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 visit our website at www.Equidox.co
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
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
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