents so we don't necessarily put a cap on how many people can have access to the tool
it's just about how many are using it at any given time being that it's web-based there's also a lot
of nice collaboration features built in we're able to share documents through the application
so if you needed to work with a subject matter expert on maybe a very technical document or if
they're if you're a new user and you have a very advanced document you'd like to ask for help with
you can do all of that through the application you can even have multiple people working on the
same document simultaneously so for a situation where you have maybe a very long document or a
document with a very tight deadline that you need to get remediated and posted right away
you could have your best remediators kind of sharing that workload working simultaneously
from their own individual computers they don't have to be in the same room nothing like that
they can be totally isolated working on different pages in that document so that you can kind of
power through those those large volume projects or those projects with tight deadlines very quickly
now what we're looking at here is just a list of documents that I've loaded into the tool for
just various demos and trainings that I do so these documents are are in my Equidox account
and they're ready to be worked on at any time to show you how to get documents into Equidox I
would first click over here on the import button so that's the second tab on the left hand side
and that will bring me to this import screen where I have two options I can either upload documents
directly from my hard drive or I can copy and paste URLs so this is particularly helpful
if you've done like a website audit you might have a spreadsheet or a .csv file that contains
a bunch of different URLs for PDFs that are scattered all over your website so instead
of having to go and download those individual PDFs which could be a full day project in itself
you can actually just copy and paste the URLs into this field and then Equidox can go and
automatically retrieve those documents for you through their URL in this case I've got plenty
of PDFs on my hard drive so I'm going to use the upload tab so if I just open up my folders I've
already selected a few documents so I'll just drag and drop these four documents into this gray area
and then you'll quickly see these green check marks indicating that the documents have been
uploaded now once they're uploaded I get this blue import button that will appear and pressing
this blue import button will kick off an automated process where Equidox will begin to evaluate these
files and what it's looking for during this import are things like existing tag structure so if the
document were previously tagged whether that be coming from the source file like microsoft word
or indesign when you hit save as PDF there are typically some PDF tags that are automatically
generated however those are not by any means guaranteed to make the document accessible
and that's really what a tool like Equidox is for to retroactively look at those PDF tags and just
clean them up make sure that they are accurate and make sure that that document is going to be
compatible with assistive technology so you can't always rely on existing tag structure
now the alternative is that maybe those documents weren't previously tagged in any way and that's
fine as well because what Equidox does during the import is it will automatically detect
various elements of that PDF and it will give you a head start on that remediation process
so Equidox will find all of the text elements so different paragraphs in the in the document
it will find images it will find hyperlinks fillable form fields pages that require optical
character recognition just different elements that make up the PDF document are going to be
detected during that import and really it's all aimed at making your process as you go through
a little bit smoother so that you're not having to do as much manual manipulation
of the individual pages okay so now those four documents are imported while I was talking there
if I return to the main document list let me close out of this closed captioning
I don't know why my internet is slow there we go so when I return to the main document list I will
see that I now have these four new documents here ready to be worked on at any time I'm actually
going to get started with this document here it's a pretty straightforward simple document
and it was actually previously tagged it's most likely just a Microsoft Word document
which is very common so it was actually created in Microsoft Word for Office 365. I can see that
right here on the document detail page one thing I like to mention on this document detail page is
that you have the ability to change the document title that's an important part of accessibility
so for example this document if you notice the file name actually took over the document title
so there was no document title provided you can update this right here in this title field so you
would certainly want to like make sure that you're inserting spaces between these words
and then you don't need things like the dot PDF suffix so a nice clean and consistent clear
document title is really important because that's typically the first touch point that
a user will have when they are navigating your site and looking for a specific document
you can also set language attributes at this point so if you have any documents that are presented in
different languages the primary one being English that's the default setting of Equidox but let's
say you have a Spanish version of this document you would just change the language attribute to
Spanish to trigger the screen reader to read from a Spanish library of words therefore it
won't be an English screen reader mispronouncing a bunch of Spanish words which will sound very silly
to the native Spanish speaker who is listening to that document through their screen reading device
you can also share this document with other users so that's important if you
wanted to ask for help on that document you can share it with other users in your account
so if you need help with anything you can obviously collaborate and work together as a team
now I'm going to jump in here into page one and take a look at what we have so we remember that
this document was previously tagged coming out of Microsoft Word and if you notice right away
what I'm looking at are these yellow boxes that are covering up the content on the page
this is all great we've got all of our different paragraphs recognized for us that's handy
but one thing I notice if I zoom in a bit is I can see that my heading level one is way down here
so for whatever reason whoever was publishing this document perhaps they were using heading styles
this got set as the heading level one for the document for some reason whereas I would think
that the heading level one should probably be up here at the very top of the page so these yellow
boxes that we're looking at think of these as a replacement to tags they really do equate to tags
we call them reading zones but all of these with labeled with the “TX” in the upper left
hand corner of the zone those are going to equate to P tags when we export the document and then
the number in the right hand corner of the zone that's indicating the reading order of the page
so the default assumption for the reading order is that it's left to right top to
bottom which will work fairly well for this document because it's pretty much a standard
just top to bottom reading order for every one of these pages so we don't have much to change there
now I'm not too satisfied with this heading level one being way down here I could change this and
turn this back into like a a Text Zone or maybe a heading level two and then set this as my heading
level one but before I go any further I want to show you a really important tool of within Equidox
that kind of helps automate things if I go to the page tab over here on the left hand side we have
this tool called the Zone Detector now the Zone Detector is handy if you don't like the initial
tag structure that you've been given or if you don't like the way that Equidox detected the the
structure and the layout of the page initially so if you don't like the structure you can use this
tool and you can slide this back and forth left and right and you'll notice how the granularity
of these reading zones starts to change so this is a way of helping to automate the process
where if you don't like what you've been given to start you can kind of change it to find that sweet
spot for the page and then you don't have to make as many manual adjustments to the individual zones
so just taking a quick look here you can see that I still have all those paragraphs nicely detected
and if I come up here to my preview button if I look up here this button in the right hand corner
it looks like a computer monitor if I press this at any time this is another really helpful tool
within Equidox this is an HTML preview of the page that I'm currently working on so I'm able to see
the structure that I've built in this very simple linear HTML view and this is essentially just a
reflection of what a screen reader is going to read out loud if I were to export this document
right now so as I make changes to my PDF page I will see those changes come to life over here in
my HTML preview now what I mean by that is let's say I bring the Zone Detector like way down to the
left and I get like individual paragraphs for each one of these lines of text this is obviously far
too granular and when I go to the preview you're going to see like the change that it's instantly
made obviously that's not correct we don't want each of these lines of text to be read as its own
individual paragraph at the same time if I bring the detection slider all the way to the right
this is a big giant paragraph over the entire page and that is going to render as this very clearly
incorrect giant paragraph where I need a I need a much more granular breakdown of these paragraphs
so I'm going to go back to something like I had before something along this along these lines in
this in this neighborhood of the Zone Detector and that's going to give me nice detection and
from here it's just a matter of setting a couple of headings so I'm gonna set this element here
as my heading level one now it's a Text Zone by default but I could change it to a heading through
the drop down menu or I can use my keyboard shortcuts so if I just tap “1” on my keyboard
that will set it to an H1 and when I look at the HTML preview I'll see much larger font
to indicate that I have in fact set that as a heading level one now down here I might elect
to set this as a heading level two so this is almost like an outline across this page it's
these are subsections of this much larger heading level one but if I wanted to set this as a heading
level two I can simply tap “2” on my keyboard and I will see that I have larger font here
representing the heading level two so the rest of this page is pretty much clean I don't really
need to do anything else to it so I can then move on to the subsequent pages in the document
so again this is another heading level one so I could just quickly change this to a heading level
two and the rest of this page looks pretty good if you notice there's a link inside of this paragraph
but Equidox detects that link automatically so I don't have to worry about it the anchor point is
already provided the zone is already there waiting for me and all of my Text Zones have already been
detected so when you get into documents like this you can move very quickly through them if you know
what you're trying to accomplish it's just a matter of maybe bumping the detection slider
setting a heading level two and then here we can use break lines to identify these sort of
different addresses and contact information and that will render slightly differently in
the HTML preview where you'll see it'll be more reflective of how it looks in the PDF
but essentially it will put a small pause at the end of each one of these lines of
text to read it a little bit more smoothly for something like an address
so a document like this once you get into the flow of using Equidox and you kind of understand what
you're trying to accomplish you can remediate a document like this literally in seconds
you know 30 seconds to a minute to get through four pages and then from there
I would just save the document close out of it to return back to the document detail page and
then I would go to my Output Tab now my Output Tab will allow me to export this document in
multiple formats if I'd like the primary one being PDF so I can simply press generate PDF
and Equidox will produce a brand new document for me and it's going to look and feel exactly
the same as the original there's not going to be anything different about this new document
but it's going to have all of that tag structure that I've just built so the headings and the
reading order the hyperlinks all of that is going to be automatically tagged by Equidox simply by
exporting it so this is my new document it's ready to be sent off wherever it needs to go posted to
the website sent to a client whatever whatever it needs this is your new PDF that can be used
and replace the old one that might be sitting on the website that was
inaccessible now I'm going to jump into a different document now that has a little bit
more to it so there's a document that has well one of the primary challenges of PDF accessibility is
something like tables. tables can be really quite a burden to deal with so let's just take a look at
like this page here for example so this page here has some tables on it and if you've ever done PDF
remediation before you and you've done it probably with Adobe Acrobat you know that tables are
really one of the hardest elements to tackle there are so many steps associated with it
now this document was again previously tagged and I already have some table structure here but let's
assume that you don't have the table structure already maybe you arrive at the table and it
looks something like this very scary when you've got all these Text Zones for each individual cell
and if you look at the HTML preview you can see like this is not at all how a table should be read
by a screen reader that's quite a mess so what I can do to fix this is I can just simply place
a single zone over the entire table and then hit t on my keyboard t for table or I could use the drop
down menu and then this blue Table Editor button will appear so when I pop open the Table Editor
I will just be isolating this portion of the page for myself and you'll see these green grid lines
and this is Equidox's just initial guess at the basic cell structure of the table
it did an okay job as you can probably tell but it missed the mark on the columns especially
now we can improve upon this detection using our Table Detector so this is using a combination of
computer vision and machine learning so as I move these detection sliders back and forth left and
right you'll see how they the green grid lines start to change their detection of this table
so moving them around you can just again find like that ideal sweet spot where
you get all of your cells organized correctly so ins we remember how ugly this was before when it
was just going to be reading random bits of data in like a left to right top to bottom
way now when I press the preview button what we're going to have is a nice clean HTML table
and then this will all be read correctly through a screen reader and allow that user to navigate
the table data so if they find themselves in this particular cell they know that they are in
the administrative assistant row and they know that they are in the median lowest wage column
so they can navigate freely through this table data and always understand where they are located
in terms of the table structure with the rows and the columns so the beautiful part of Equidox
is that all you're doing to tag this table is interact with it here like on the surface level
where you place these green grid lines in the correct locations and then Equidox will show
it to you in this nice clean HTML preview and it does the hard part when you export the document
it will actually convert this HTML structure back into a PDF tag tree so you don't have to
understand the many nuances of tagging a PDF table where a table like this could easily take you an
hour to work through in Equidox it takes I don't know 10 to 15 seconds and then you would just save
it and close out and if you notice all of those individual Text Zones that were there before they
have all been replaced by this single Table Zone now tables can be even more complicated than this
I have another document in here that has quite a complex table which would literally be like
this document you know would be like a clear your calendar for the day if you had a document that
was like this or full of tables like this you have multiple column header levels up here you have
spanning that you need to do and look at all these data cells there are so many steps associated with
tagging this document correctly in Acrobat and you think well it's just one page how bad could it be
I'm i'm telling you it could literally take you many hours to get through a page like this
all we do is hear horror stories of how long it takes to remediate tables in Acrobat whenever
we're doing product demonstrations or talking to prospects and clients every single one of them
across the board tells us how difficult and how time-consuming table remediation is when you're
doing it manually in Acrobat so with this I'm just going to hit draw zone over the table hit “T”
and open up the Table Editor and even though this table has quite literally like like hundreds and
hundreds of cells in it again I'm just using the Table Detector here and it's going to do
all of that hard work for me by giving me all of these grid these gridlines here which if
you can tell I miss one row at the bottom so I can quickly just hit “R” for an extra row
and then if I just go to my HTML preview what I'll see is I've got basic table structure so
I'm pretty close I just have to clean up the top portion here where I have some spanning to do
so if I go back here I've got a little bit of a complicated mess up here with the different ways
that the row and column headers are spaced out so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just get rid
of this row here by hitting “D” on my keyboard, “D” for delete and then if I just start spanning
all I'm doing is holding SHIFT and pressing “S” and I'm going to hold SHIFT and press “S”
and then that's going to accomplish those spans for me so if you notice it turns
green to indicate that you've spanned and then from here I just need to get rid of this row
and span straight down for these two cells now once I've done that when I go back to my preview
I'll see that I've cleaned up that top portion but the last thing I need to address now is the fact
that I have three rows of column headers so the column headers are represented in that bold font
same as the row headers they are represented with that bold font to indicate that they
will be tagged as table headers whereas the standard font style is indicating table data
so this table has three rows of column headers so I would simply just change that here
in my column and row header field so changing the column header from the defaults one
to three and then when I return to the preview you will see that now my top three rows all have that
bold font style to indicate table headers whereas the rest is standard font for table data so that's
how quickly you can tag a very complicated table like this by comparison if you could do that if
you could do this table in like less than an hour I would be stunned in Acrobat in Equidox
it doesn't take much to get it to a perfectly usable accessible version in less than a minute
now another tricky element type that I want to address in in how we kind of address it in Equidox
are things like lists so if I open up a document that has some lists in it
so let's take a look here at this list so this list was again previously tagged so
Equidox imports that existing list structure but you won't always be so lucky you won't
always have existing tag structure so let's say you were to start with just a Text Zone
now if I were to look at the HTML preview this list is going to be read sort of just
like a strange run-on paragraph if I were to leave it as is it's not going to have
any list structure to indicate that this is a single list with three distinct items so what
I'll do is just simply hit “L” on my keyboard and then I have a List Detector that will appear and
if I bump that slider from left to right that will instantly detect that there are three list items
in this list and then if I refresh my HTML preview you'll see the change where now I have a real list
delineated by three individual bullet points to isolate the three list items so this list is now
tagged and you can move on to other elements in the document now of course I would want to clean
up some other things on this page but we're really just looking at this document to talk about lists
I think you can see that just taking a quick glance here the detection of Equidox it really
gives you that great starting point where I'm not having to manipulate much on this
page maybe just setting a heading level one and tinkering around with the reading order slightly
I'm going to jump to page two to show you a nested list so these nested lists are much more
complicated and this is the type of mess that you can see coming out of Microsoft Word where
it tagged this as a list but it really made like I don't know what it was doing whereas it's dragging
that entire list all the way down here so this is an example of sure the document was previously
tagged but not tagged very well so if we just focus here on the nested list portion if I just
place again that single zone over this element and the nested list is much more complicated in
especially when doing it in Acrobat because you have lists inside of list items so it really
kind of compounds the complexity and the time that's needed to remediate lists like this but
in Equidox again I just put a single zone around it hit “L” for list and then move my detection
slider over a bit further when I move it over and use the different settings it's going to invoke
computer vision and machine learning so you'll see how it's got the five main items detected based on
the location of their bullet points but then the computer vision looks inside of the items and it
isolates the fact that there are other lists in there and it's already drawn these zones for me
so when I go to my HTML preview what we'll see is I've built nested list tag structure in just
a few seconds again by comparison this is like maybe a 20 minute process in Acrobat depending
on your skill level but yeah if you could do it in 20 minutes I'd be pretty impressed there's just
a lot of steps associated with tagging all of the list labels and the list items and the list bodies
stacking it all together expanding and collapsing the tag panel it's very tricky very time consuming
very slow okay so that's lists just to mention a couple of other features we can instantly reset
Reading Order for a page so if I were to just use this page for example you're able to change
the reading order for the entire page using the default top to bottom or two three or four columns
depending on the layout so Equidox can instantly reorder the page if you don't like the reading
order or if you've made adjustments to the page and inserted new zones that have taken on a new
a new slot within the reading order you can quickly reset that reading order for the entire
page you can also click on an individual zone and change the order of it and you can actually use
the decimal system so if you want to set this zone for example to the first zone right on the page
you might think well if I change that to one then I have to change one to two and two to
three and three to four and play a game of like musical chairs with all of the zones on the page
but in fact you can actually just put a period in front of the four to make it point for
and that will have that element read first whereas everything else will fall in line behind it so you
have multiple ways of adjusting reading order in Equidox it's actually really really helpful
and then also if I jump to a document that has some images in it I also want to mention the fact
that we do give you a consolidated list of all the images in the document in one location so this is
really handy because you're able to see how many images there are the nature of the images are
they decorative things like logos or watermarks or are they something technical that's actually
adding value to the document so if you know what the images represent you can instantly apply your
alt text to them from this single list view or if you need a subject matter expert you can send them
this URL and say hey can you just go to the Images Tab and insert alt text for the images they might
not be a remediator per se but they can certainly use the Images Tab to describe the images because
assuming they were the ones that published or designed the document you can also do things like
artifact images so if you want to artifact all of the images with just a couple of clicks you can
I would not recommend that for a document like this but I see so many documents where it's just
a 100 page long report and every page has the same logo in the upper left hand corner you
don't need to tag the same logo 100 times with the same description that's very redundant so
you have the ability to artifact images with just a couple of clicks from this list view
and now you can also go into documents and you're able to click on images and maybe you
need to read a paragraph to understand the context of this image but you can actually
apply your alt description right here from this from the document detail view as well
another quick thing we have one minute left I noticed is setting heading templates
so let's say you wanted to set this as your heading level two if you hit two on your keyboard
and say use as template when I go to subsequent pages what Equidox will do is it will find all
zones that have the same font characteristics and it will automatically set that as your heading
level two style for that document it's really really helpful for sort of templatized documents
that are consistently designed throughout because you might have three 400 pages in a document and
if you can set all of your heading level twos all of your heading level threes if you can do all of
that ahead of time then you don't have to think as much as you're going through page by page so
these are just a couple of the automated features within Equidox there's so much more to talk about
I just want to be respectful of everyone's time so I i just will return here to the the main
Powerpoint slide because we are right at 2:30. But again we will be at AHEAD so if anyone especially
in the EDU in the EDU space is attending ahead please come see us we'll be at the booth and
we'll also be hosting a happy hour but also just want to remind everyone of our contact information
so we can be reached at EquidoxSales@Onixnet.com www.Equidox.com 800-664-9638 is our telephone
number and we're also very active on social media so connect with us on LinkedIn
Twitter visit our YouTube page for more training resources as well as Facebook and I believe Tammy
will be sending around a short survey just for some feedback on the web on the webinar
so if you have a moment and you can fill that out we would greatly appreciate it
but with that said I thank you all so much for attending and we will close for now but again
as I said please feel free to reach out if you have any follow-up questions or would like to see
a more one-on-one type of demonstration with your documents thanks everyone