EASI Webinar

October 1, 2013

 When you do choose to open a PDF document in word, the first message you're going to get is that if the document is or has high number of graphics, for example, if it's a desktop published document, if it has a lot of graphics used for layout and background and things like that. Then the fidelity of that may not be kept when you open a document in Word. For those of us who are using screen readers or text to speech tools or text magnification, we don't care about the decorations or the integrity of the graphics. What we want is access to the context of that PDF document. The other thing if that PDF document is password protected, then the PDF Reflow protects that. Keep that in mind when using this tool.

What I have on the screen now is a document that I created. It's a picture of a document I created. And it is in adobe acrobat. What I've done with the JAWS screen reader is to get a list of headings. Because I wanted to show you visually that when I opened the same document in Word using the PDF Reflow. It's the same tool. But all you have to do is open a PDF document and voila, presto, it Reflows. It will take a little bit of time. It's not instantaneous if you are looking at a long document.

In terms of the production centers, this can be a useful tool with some of the documents that you get that you need to make accessible in Word format or other formats for students. This slide is a picture of the same document. When I opened it in Microsoft Word. You can see the tail end of the first page that has my page border. This document did come from Word. It was created in Word. It is a well-structured Word document that was then converted to a well-structured and accessible compliant PDF document. And then opened in Microsoft Word. You can see that I've got the list of headings using the JAWS screen reader. So exactly the same headings that I had in the PDF document I now have in my Word document. So it is respecting, to some extent, the structure of the document now. Whereas it wasn't before. In terms of what has been added, the addition of headings is really helpful. When you open the document because it means you have a way of navigating through the document topic by topic. So hopefully as I say, as they add other elements to this, we're going to see the list structure and maybe the alt text, well hopefully, the alt text being imported as well.

This is another document. Now this is an untagged PDF document. I wanted to show you the difference between opening a well-structured PDF document using PDF Reflow in Word and opening a document that has no tags. This is not a scanned document. But this is a document that it looks like it might have come from Microsoft Word, although I'm not sure. And it was simply created using the print to adobe PDF. Which means it has no tags. The image on the slide shows the document in adobe acrobat and it shows the dialog, the message that you get saying that your document has no tags.

When I open this document in PDF Reflow I also have headings. This slide shows you the same document. Now I've moved ‑‑ oh yeah, it is on the first page. It's just that the dialog is blocking it. So I've got my list of headings from JAWS and a list of headings that are in the document. What has happened is that in the conversion process, Word has gone through the document and if it looked like it was a heading, it's applied a heading style to it. Now the heading styles may not be in sequential order. I didn't check that. But at least you have headings. If you need to you can go and change the level of the heading to make the document more accessible.

This means that if this was a document that you needed to make accessible, you don't have to spend time adding the headings. You could review the headings. I'll show you in a couple of slides down the road, one of the tools that you have to instantly see whether something is a heading or not. So when I open this document, this untagged PDF in Word, Word was smart enough or intuitive enough to make some decisions about what was a heading and what wasn't a heading.

I find this a very useful tool if I have a PDF document that might be complex or I don't have time to sit with adobe acrobat. I don't use reader. I just use acrobat in case I do have to tag a document that doesn't have security. The other advantage is I can then quickly open a PDF document in Word, take it on my victor reader stream or any portable device and read it. Because as we all know, so far there is no really good PDF reader for the mobile devices. There isn't anything that will let us go by paragraph or sorry, by heading, locate links, identify lists. Those kinds of things. We either read the document or we don't.

This is further on in the document. I've actually moved to one of the headings in the document. To show I can navigate by heading. The heading in the list is the heading I've navigated to. Sorry, we're back in acrobat. So acrobat, I've navigated to by heading. I'm not sure exactly. I was concentrating in doing this in a sequential order. Sometimes when I do that ‑‑ okay, I lose sequence. On that page I did go and look at the top and check out the list. Because when I started reading the page, JAWS told me that I was in a list. Unfortunately what happened and this is ‑‑ or sea. I reconverted the document back. Let me go back. That's what I did. I know sometimes I get a little carried away. Okay. So in this I took the document. I opened in Word. I didn't do anything to it. But I converted it back to a PDF using the convert to PDF tool in Word that does allow me to use headings as book marks. So this is the same document. Imagine that I've done any ‑‑ put any additional content into it and I've converted it back to a PDF document. So here, my headings are still intact. If I look at the top of that page, I have a list. And unfortunately when I converted the word document back to a PDF, the list items all came in as individual lists. So this is a repair that I would either have to do in Microsoft Word or I can do it here if I know about the tags tree. As I said, the tool is a lot better. The PDF Reflow is a lot better than it was when Office was first released. As we have updates to Office, the PDF Reflow should improve in terms of accessibility and the amount of repairs that you would have to do if you were converting the document back to a tagged PDF document. Unfortunately you cannot open or read scanned PDF documents in Word yet. When you open a scanned PDF document in Word, each page comes through as a figure. So the tool isn't smart enough to say this is a scanned PDF. I need to perform OCR on it and then open it up in Word.

The option that you have is to use Microsoft one note. Here's we're where working with the two tools comes in handy. I will say if you are going to do this, you cannot be concerned about the decorative elements of the document. And there will be repair needed on the text. And we'll walk through that. But if you do have a scanned PDF document and all you want is the text so that you can read it, you can open that document in Microsoft one note. You would go to the insert menu and insert file print out, locate the file. It will open on a new page in one note. All of the pages will be in sort of separate containers, for those of you who have used one note before. I'll touch on one note next week and give you a brief overview of how it functions. For now, just note that in one note, you can open a scanned PDF document.

Here's the PDF document that I opened. I am using a document, this is a very old document. And I don't want all of you running and railing on freedom scientific. When I started doing accessible PDF documents back in 2005, freedom scientific was the only company that would let me use one of their print brochures to demonstrate the accessibility of PDF documents. Because I was moving from a print document to a scanned document to a tagged PDF document, and I did find some inaccessible digital versions of documents at the time. Companies did not want to be embarrassed by the fact that their digital content wasn't accessible. For some reason they didn't want their material used as a learning tool. And of all of the companies that I approached, freedom scientific has always been quite cooperative and eager. At the last conference I was at with them I had permission to use one of their tri‑fold brochures. When doing and talking about PDF documents. That's another element of PDF that is sometimes difficult to tag. Anyway, in the lower right hand corner of the slide is the original document. So you can see it has some decoration. It has a heading. It has some text. It has some web content. Everything that a PDF would have. When I opened the document in Microsoft one note, you can see that all of the graphics were removed but I do have the text. And for those of us who simply want the content and want to know what's in the document, we don't need the decoration. We do just want the text. Once the content is in one note, and if you are using a screenreader, you will be able to find the text in OneNote. You would right click on the container that it's in. At the very bottom you would see something called make text searchable. And I installed all three languages. So I did a custom install of Office and under proofing tools I chose to put the optical character recognition language of English, French, and Spanish in. And I do that just in case I do have any documents in that format. By default you're going to get the English.

So you right click, you choose make text searchable and then you choose your language. English, French or Spanish. Those are the only languages available. At least with the north American version of Office. I think I checked for someone and those are the only languages available.

What happens then is that you have what called machine generated alt text for that image. And the machine generated alt text is the text of the document. Here's a picture. I right clicked and I accessed the alt text dialog and you can see it's machine generated alt text and then there is the text of the document.

Now one of the things that has changed slightly in OneNote is that I used to be able to go to file, send, and then send the page to Word, and the text would come through and it would be just fine. That's changed a little bit. Either that or it is completely mouse dependent because it took me a couple of tries to do that. And I'm not sure exactly what I did differently to get the text to open in Microsoft Word. So this slide shows exactly the same text that machine generated alt text or what we made the text searchable that is open in Word. Now what's happened with that document is that each line has been treated as a paragraph so I simply need to go through the document and join things together.

I need to do a bit more research on this because that shouldn't happen. It hasn't happened in the past and I'm wondering if I missed a step or things have changed since OneNote 2010. I will investigate that for next week when we do talk about OneNote. But the important thing to remember is that if you do have something that is a scanned document, you can use Microsoft OneNote to at least make the text available to you.

The other really nifty tool that you have is the ability to expand or collapse headings. For a lot of people using the outline view in Microsoft Word to check their heading levels or to look at their document in terms of structure is really a nasty place to go. It can be very confusing. The whole idea of expanding or collapsing headings can be confusing. Pictures are represented by large spaces. So you think that the picture is gone. You start deleting space only to find when you get back to print layout, you've deleted your picture. A lot of things can go wrong. One of the really nice tools we have is the ability to expand or collapse headings while we're in print view. Again, this is helpful if you're in an alternate text production as well as if you have an author who has a disability and wants to create more accessible documents.

I created some random text and starting with Word 2007, we've had the ability to simply put some text from the help documentation that comes with Office into a document so that we can see what things are going to look like. And if you want the instructions on how to do that, let me know in the chat window. And I will make sure that we have that for next week.

The image on the left shows my document. I have three headings in my document. I have a heading level one. A heading level two and a heading level three. Each one of those ‑‑ sorry, back to a heading level one. Each one has at least a paragraph of text underneath it. You'll notice that next to the first heading, which is a heading level one, the Word introduction. If I have hover my mouse over it, imagine my mouse is hovered over it, you see an arrow pointing down. If I click on that chevron or arrow, I'm not exactly sure what it is, then what happens is what you see in the image in the upper right of the slide. So I have the Word introduction. Then I have chapter one which is my next level one heading. So what I've done is I've collapsed everything under the word introduction which includes the introduction, the paragraph, my heading level two which is background and a paragraph. So I can now see all of my heading, I can see all of my heading once at least here. It doesn't collapse everything. It simply collapses that one.

If you want to do that with a keyboard, you simply put your cursor in a heading. Right click or press the app key and then choose headings expand or collapse and it will ask you if you want to expand or collapse all headings or just the heading just the level that you're at. This is something you can use at the keyboard. If you've listen online view and you don't want to go back there again, it's just another way of looking at your document and getting the information that you would get in your outline view.

One of your other tools you have is the navigation pane. This happens to be the find tool in the navigation pane. But I can also click on headings and access that by the keyboard as well. And it will give me a list of all the headings in my document down the left side of the document. So it's another way to take a look at your document, make sure that everything that needs to be a heading is a heading. So those are two really nice tools for alternate text production centers but also for those of us who are using adaptive technology and need to create well-structured documents.

I'm including the find pane because it was introduced into Office 2010. Well Word 2010. And if you are moving from Word 2003 or 2007 to Word 2013, this is going to be quite the shocker for you. When you press control plus F you now get the find pane. You can type what you're looking for. The nifty thing about this is it will then in that pane to the left of your document, show you every instance of that word in your document. So if you want you can review that information in that pane. You can click on any instance and it will go directly to that place in the document.

The other thing with the find pane is that for every word that you search for that is found in the document, it's going to be highlighted in yellow in the document for as long as the find pane is open. You can still get the old find dialog if you want to in two ways. You can press alt plus G for the go to and simply control page up until you get to find. Or you can get at it through the home ribbon which is alt plus H, F, D for find, and then A for advanced. What I do in order to save time is to press control plus F, type my word in the find pane. The screen readers should be able to access the information in the find pane. I'm just going to tell you a little bit faster. I search for the word. As soon as I type in the word. I think this time I typed in video. Then I press enter to find every instance of the word video. I press escape key which gets rid of the find pane. I can move page up to move to the [Indiscernible] or control page down to move to the next instance of the word. If I want to go back to using control up or page down to move page by page, I simply [Indiscernible] type in the number of the current page I'm on, press enter, press escape and I'm back to using control page up and page down for page navigation. It doesn't matter whether you ‑‑ which find dialog or which find tool you use. It automatically and has automatically takes over the control page up and page down. So even if you use the old find dialog, you'll need to reset the control page up and page down to page if you want to use those keyboard commands for page navigation.

So this is the new look of the find tool as of Office ‑‑ or Word, I should say ‑‑ 2010. And it still continues in 2013. It's not going back. I know people have said well will they change it back. No. They won't change it back.

The next tool is quasi ‑‑ well no, it's not accessible. Hopefully at some point it will be. But right now it isn't. It has to do with track changes. And it's a new feature called simple mark‑up. A lot of people get confused with track changes. And find it very difficult, especially if a lot of people have been working with a document to sort out things. Like what was there before because I can't figure it out from all of the changes that people have suggested. So simple mark‑up allows you to have just a marker in the margin next to a paragraph that someone has used track changes to make revisions on. And you can expand or collapse this. So if I go to my document, and again, I've typed in some sample text so that I can work with it. And the first image shows the paragraph with the track changes. So there's my marker in the left margin. It's the ‑‑ let me see, yeah, vertical line up and down. And then in my paragraph I have the traditional blue underline text that indicates that this is something I've added. The second picture on this slide is the simple mark‑up. And I have the indicator in the margin but my paragraph looks the way that it does in the document without showing the track changes. What this allows me to do is to go through my document and instead of being overwhelmed by all of the track changes, I can decide paragraph by paragraph whether I want to see all of the changes that are recommended.

You find simple mark‑up in the review ribbon under tracking and it's in the list of things where you have show mark‑up, show final. The first item is simple mark‑up. Another change to track changes ‑‑ now if you don't want to use simple mark‑up, just go up there, say show mark‑up and it should respect your choice even if someone has used simple mark‑up on their machine.

The other change to track change is where options are. Options used to be under the large button that said track changes. The very last item used to be track changes options. And it is not there now. It is in a very tiny, little icon in the lower right of the tracking options. What it's going to do is open your first dialog and it's going to allow you to choose which types of changes whether they're ink changes, whether they're formatting changes. All of those kinds. There are checkboxes. Then there's a button for advanced changes options. When you activate that, that is where you have the ability to change the colors for your track changes. By default they're red which I mean, two‑thirds of the male population is red green color blind. So choosing red as sort of a flag for things that need to be changed isn't really helpful for a lot of people. You can go in and change it. I also find the red very light so I typically change it to blue. Then I make modifications to other things that I want to do with track changes. So you can customize track changes. People don't ‑‑ a lot of people don't know that.

There are also some changes to comments. You can insert a comment now from the insert ribbon. And the keyboard command for that is alt plus N for insert ribbon and L. Not sure why L is for comments. I know C was taken and M was taken. Alt plus N and the letter L will insert a comment at your cursor point.

The other change with comments is that if you have a picture associated with your account, the picture goes with it. And you can choose any picture. It doesn't have to be one of your own. If you have no picture, then just the silhouette of a person will be there. You can also reply or send instant messages to people. That's not quite accessible yet. But it is a feature that allows you to contact the person if you ‑‑ immediately ‑‑ if you have a question. The comments will also nest. So if they reply then it will nest with that comment. So it's almost like a threaded conversation within your comments, within your documents, which allows you to take track of any conversation that you do have about track changes.

So here is a document. It's the same one that I used before that does have the track changes but now I've added a comment. If I hover my mouse over the picture of the person, then I get this pop‑up that allows me to e‑mail or instant message. Unfortunately at the moment that is the only way that you can do that and it is mouse dependent and it's not accessible.

You also have this ability in PowerPoint as well. So anytime you can add a comment to anything in an Office application, you have the ability if you can use a mouse and don't need a screen reader, to send an e‑mail or an instant message. As I said, hopefully as we move forward, this tool will be accessible.

In all of the applications you now have alignment guides. This happens to be because it was easier to show the alignment guides in PowerPoint rather than showing them in Word where they might be lost in the text. These are alignment guides in PowerPoint. What the alignment guides allow you to do, and again, you wouldn't be able to use these in if you are using a screen reader. They are visual. So if you have a learning disability or a visual disability and are using screen magnification, you can take advantage of these. Although with screen magnification, you may be confused by the number of alignment guides you get. For example, the picture on the left shows the alignment guide across the top of the picture and the line is from the center of the slide. So you can line up your picture to the top of the picture that's already there and you can look at it in terms of when this line shows then it is centered to the center of that slide or that place holder. So it helps you position things so they don't look wonky or sort of off and over.

The second picture on the slide is a little bit more complicated. It not only shows the alignment guide to make the picture aligned with the picture to the ‑‑ let me see. The alignment guide to the picture ‑‑ oh, that was the first picture. I got them mixed up. I apologize. So the second picture, the picture on the right shows the alignment guides that help you align to the edge of the place holder for the title. So you don't have your picture sort of way out. It's in line with the title. And then in line also with the bottom of the place holder for the title of the slide. So the alignment guides give you the ability. And they're very faint dotted red lines and you can't change them. So again, we have red, which may not be useable by everyone. But for those of you who can use the alignment guides, it's a way to make sure that your documents look more professional and that things are lined up in a little bit better way.

The other tool that we have, and I seem to be going through these slides rather quickly ‑‑ I didn't think I would. The other ability that we have now is the ability to insert videos into Microsoft Word. I know, it's a feature we've all been wanting and asking for. The process is as inaccessible as inserting things from online pictures. However, you can do it. And the videos that are inserted into Microsoft Word are sort of accessible. And I will explain that. You can insert a video from YouTube, from Bing, from ‑‑ I don't think and I'll have to look on the next slide. But I don't think you can insert your own home videos yet. But I could be wrong. And that would be one of the things that they would improve as the updates come. I know when Office 2013 was first released, you could only insert YouTube videos, which wasn't helpful to, you know, a lot of us who might want to do that, insert videos.

So for instructional material, and again, with disability as more people get Office 2013, you're going to see more projects and assignments that may include the addition of video in documents. So it's important that if you do find accessibility issues, first of all, let me know. And second of all, if you have a contact and all academic institutions do have a Microsoft representative that can carry your concerns back to the individual teams, to please let them know.

On this slide on the left I have the insert video dialog. So I actually just left it at Bing. I really like the WCAG 2.0 theme song with Sharky and David McDonald. I always use that when I'm demonstrating videos of anytime because it's catchy and promotes accessibility. So I went and found the WCAG 2.0 theme song. When it opened, I could find it with my screen reader but I had to use a mouse to insert it into my document. Just like with online pictures. It seems to be a problem with the dialog. That hopefully will get fixed.

The picture in the lower right shows the video inserted into the document. When I move focus off of the video and then put focus back to where the video would be, I was told that this was a graphic and then I was told that it was a video and then the size. So when it was inserted, there was something that collude either the screen reader or Word to say at some point this is a video. It may have been that video was part of the title. I don't know. But I did know that it was a video.

When you are inserting videos, you do need to add alt text to them. And the alt text should include something to indicate that it is a video. So for example, this may be WCAG 2.0 theme song video. At which point I can right click or press the app key and choose play video. The video doesn't appear to have controls the same way that a flash player does. So you either play it or you don't. Hopefully people will use short videos so that you don't have to have it just rambling and rambling and rambling. And I didn't check but there should be a choice to stop the video once you start it if you don't like it. So videos are accessible in terms of I can find them. I can play them. In terms of having controls so that I can control and stop it when I want. Or whether it functions the same way as a flash player or other multi‑media player, not quite.

And as I say, we'll be getting more ‑‑ I did. I got through this in less time than I thought. I could have put in the PowerPoint stuff. I think that as we have the capability to put videos in, as I said, especially in academic institutions, in newsletters, we are going to see more videos inserted into Word documents. Now keep in mind that if you do insert a video, it is going to blow out the size of Word. So your documents are going to be larger and you may not be able to share them by e‑mail. On the other hand it may be a great way to prevent people from sending your document by e‑mail. So this week we've looked at PDF Reflow which is a really good tool for both alternate text production centers and people with disabilities to be able to open PDF documents as long as they're not secure and as long as they are not scanned documents, and be able to quickly read the text. The document that I opened, the one that I created was ‑‑ let me see. It was ten pages long and it did take less than a minute to convert and load into Word. The document on handy trans was presently 60 pages long and it did take a little bit longer. But you are told of the progress. JAWS will read the progress bar as it is ‑‑ no, that was in OneNote. Yeah. JAWS doesn't read the progress bar. Unless you go down to the status bar you can actually find where the document is loading and get the percentages that way.

Now with scanned PDF documents, if you open them in OneNote using insert, file, printout, that may take a little bit of time to load. Especially ‑‑ well especially if it's a scanned document because it tends to do the OCR even a little bit before you say make the text searchable. You still won't be able to read it until you make the text searchable. But it does tend to do a little bit of the background stuff. And then you can take your text from Microsoft OneNote and send it to Word, use it in Word. OneNote is still not fully supported by adaptive technology which is the only reason that I take it from OneNote and put it into Word.

We looked at the ability to expand and collapse headings so that you can get a better idea of the outline of your document. We talked about the navigation pane and how that just as those of us with screen readers can get a list of headings in our document, the navigation pane itself gives you a list in the document. Instead of going to [Indiscernible] you can simply go to the navigation pane and either click or or press enter on any of those headings and move to that point in the document. You don't need a screen reader to navigate by the list of headings in the document. Oh, I forgot the accessibility checker. I'll have to do that next week.

We also looked at the simple mark‑up and that it is currently inaccessible. We looked at the find pane and some options if you really want to use the old find dialog and a strategy for using the find pane if you want to go through the document faster than going down the information in the find pane.

We looked at inserting videos into your Word document. So getting more to sort of finessing. I did not try, thinking of that, I did not try opening a PDF document in Word that had a video. So I do not know if the video comes through as a graphic or if the video would come through as a video. And that could be your homework. Anyway, next week we are going to do PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. Whatever we don't have time for we will do in the 4th week when we're going to talk about Office 365 and which version of Office is going to be best for you. Have no fear we are going to talk about everything. If there's something I missed, something I didn't explain well enough for you or if there's a tool that you want more information on, then please e‑mail me. The e‑mail address is info@karlencommunications.com. I do have some handouts on all three office pages. There's a web page for Office 2007, 2010, and now 2013. So there are free handouts on there. Including some of the changes and things that you might want to change in terms of settings. Because it was a handout for a conference. And as I mentioned last week, I am no longer doing the PDF work myself except that I am the head of quality assurance and training at Accesibil‑IT, who do an excellent job of making PDF documents accessible. If you have that need I urge you to get in touch with Adam Spencer of Accesibil‑IT and discuss your needs with him. So if you have any questions then let's have them.

 Karen, that's a really interesting presentation. Often times when a product has an upgrade I don't bother getting it. But what you talked about today is a whole bunch of new features. We'll let people use either their mic or text box to ask their questions.

 I don't see any questions. Londa Peterson said she would like that information. I know it was something you said [Indiscernible] I forgot what it was you said you'd look at. I'm sorry.

 Oh yeah. Okay. Especially with Office 2013, I don't know whether Microsoft is actually going to produce an Office 2015 or 2018. The idea is that instead ‑‑ the idea that instead of having the big service pack updates that you download and install, that by turning on the automatic updates, as things get fixed, they just seamlessly are fixed in the user interface. So that you don't really know that they've been fixed but all of a sudden you'll be using them and it's like oh, that's fixed. So I don't know whether their plan is to have other versions of Office or whether to simply just keep refining this version. But I know that with this version there will not be the big service pack updates. That things are going to be pushed out as they get fixed or as they get added. So it's another reason to make sure that you do have those automatic updates turned on. Just the difference in PDF Reflow from when Office was released until today is amazing. Oh I think I was supposed to do the accessibility checker. I'll make a note and start with that next week.

 So next week three will be next week. The date happens to be the day after [Indiscernible] Thanksgiving. We hope Karen doesn't eat too much turkey or pumpkin pie. She should be in good shape next week.

 Yes. And I think I'll go back to having 43 slides. I think this is the shortest webinar that I have ever given you, Norm. Usually I am 15 minutes over. And I thought that I would be talking about PDF Reflow. Next week I will make sure that I have enough content for a full hour.

 I don't mind if you stop. Maybe you're talking faster.

 I think Karen doesn't feel complete if she doesn't fill in a complete hour.

 I want to thank everybody who has been with us for coming. I should get the recording and the transcription up probably tomorrow. I'll e‑mail about it. Thank you everybody for coming and thanks Karen and Beth and Alicia, our captioner.

 Bye, everybody. I'll see you next week.

 Bye, Karen, thank you for all you did.