 to ensure that content is directly accessible to as many folks as possible, and that it's also capable of being repurposed in different forms to match different people's sensory, physical, and cognitive abilities. The first principle is perceivable. Is the information presented to users in a way that they can perceive? And are there text alternatives included for visual content? Folks who cannot hear audio are captions available. Or for individuals who cannot see the video or hear the audio, is there a transcript available? Is the content presented in different ways for different needs? The second principle is operable. Can the user easily navigate around a document? And can they find content? Is it clear to them where they are within a document? Is functionality available from a keyboard? And you want to make sure that the content does not cause seizures. The third principle is understandable. Is the text readable, and does it make sense? Does the user understand how to use the interface in which they're viewing the material? And does it behave in predictable ways? Are users prompted to avoid incorrect mistakes? And finally, the last principle is robust. Is the content robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of current and future tools? Now, many accessibility standards relate to content styling and layout. For document accessibility, logical structure helps to paint a clear picture in the user's mind. And this is achieved by using navigation elements, such as table of contents, heading levels, and lists. Descriptive body copy is often overlooked but plays a significant role in accessibility. Content should be described supporting materials and set the framework for graphics. And descriptive body copy also helps keep alt text short and to the point. Make sure to include color friendly palettes that have a high contrast ratio between the foreground and the background to make it easily distinguishable for those who may have low vision. And also be sure to include text for visual elements, such as images, graphics, figures, and charts. The relationship between headings, paragraphs, figures, and page structure allows the reader multiple ways to navigate the document reliably. Establishing predictable patterns and documents helps the reader gain familiarity with the content as they cycle through the pages. And now that we've established an understanding of the principles and requirements for accessible document, let's look a little bit deeper at the software application and the tools within those applications that can guide a content creator to making a more accessible document. It's important to note that Microsoft Word is a word processing program, not a layout program. With that said, it is possible to create an accessible word document with nice layout when using the appropriate formatting tools. When reading a document, cited users can scan a page and use visual cues like larger or bold text to find a section of a document that they want to read. However, for somebody who uses a screen reader, these types of visual markups are useless. Using styles and headings will allow a screen reader user to navigate from section to section heading to heading rather than listening to the entire content from the top of the page to the bottom. It's important to use the headings tool to create the scaffolding that forms an outline of the content rather than manually making the text bigger and bolder as the heading tool provides an anchor point for screen readers to navigate by. And on the slide, I've included an image of the styles pane in Word. The styles pane displays styles included in a document and can be viewed by selecting the style pane icon on the home ribbon in Word. In this list of styles, you can see items such as normal text, heading one, heading two, so forth and so on. So you can think of a style as a set of predefined formatting instructions that is utilized consistently rather throughout a document. And they're used to tag or identify parts of a document. And styles can be easily modified in the styles pane and can be applied to a particular style throughout a document. Alt text provides textual information for visual elements contained in the document and should provide a brief description of the image and why that image is relevant. It's very easy in most applications, most office applications to add alt text to an image just by simply right clicking on it. Now there are many ways to add alt text this just happens to be one of them. But if you do it that way, a context menu will appear and within that menu will be an option to edit alt text. If you select that option, the alt text pane will pop out on the right hand side and a text field is prominent and displayed where you can enter your alt text for that image. Images that are decorative should be marked as such as they can be redundant and often annoying for screen reader users. In office, you can easily mark images as decorative by simply selecting a checkbox that says mark image as decorative. And Microsoft also has an option for machine generated alt text. They have included a button that says, generated description for me in the alt text pane that uses artificial intelligence to assign alt text to an image. I invite you to try this method and see what results you get but keep in mind this feature has some limitations and in my experience, the results aren't great. Lists are another way of creating structure and documents and you wanna make sure to use the correct list generating tool to do that. Use the bulleted list tool to create bulleted lists and the numbered list tool to create numbered lists. The multi-level list tool helps with creating nested lists of varying degrees with numbers and bullets. It's a little tricky to use but it's much more effective than using the regular bullet list tool and indenting lists manually. The multi-level tool will do all of that for you. And for tables, by default, assistive technology will read a table from left to right starting at the top. And if the relationship between the cells is not defined then the table is not formatted correctly. If heading cells aren't associated with data cells, a user can quickly get lost in a sea of data. When including a table in your document, be sure to use the table tools editor to identify headers within your table as this helps screen readers and assistive technology announce the table data in a more meaningful way. Simple tables and office applications can be made accessible but complex tables that have merged cells or multiple headers cannot. Meaningful hyperlinks make it easier for users to determine what that link is all about rather than listing a URL which usually has a long string of letters and characters. Using meaningful hyperlinks helps users know something about the destination of the link if they decide to click on it. Try to avoid using links that has big image or I'm sorry, big language such as click here. Adding document properties allows screen reader users to get a bit more information about the document without having the need to open it. And for somebody who uses a screen reader or other assistive technology, this can help limit the need to open a document to determine if this is the one that they're actually looking for. You can add a document title, a summary and keywords as these are helpful for searching and indexing of electronic documents as well. And if you have any foreign language content, be sure to include that correct language attribute as many screen reader applications support multiple languages and can switch on the fly between supported languages using the appropriate voice and rule set for the current language. Switch our focus to accessible PowerPoint now and all the steps presented in the previous slide that make Word documents accessible, those also apply to PowerPoint but with a few modifications. PowerPoint functions a bit differently than other formats as the content distributed throughout the slideshow is often very visual and image-based. One thing that makes PowerPoint a bit more complicated is that people can consume the content in various ways. They may be watching somebody present the PowerPoint like you're doing right now or they may be viewing a PowerPoint on their own computer or they may be viewing printed slides. But the way in which someone interacts with the slideshow is going to shape if and how they can access the content. Even if you don't intend to distribute your PowerPoint it's always important to remember that for someone who cannot see your presentation you must explain all the content presented on each slide. An important part of making accessible slide decks is to use the layout templates that are built into PowerPoint. This is important because screen readers may jump over or ignore items like text boxes that are added to slides that exist outside of the content boxes provided. You want to avoid selecting a blank slide from the layout menu and then adding a bunch of text boxes to populate the content on your slide. Instead select a layout template from the new slide dropdown menu on the home tab. Also on the home tab in the slide section there's a dropdown menu for layout to determine which template is used for a slide can navigate to that slide then open the layout menu. The layout template in use will be highlighted and I've included a screenshot image on this slide of the layout menu that shows the layout type. PowerPoint doesn't really use headings instead the slide title and layout templates essentially function like headings and that they aid in navigation and provide structure for the content. Every slide in a presentation must have a slide title and each slide title should be unique. Duplicated slide titles can be confusing and can make it difficult for someone to find information on a particular slide if they're looking for it. If you have any spillover information you might wanna consider using numbering in the slide title such as one of two and two of two so forth and so on. Individuals who have dyslexia describe seeing text that swims together on a page. They often see text that merge or distort. And for people who have dyslexia or low vision you may want to consider reducing the reading load of the text on the slide and use a larger font size of at least 18 points or more. They may also benefit from using familiar sans serif fonts such as Arial or Calibri. And avoid using all capital letters and excessive use of italics and then underlines as this is very visually distracting. Be sure to include ample space between sentences and paragraphs that help out with clarity. Excuse me, it goes without saying any videos that are embedded in a slide deck and should be accessible to visually impaired and hearing impaired users. And you wanna make sure that videos include captions and have audio description if that's necessary. I've mentioned alt text and images and word and the same is true in PowerPoint to add alt text to an image just simply right click on it and select edit alt text from the context menu. But if you have multiple images on a slide you may want to group the images by going to the arrange dropdown menu on the home tab. If you're on a Windows machine you can control click and select on all the images or if you're on a Mac it would be command click and then you'd go to the arrange dropdown menu and select group image. And this essentially flattens the images into a single unit and then you comply alt text to the entire group rather than each individual image. And that also the screen reader passes up over each one of those individual images and collectively sees it as a group. I wanted to bring up some common barriers to accessible content that I still see happening on occasion. Microsoft Office products have been around for quite some time, several decades in fact. And some folks have developed some workarounds for laying out content rather than using the formatting tools. And sometimes these workarounds cause barriers to accessible electronic documents. And I wanted to point out a few common barriers that content creators often use that really should be avoided and offer some solutions. First up are text boxes. While there's sometimes used text boxes as a call out to emphasize a thought. Screen readers read and navigate information in electronic documents in line. And that means that they read the information from beginning to end. If a text box is inserted into a document, let's say it's inserted in a margin, a screen reader may miss that information. Or if a screen reader does pick it up and catch it and announce it, it may be out of the normal reading order which can cause confusion. So the solution is to not use text boxes. I still see some document creators using tabs and spaces to format text in order to make it look like columns. And this causes some very unpredictable results when using a screen reader or other assistive technologies. It really messes up the reading order. So to make sure that your text flows accurately, I use the column layout tool in order to flow the text as a column. And this will force the screen reader to read the information as a column as it's presented. Non-printing characters such as heart, hard carriage returns and spaces and tabs, especially if there are many of them in succession will also be announced by the screen reader. And this can be very annoying. Instead of using hard carriage returns to create space between paragraphs, use the paragraph spacing option to achieve the desired look and to adjust the space you want between the paragraphs without having to use that hard carriage return. Also avoid using multiple hard carriage returns to push information to the next page. You wanna make sure to use page breaks instead. Screen readers will announce those hard carriage returns as blank. So if you have many of them on a page to push the information down to the next page, it will say over and over again blank, blank, blank, blank. And for some screen reader users, that's an indication that maybe that document is at the end and there's nothing left. So you wanna make sure to push that information using page break. When created with accessibility in mind, office documents are well supported by screen readers and other assistive technology. However, many content creators take that extra step of producing a PDF from Word or PowerPoint or other document authoring software for whatever reason. And if as a content creator, you decide to export or save as PDF for your office document, it's important to remember that the source document is supreme when it comes to creating an accessible PDF. A couple of things to keep in mind. Ask yourself, does the authoring tool of the source document allow the author to create an accessible document? So for example, Word and PowerPoint do have tools to help content creators make accessible content. And Office does have an accessibility checker to help the author make the document more accessible before being saved as a PDF. You can also ask yourself, does the author know how to create an accessible document? Are they using the styles appropriately to apply headings rather than just changing the font size and the weight? While it is possible to remediate or fix a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro. Amy, we have a couple of questions that I actually missed. Oh, do we? Okay, yeah, I can. Yeah, let's go ahead and take those. Leslie asks, I'm sorry, I may have missed your explanation. What is a hard carriage return? Sure, a hard carriage return is just when you hit Enter on your keyboard. And if you have non-printing characters enabled in your Word document, you usually see spaces and tabs and hard carriage returns in a lighter blue color. But that's the equivalent, like if you were on a typewriter, just using the hard carriage return, which back in the old days was this thing that stuck out on the cylinder of a typewriter. And that gives a full carriage return, a soft carriage return is when you hit Shift and Enter. So that's a little bit different. And then could you also compare that to a page break? Yeah, sure. So page breaks actually signify to assistive technology that we have left the previous page and are now on a current page. So sometimes when creating documents, you'll have a page that will start to flow onto a next page. But if you have a header section that maybe spills over and you want to make it kind of line up or be on the same page, some people will use hard carriage returns to push that information to artificially move to the next page. And that can kind of mess up your spacing. But using the page break feature in Word will accomplish the task of just putting that information on the right section of the following page. Hopefully I explained that correctly. Any other questions? Okay, I'm not hearing any more. So I'm gonna go ahead and continue on. Let's see, it is possible to fix a PDF document and make it accessible. It's easier to create an accessible source document and then export that and save it as an accessible PDF document. So you can use that and save it as an accessible PDF than it is to fix it as PDF has its own set of challenges. It's also important to know the proper steps for exporting or save as PDF depending upon the application. In Word, the proper method is to go to the file menu and select save as from the drop-down menu. Select PDF as the export format and then select save. And on a Mac, you'll be prompted to select, you'll be presented with another option to select an option for best for printing or best for electronic distribution and accessibility. So you wanna choose that second option of best for electronic distribution and accessibility as that will maintain the accessibility features that were used to create the accessible Word document. And that will produce a tag PDF that is accessible to screen reader users. And if done accurately, no further remediation is necessary for that PDF. But for PowerPoint, the method for saving a slide deck as an accessible PDF is completely different. Selecting save as and using the steps for creating an accessible PDF from Word will result in a PDF document that has no tags at all, essentially making it completely inaccessible. We have another question. Okay, let me finish up this spot and then I'll go on to that. Certainly. Yeah, so the proper procedure to save a PDF, I'm sorry, a proper procedure to save a PowerPoint document as a PDF is to select the Acrobat tab and then click on the create PDF icon as that will preserve the accessible formatting and create an accessible PDF document from the slide deck with the proper tag structure intact and no further remediation of that PDF document is necessary. Okay, go ahead, Anna Marie. The question is, does print to PDF create problems with accessibility? Yes, it does. Print to PDF is essentially meant for print distribution so that will completely break any accessibility that you've applied to your original source document when exporting to PDF. So you want to be aware of the proper method of exporting your source document to a PDF to maintain that. And print PDF is completely the incorrect way to do that. All it does is it maintains the look and feel of the source document to maintain the font and the spacing of the document itself. It doesn't maintain any of the underlying structure that was created to use, the underlying structure that was used to create an accessible document. Any other questions? That is all we have at this time in the chat. Okay, awesome. Okay, cool. So early in this presentation, I reviewed the four principles of accessibility. And I want to explain how those relate to web content accessibility guidelines or WCAG and PDF UA and what this has to do with document accessibility. Well, the World Wide Web Consortium or the W3C is responsible for website governments and they created WCAG. And PDFs are officially categorized as web content under WCAG. PDF UA is an additional set of standards that focuses exclusively on creating more accessible PDFs and is based off of WCAG. PDF UA is an international organization standard and that helps determine how to implement WCAG success criteria in PDFs. And these guidelines can help you apply WCAG standards to creating accessible PDFs. So conforming requirements for WCAG and PDF UA include that the content of a PDF document must be tagged in a logical reading order. The tag content must correctly represent the document's semantic structure. Meaningful graphics must include alternative text descriptions, security settings must allow assistive technology access to the content and fonts must be embedded. The only real way to tell if a PDF document is PDF UA compliant is to run an accessibility report with a third-party application called PAC-3, P-A-C-3. And that's freely available for anyone to download and use. It's only accessible for the Windows platform. But this provides a report about the accessibility of the PDF document and lists any errors and encounters. But it doesn't give the author the ability to correct these errors. That must be accomplished by a PDF remediation software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro. When to use PDFs? So it's important to note that PDF is well supported in the Windows environment when it comes to navigation. Mac users have a very different experience when trying to navigate a tagged PDF document, especially when it comes to longer documents. So whenever possible, you wanna use HTML instead of PDF as that format rather is far more accessible for both Windows and Mac users. However, online documents and PDFs are a huge part of digital communications across many industries. And some users still like to download and print documents instead of reading information online. So there are a few cases when folks might choose to use PDFs over other formats, including publishing secure documents that can't be altered or copied. Although Adobe Acrobat Pro does allow the content to create or to edit a PDF. And there are other free PDF editors floating around out there that can do the same thing. But this still seems to be a popular misconception about PDF. What PDF does do is it preserves the layout of a document for printing, including images, typeface, and that seems to be the predominant reason for using PDFs. Adobe Acrobat is the key to both check for accessibility errors. And I'll go over that more in a bit. And also to fix PDF accessibility errors. Acrobat is rarely used to create a document as that's not really made for that. The more accessibility work you do in the application where you create your document, such as Word or PowerPoint, the less you'll have to use Acrobat to touch up any errors. And there are three types of PDF documents. The first type is an image PDF. And those are usually created when an article from a book is scanned on a flatbed scanner and the output selected is a PDF file. And this type of document is completely inaccessible to screen readers as the PDF is effectively an image without any underlying text or metadata. Now on this slide, I've included a couple of examples of scanned documents. On the left-hand side is a scan that's kind of hard to read. The text phase in and out and there are all kinds of markup all over this document. There's underlining and marks that go through the text on the page. And it is possible to convert an image PDF to text using Optical Character Recognition or OCR. But with all of the markup that's on this page, it will cause errors when converting to text. The scan on the right is much cleaner. It's a lot easier to see visually. And when run through an OCR scanning application will yield much better results when converting to text. The second type of PDF document is one that has text but no underlying structure. And structure is what allows screen reader users to navigate and jump from section to section and heading to heading. Without structure, users are forced to listen to the text of a document from the very top of the page to the bottom of the page without the ability to navigate exactly where they wanna go within a document. And the third type of PDF document is one that is tagged and well-structured with appropriate heading levels, lists, and other elements that allows screen reader users to search a document and consume the information in a more predictable way. Okay, I'm just gonna pause right here and just see if there are any other questions before moving on. We do have a question that just came in. Okay. While contrast seems to be the most important factor of color choices, is there a best practice for dark text on a light background versus light text on a dark background? Or is one of these preferred over the other regarding accessibility? I think that's mostly just a personal preference. I think it depends upon the type of low vision someone may have. They may prefer to have a darker background with either white text or yellow text. I know that some folks who have a degenerative vision, they prefer yellow text instead of black text. And I'm not sure the reasons why that is, but it just seems to have a better contrast ratio and it's easier to consume for those particular folks. So it's mostly a matter of personal preference, which is why sometimes you'll see in some applications where you can adjust the color contrast that you have the ability to make adjustments to the background color, either black or white or the text color, either being black or white or yellow or some other combination thereof. And sometimes I've seen like a neon green color. So part of it, most of it I would say would be personal preference. Any other questions? That is all we have in the chat at this time. So thank you, we're gonna move on then. Accessible PDF. So I mentioned earlier that PDF tags are necessary when it comes to accessible PDF. And essentially tags are XML based coding inside the PDF document that provides structure and necessary semantic information for screen readers to navigate a document. If a document is not tagged, Acrobat will infer a structure based on the reading order preference setting, which can result in page items read in the wrong order or not at all. And on this slide, I've included an image of a PDF tag tree with documents as the root tag. And the rest of the tag elements appearing in a linear order from the top of the tag tree to the bottom. And this is the order in which a screen reader will announce the information. Excuse me, and contained within those tags is textual information. Now most cases screen readers will announce the semantic structure and the textual information to give context to the user. The PDF does support complex tables and as it is with HTML tables, it's possible to make a PDF table more clear by giving each header an ID. So you can specify which headers go with each data cell. Tables created in Word or PowerPoint, however, won't generate or export IDs when converted to PDF. So any tables that are created in those native formats will need to be remediated using Adobe Acrobat Pro, which does require quite a bit of training in order to be accomplished correctly. But before you try to make a complex table accessible in PDF, see if you can simplify the table in the native application. For example, if the table has a series of sections, would it reduce confusion to divide it into a series of tables, one for each section? And compared to HTML, PDF forms have inherent accessibility limitations. The process for creating an accessible PDF form is incredibly daunting for the content creator and equally daunting for the screen reader user. Most PDF forms start out as Microsoft Word files or other electronic documents with empty spaces for the form fields. And actual form fields then must be added within Adobe Acrobat Pro before the file can be filled out electronically. And when a screen reader user navigates a form field, its contents must be described to the user. Each form control in a PDF needs to be explained using tool tips. And reading order is absolutely critical of making sure that information is understandable and accurate for those form controls. Once those form controls have been added to the PDF with the proper tool tip information, then they still need to be tagged so that the screen reader will encounter them and announce them. So when a screen reader enters a form control, it usually switches to a different reading mode and this mode is often called forms mode. While in forms mode, the screen reader skips over the content that is not a form element or a link. And for this reason, it's best to place important information or instructions that apply to the whole form before the first form field is presented. And at this point in time, math and STEM content that requires scientific notation are not supported in PDF. Instead, mathML or mathematical markup language or math type for word should be used to ensure that math equations and symbols are announced accurately by a screen reader. Okay. Adobe InDesign is a popular page layout program that uses text and images to create fancy brochures. And it is possible to create a document in InDesign and have it export to an accessible PDF document that does not require any additional remediation using Adobe Acrobat or any other remediation source. But there's a specific workflow that needs to be followed and adhered to when creating InDesign documents for accessibility. And this includes mapping styles to tags using the paragraph styles pane and editing the tags in the export tagging menu. And additional training is available through third parties and will be necessary to learn this workflow in order to create an InDesign document that can be exported to accessible PDF. And here I've shared a resource pubcom.com that provides comprehensive training on how to create accessible InDesign documents that export to accessible PDF. And I'm gonna pause right here just to see if there are any questions. We do not have any questions in the chat at this time. Oh, great. I'm gonna take a sip of water then. All right, let's talk a little bit about Google Docs. So Google Docs is an online word processor that lets you create and format text documents and it's mostly known for collaboration with other people in real time. And Google uses a rich text editor to create content and should be used with caution as source material created in Google Docs cannot be made as accessible as source material produced through Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. And since Google Docs can be used in a collaborative basis, it is important to make them as accessible as possible. So best practices for creating accessible Google Docs and slides includes using the built-in styles and slide templates to provide semantic structure to your document similar to the tools that are used in Word and PowerPoint. Make sure that you include alt text for images and any images that are purely decorative should have empty quotes for your alt text. When creating lists, use the bulleted list or numbered list tool to create them instead of inserting asterisk numbers or tabs. Tables in Google Documents cannot be made accessible as it's not possible to properly designate header rows or columns. So try to avoid using tables in the Google Suite. And it's important to note that when exporting a Google Suite document to either a Word or PowerPoint, accessible elements will not map accurately and will not produce an accessible Word or PowerPoint document. And it is not possible to export an accessible PDF with tags from Google Docs or Google Sheets. Also, Google does not have a built-in accessibility checker. So it makes it a little bit harder for the content creator to determine whether or not their content is accessible. Document accessibility checkers. Okay, document accessibility checkers are automated tools that can help with validating the technical accessibility of an office or PDF document. And in some cases, they can help you address any issues that appear in accessibility reports. Accessibility checkers verify that the document, verifies the document against a set of rules that identify potential issues that can cause barriers to accessibility. And many of these rules conform to WCAG and PDF UA success criteria for accessibility, but not all of them. Some of the elements that accessibility checkers review include checking for the presence of headings and if those headings are properly nested to form an outline. In PowerPoint, it will check to make sure that each slide has a title and that each slide title is unique. Accessibility checkers can also check to see that if alt text is assigned to the visual elements such as images and figures, but it can't check the substance of the alt text and tell if the textual information accurately explains the image. In older versions of Word, when an image was inserted into a document, alt text would automatically be assigned the file name of the image, which wasn't really helpful considering people usually don't name their image files meaningful names, at least not meaningful enough to be considered useful alt text. And Microsoft has stopped doing that, so that's good. The checkers will also review any tables that are included in a document and will check to see if the tables have appropriate headers and proper IDs associated with those headers. And with Office documents, it will let you know if your tables have merged cells which will make listening to table data challenging for screen reader users since Office has limited accessible table authoring capabilities. Checkers will ensure that lists are created accurately using the bulleted or numbered list tool, but it can't check the accuracy of nested lists if they were created using the indent feature rather than the multi-level list tool. Checkers do check to see that document properties are included such as document title and language attribute and make sure that the document doesn't have any restricted access to content as that limits the information the screen reader can access. And last but not least, accessibility checkers make sure that the reading order of a document matches the tab order, but can't really tell if the reading order is logical or not. So as you can see, accessibility checkers have a significant gap. They're focused on code and strict technical compliance, but not so much on usability, design and content and can't truly identify how real users understand and interact with documents. As with any web page, documents must be assessed for functional accessibility by manually reviewing a document using a screen reader. Last month, our team member, Heidi Rangan presented a webinar on testing with screen readers and during his presentation, he talks a lot about the difference between technical and functional accessibility and I invite you to review that women are when you have a chance. All right. So this slide shows a screenshot of a Word document with the accessibility panel exposed on the right hand side. So in Office Products, to launch the accessibility checker, that's contained in the review tab. So you'd want to navigate to the review tab and towards the left hand, towards the left hand upper left hand column or left hand side there, you'll see an icon that says check accessibility. And when you select that icon, the inspection results or the accessibility panel will pop out on the right hand side and give you inspection results which are comprised of errors, warnings, and sometimes you'll get some tips on how to improve the accessibility of the document. And if you click directly in those inspection results, like I've done here on this image, you can see I've selected that specific image. It will take you in the document where that issue is. And then if you look towards the bottom of the inspection results, you'll be prompted with information as to why this is an issue. And you'll also be prompted with steps on how to correct the issue. So it makes it really easy for the author or the content creator to step through and to walk through, fixing any technical accessibility errors inward. And this slide shows a screenshot of Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is the application needed to check and fix PDF documents for accessibility. There are other programs available that can do this, such as Common Look and Equidocs, but Acrobat seems to be the industry standard for addressing inaccessible PDF documents. And in order to get an accessibility report, you'll need to go to the tools menu and then you select accessibility, which will pop out an accessibility panel on the right-hand side here. And you can see that on the screenshot. Within that panel will be an option for accessibility check. And if you select that, then another window will open, which is in the center of the screenshot here. And that shows the accessibility checker options. And there are different categories that the checker and Adobe Acrobat will go through, such as documents, alt text, check your tables. And by default, all of the elements are checked to be reviewed within the accessibility checker options. Now, if you select the button that says Start Checking, you'll be presented with an accessibility report and that pops out on the left-hand side of Adobe Acrobat Pro. And you can see that on the screenshot here. And within the report will be a list of the different items that either pass or fail accessibility. And you can tell if it's failed accessibility, if it has a red circle with a white X next to it. And then it also has the word fail. And in some cases, not all cases, in some cases, you can fix these issues within the accessibility report just by right-clicking, which will call up a context menu. And in some cases, you'll be prompted to fix it. And that will automatically walk you through the process of fixing it. Or it will give you options to do some more research on what else needs to be addressed in order to fix that situation. And even after you perform all these steps of fixing it through the accessibility report, further remediation may still be needed by a remediation specialist as adjusting tags and working in the tag tree of Adobe Acrobat Pro does require a bit of skill and can certainly produce unpredictable results if you're not entirely sure what you're doing. So be very careful if you're in the tag tree. But in the report section, you can fix some issues. Okay, so before we conclude our presentation today, I wanted to review the different file types we covered and when it may make sense to use one format over another. I mentioned earlier that HTML pages are far more accessible than PDF. Tables, forms, math and STEM content are all fully accessible when presented in HTML. Word has some accessibility with stylistic features such as headings and lists and can present math accessibly but has limitations when it comes to tables and forms. PDF rather also has some accessibility with stylistic features that are repurposed and can make complex tables accessible but forms are awkward and math and STEM content are not supported at all. And navigation and PDF is well supported for window users but not for Mac users. And I wanted to make a plug for next month that Dan Comden from the IT accessibility team will present on alternatives to PDF. As this format does pose significant challenge for authors when creating accessible content. So that's all I have. So I wanted to go ahead and pause and take any additional questions if we have any. We do have a question. Is there a machine learning benefit to using the auto-generated alt text? For example, if I use auto-generated alt text and edit it then will the software learn to generate better descriptions? I don't think that the auto-generated alt text can learn from your input. At least I don't have that indication. So I don't think that there's any benefit in that regard. The only benefit that I can see is that it may help you with composing alt text if you're having any issues with, oh my gosh, how am I going to describe this? You can try the selecting that button for the automated alt text and see if it comes close to perhaps the image that you're trying to assign alt text to. And then you can alter it from there. But I don't think it has the capability of learning from the content author how to write appropriate alt text. This is Terrell. Just to follow up on that, I guess I would question. I think it might be. We don't know what Microsoft is doing behind the scenes. And so there may be some privacy settings too that dictate whether or not it can access your alt text. But I wouldn't put it past them to actually be doing something to learn. I know that Google has been said to be learning when we edit their automated captions. And they're using that knowledge to get smarter and smarter. And we've seen that over the years that their automated captions are getting better and better. And a lot of that is that their system is learning from some of those edits. So I can imagine Microsoft maybe doing the same kind of thing. They're a long way away though from heaven. Good automated alt text. Okay, we do have another question in the chat. Is Adobe the best OCR program to use to fix scanned readings such as for readings in classes? Sorry, my chat jumped when I was trying to read that. That's okay. No, it's not. A better OCR scanning application is Abbey Fine Reader. It has higher accuracy. And when it comes to recognizing text even if the original is not great, it's a far more powerful program. And the scanning engine is far more accurate than the scanning engine that is included in Adobe Acrobat Pro. So I would recommend Abbey Fine Reader as an OCR application rather than using the one that's built into Adobe Acrobat Pro. Okay, I have to edit my already accessible PDFs each year. However, I then have to remediate that whole section. Is there a way to avoid that? Reremediate, excuse me. You shouldn't have to re-remediate it. Once it's been, once any accessibility fixes have been applied, they should maintain. I guess it kind of depends on if are you making any alterations to the PDF document. Yes, I think maybe I didn't say that right because the chat jumps every time something gets added. So let me read that again so it's more clear. I have to edit my already accessible PDFs each year. However, I then have to remediate that whole section. Is there a way to avoid that? Yeah, I would say that probably the best way to avoid that would be to work with your native document and making sure that that's as accessible as possible. And then if you need to make any changes, then you would go back to your native source documents, make any changes from there and then export it to PDF. If you remediate a PDF document and then make any edits or changes to that remediated PDF document, it could break any of the accessibility that has been already applied. So that may be the issue that you're encountering. But I would say go back to your original source document as that really should be the way that you really should be creating accessible documents from that source document then exporting to PDF as a best practice rather than having to to remediate a PDF document that was exported that from an accessible word or PowerPoint. Okay, and we have a question. Do you have a webinar for DocuSign and accessibility? I believe we do not. Not currently, we do not know. Okay, and then do you have any thoughts on the OCR option available when scanning to PDF on the RICO copiers comment on campus? There should be a setting within most copiers slash scanners to have your PDF documents scanned using OCR. So it's just a matter of going into the settings and figuring that out or going online and seeing if you can get the user manual for that particular scanner and seeing if you can find how to enable that setting for the scanner. But for most scanners that are available, they do have that option for OCR scanning. And essentially what that does is it takes the, it does apply text to the document, but it will not infer any semantical structure. So it won't determine where the headings are. It probably won't figure out your tables very well. All it really does is just make sure that the text is announceable. Do you have any experience with that, Gibby? I'm curious as to whether or not, how that compares so that OCR technology compares to like software packages that we use? Yeah, well, I have experience with just setting, of going into the settings of the scanning devices, but the experience that I have with documents that were scanned that way, and looking in the tag tree, I just noticed that it's mostly just text that are tagged as paragraph tags and there's no real structure to it. So in fact, that's what, those are a lot of the documents that come through the PDF remediation service, which is a service that we have on campus that I manage student assistants who provide PDF remediation for departments. And we do see a lot of scanned articles and it's just pure text that is labeled as paragraphs. So there's no real formatting that's applied during that process. So it's much different than say like a desktop OCR applications such as Abby, which does try to apply some formatting based on the look and the weight of the text, but doesn't do a great job of it, but it seems to do better than the standup scanners. Awesome, thank you. So we've had some thank you for you along the way, a few comments, thanks, very helpful. Moved away from styles when others didn't understand their use when they edit later, great reminder. Thanks, the latter part is what I was interested in. I'd gotten it to do OCR. It's a paid option we add on the lease on all of our copiers, but with no formatting to speak of. I create DocuSign templates for our accessible PDFs. I wanna use conditional fields, but you have to hide them by making them the same color as the background so you can't see them. However, will an e-reader read the hidden formulas for the conditional fields? I'm not sure. I haven't tested that, so I'm not sure. Does anybody else from the IT accessibility team have any response to that? I think if you're hiding just visually, then that's not actual hiding. It's for somebody who's using a screen reader and doesn't know what color things are, then the screen reader is probably gonna read that. So there's probably a better way to do that. Even though we don't have a webinar on DocuSign specifically, we are actively engaged with DocuSign. We're meeting with DocuSign's accessibility person every month and doing some testing in between. And so kind of trying to develop some best practices for how to use DocuSign effectively and to help them improve their accessibility. And so there might be something that emerges out of that that we can share with others. Stay tuned. Sorry, we have another question. Can you scan from a RICO to PDF and then have Abbey Fine Reader OCR it? You can, that's kind of introducing an additional step because it's probably better to have the OCR happening at the very beginning of the process rather than, so how Abbey would work is it takes out electronic PDF and then it applies the OCR scanning. So it would probably, so it is possible to do that, but it seems like it's an additional step that may not be necessary for having the OCR setting on a RICO scanner. It will have that text capability, but not the formatting or won't have any of the formatting elements to it. And the same is true in Abbey, but it might do a better job of applying those formatting but probably not. So I think that's just kind of introducing an additional step and would just apply the OCR from the very beginning and then remediate the document from there. Okay, that has cleared out our questions in the chat. Great, thank you Annemarie. And I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody wants to unmute themselves, Abbey Fine too. Okay, well, I think that's it then. That sounds like we have all of the questions in the chat answered. And I guess that's all we have for today. Thanks for coming everybody. I'll just kind of stick around in case anybody else has a question that they want to ask as folks are heading out. Lots of thank yous for the great webinar coming through.