EASI Webinar

February 1.  2011

>> My mic for a second wouldn't kick in. Welcome, Jeff. Can everybody hear us now?

>> Robert, Marisol, are we ready to go?

>> I'm ready. What about you, Robert?

>> I'm ready when you are. Just give me the clue to start the recording.

MARISOL MIRANDA: Okay. I'm going to start my computers. I will start probably in 15 seconds.

Hello, everyone. I'm Marisol from EASI SQL and I want to welcome everyone. I'm going to turn the mic to Robert Beach from EASI. Hi, Robert.

ROBERT BEACH:  Hello, everybody. And welcome to the presentation today. This is part one of four of the series on accessible PDF files. I just want to mention a couple of real quick webinars coming up. In early March there will be a free webinar on HTML 5. I plan on attending that one. So I hope you can turn in. Also in March will be [Indiscernible] and the dates will be posted on the EASI site. And that is EASI dot CC. And go to the webinar page and there will be a list of dates and who the presenters will be. There is a four part series on [Indiscernible] and that again is a fee based one. But Norm wanted me to be sure and mention those to you guys. Today we're starting off the four part series. This is part one as I said on accessible PDF. This is a very important topic. PDF is not going away. I know it's become more prevalent. I know at the school I teach as an adjunct, they're recommending all assignments they post to the online education or websites or e‑mail to students that we do it in either PDF or HTML format because it's the most accessible for people to read. So I think accessible PDF is an important topic. We have one of the best people in the field to give us this presentation. Karen McCall. I call her awesome and I'm going to turn it over to her now and let her show us about accessible PDFs. Karen, it's yours.

KAREN McCALL: Well that's quite a lot to live up to. This is the first in four parts as Robert mentioned. Just a bit of my background, I am a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Word. I've won this award for 10 years in a row. It's allowed me to work somewhat directly with the teams on Microsoft on the accessibility on some of their software applications. This is a voluntary position. I have to sign disclosure agreements. But I'm allowed to contribute whenever I can. I'm also a Canadian delegate to the ISO committee. [Indiscernible] standards as well as being a member of the PDF UA or Universal Access working group out of the United States. My background in terms of working with PDF started with acrobat and reader 4.5 in the maybe it will make it accessible add in. I have a book mail that I'm working on the third edition of accessible PDF documents. That is a reference book. It's not necessarily a how to guide. It's a reference book. The second edition was around 565 pages on techniques and tips on how to work with and create PDF documents. This third edition is going to be closer to 1,000 pages. Because every time I open a PDF document, I find something else to fix. I find a new way of fixing things and something different. I always find something different with every PDF document.

So what are we going to do for the next 4 weeks? This week we're going to take a look at what an accessible PDF document is. Because I'm using [Indiscernible] this may be a deciding factor as to whether you upgrade or not. Those of you who have upgraded and can't find anything, this hopefully will explain why this is so and maybe where you can find it. Week two, we're looking at creating accessible PDF form from Word. I use Word because most people know it and are familiar with it. You use the techniques I'm going to talk about in Word with any application. For example Adobe InDesign has the same structures you can use to create an accessible in design document that then exports more gracefully to a tag PDF document. You have similar tools in PowerPoint. You have similar tools in Word Perfect. I use word just because it's familiar. You can take the principles and the concepts and apply them to any application you're working with. In week three we're going to take a look at the tools in Adobe acrobat to create accessible tools in PDF. Make accessible add in that installs with Microsoft Office. As well as the Microsoft PDF add in and looking at some of the things that can happen in the conversion process.

In week four we're going to take a look at repair tools and how to make some repairs in Adobe acrobat. Even if you make a completely accessible document, there may be some bugs in the conversion tool. There will always be a need for you to do quality assurance or for you to at least review the document and make sure everything you wanted to happen, will happen. So that's what I have planned for you for the next 4 weeks. Again, this is 4 weeks in 4 hours and just a snapshot of what you can and can't do. The Adobe acrobat X, and I think instead of using the number ten, the X is quite appropriate if you are using a screen writer, is a completely new user face. It isn't as accessible as acrobat nine. This is where looking at whether you upgrade or not. If you depend on the keyboard and upgrade to acrobat X, you're going to have a lot of extra and unnecessary keyboarding to do because a lot of the tools are not in the menus because there are very few menus now. Everything is in panels down, the right hand side of your document. And there is no first character navigation through the tools in those panels. So you have to F6 into the panels and then arrow down until you find the correct panel. Expand it with the right arrow, arrow down, arrow down, arrow down, until you find the tool you want. Like add text to can your document, press enter to activate it.

So there is accessible keyboarding. The other thing to note about acrobat X is it does not have 64‑bit support for Microsoft 10. I don't think office 2007 has [Indiscernible] my version of Microsoft Office does not give me the option to install either a 32‑bit version or a 64‑bit version. So in order for me to use Adobe add in, I would have to go out and buy a new version of office 2010. So what I've done is put office 2007 on my sand box computer with acrobat X. And on my regular working computer, I still have acrobat nine and I'm able to use my office 2010. Because there's no integration with acrobat X anyway, it doesn't really make any difference. I still don't have it. In office 2010, what I'm depending on is the built in capabilities in Microsoft Office to save out as a PDF document. And I notice very little if any change or difference in doing that. So I've managed to have access to acrobat ten through Microsoft Office but it has to be, for me, a lower version of office that I do have a 32‑bit version for. So if you do want to use acrobat X and office 2010, make sure that you purchase a version of office that allows you to install either the 32‑bit version or the 64‑bit version. And you want to make sure you install the 32‑bit version. Moving on. This is an image of the new user interface. You'll notice that it's also very light. I find that I suffer more visual fatigue working with this version of acrobat because everything is very light. And sort of pastely. I still have the navigation bar on the left hand side of my document. However, the comments is not in the navigation panel anymore. It is in what they are calling tool bars, which are over on the right hand side of the document. So in order to get tool bars to show, you go under view, you go under tool bars. The navigation panel items are under view, show, or hide. I forget what it is now.

As I mentioned, when my focus is on my document and I want to actually go and do something, I have to F6 over to the right and then use my down arrow until I find what I want and then press enter. One of the strategies you can use because I work primarily in the accessibility panel, is to only have the accessibility panel visible. And then show and hide panels through the view menu as you need them. And that's the only strategy that you have to lessen the number of arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, keyboard commands. This is a close up of the panels so that you can see. They've actually moved the user interface more in line with what you see in dream weaver and design, some of their other tools. So it's not really a surprise that the user interface has shifted this way. For me, what the surprise is is that I no longer have that fast keyboard access to tools that I use on a daily basis. And as someone who does have some repetitive stress injury, arrowing, arrowing as we go, can aggravate it sometimes depending on what I'm doing. On the other hand, it has forced me, or helped me, to find faster ways of doing things and doing things in other ways. Trying to do a lot of work from the navigation panel or from other parts of the user interface. And I've been able to do that for most of everything that I do.

So what are tags and why are they so important? Tags are what makes a PDF document accessible. If there are no tags in the document, the document is not accessible. And we're going to talk about the ability to use virtual or pretend tags in a moment. Adding tags is an attempt to match the visual representation of the document with some underlying structure. So for example, everything that has a paragraph will have a P tag. Everything that has a heading will have an H tag.  Everything is a level like H1 or H2. For those who have worked with HTML, this is similar. In fact the tags are [Indiscernible] if you remember every piece of relevant content must have a corresponding tag in the tags tree. And the ability to tag the document with very little repair depends on how the document was created in the first place. And if we remember the adage, garbage in, garbage out, in this case, garbage out costs you a lot of money in fixing the document to make sure that is it readable in a logical and sensible order of the adaptive technology. Here's a look at the tags tree. You can see how light the interface page is. It's very difficult to see that it's even selected. I have in here a table of context tag.

As we move down the tree, we have paragraph tags. There's an H1 tag. So everything in my document, has a corresponding tag to it. One of the things to remember when you're working with tag PDF document is to let go of the visual and work with the content and work with the tags. Never mind what it looks like on the actual document. Make sure that the content is associated with a tag. Your BFF, or best friend is the ability to highlight content in acrobat. The way that you do that is to right click or press the application key anywhere in the tags panel and highlight content will be the second to the last item. What this allows you to do is to very quickly go down a tags tree, make sure that everything is in its logical order, that the tag is correct and that all of the content has been tagged. The image that I have on the screen here shows a heading on a document that has a corresponding tag. In terms of letting go of the visual, if you notice on here, more than just the print has the little blue box around it. Don't worry about that. If you're in doubt, open the tag by pressing the right arrow and just double check the content. But what happens sometimes is that pieces of the background will inadvertently be attached but not really recognized in the tag.

So the parameters, the highlighted content will appear to be a little bit more than the text you've selected. When you see that happen, if you quickly open the tag using the right arrow, check the text and closing the tag using your left arrow, you can verify that everything is as it should be. This is why I suggest that highlighting content is the best friend you should have when working with PDF documents because I can go down the tags tree and perform three tasks. I can make sugar everything has a tag. I can make sure everything is tagged in a logical reading order and make sure tags are correct. In the time it takes me to go down the tags tree, I've done most of my quality assurance and repairs. It is the tags in the tags tree that the adaptive technology accesses. While it's nice to take a look at the order panel and we will look at the order panel in more depth in week three, it's not always possible everything in its right order in the order panel. So the thing that you need to use the order panel for is to take sort of a global satellite view of your document to make sure that everything is tagged. But then work at it at the more granular level in the tags tree because that's what the adaptive technology is going to read. We have what is called trusted assistive technology.

In Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, this is meant for old Legacy files. A lot of people are mistakenly using the ability to create pretend tags or virtual tags, as I call them, as a means of saying well this document is accessible because when someone using a screen reader opens this document, it says the document isn't tagged, would you like me to in further reading, the person can read the document. That does not make the PDF document accessible. If you are doing repairs and using adaptive technology or have adaptive technology running and you see that message, you want to press your escape key because what I find is if you say go ahead in further reading from the document, it interferes with my ability to correctly tag a document. So again, it's not a substitute. The ability to create virtual or pretend tags for untagged PDF is not a substitute or accessibility and is not accessibility. So what happens is the document opens, it's not a tagged document, and the adaptive technology says this isn't a tag document, would you like me to try and guess at what's here? And that's what this tool is for. It's to make a some what educated guess as to what the content is and to render it in a somewhat intelligent matter to the end user. Open the Document 3 times and have it read differently each time. They only live as long as you have that document open. Every time you open it, it has to go out and create them or [Indiscernible] you'll never see this tags because they are virtual tags.

So in order to have an accessible PDF document, you actually have to have the tags in the tags tree. When you infer the reading order from the document, and this does have to do with accessibility. As we move through this, I'll explain to you what this has to do with accessibility. [Indiscernible] it's the default even when the document is tagged. So that you're going to take a look at the document, take a look at tags, and infer the reading order from what you see president in the case of a tagged PDF, it's going to infer the reading order from those tags. And the content may not be left to right, top to bottom. You may have columns. This is an image of the message that we get if we're using adaptive technology. So this is the dialogue that says this is untagged document. If the document is a scanned image of a document, we will also, before this, get a message that says this is a scanned image of a document and you need to recognize the text before we can begin doing anything with it. So there are two steps depending on what type of document that you have.

Now if the document is tagged, we do not see that message. So the reading order options are to infer the reading order, which is the default, the recommended, that's the way most of us read PDF documents. The next option that we have is to read left to right, top to bottom. And these next two options are meant as tools for us to try and figure out for those Legacy documents whereas the virtual tags are created, it may not make sense. We may decide inferring the reading order from what the virtual tags see is not working. So let's try reading the document from left to right, top to bottom. And if you have columns ‑‑ and I apologize for the phone ‑‑ if you have columns, if you have text boxes and such, it may not read properly. Because again, it's going to read along the lines and not the way that the document should be read. The other option that we have is to read the raw print stream. And some people will try this: What the raw print stream means is that it's going to read it the way that the information will be printed on the page as it goes through the printer.

As information is sent from a document to the printer, it is not sent to the printer from left to right, top to bottom. So you may end up reading things from the middle of the page, the left of the page, the right of the page, the bottom of the page. The raw print stream is the order in which content is going to be printed on the page. And it's one of the most difficult things to understand because if you think of a page and how things might be printed or sent to the printer, it often will not make sense. And so you will not be reading the document from left to right, top to bottom. Or even top to bottom. But it is a tool that we have in order to try to make sense of documents that are not tagged. Again, the infer reading order from the document is the default. We also then have the ability to read all of the document or the current page. So I can choose how much of a document I'm going to read or is downloaded at once. And I can move through the document, especially longer documents, in a way that works for me. If you have a single page only downloaded, you may not have access to all of the headings or links in the rest of the document. And again, it's a choice for reading. It doesn't mean that those headings that you put in the document will never be read. It just means I won't necessarily have access to them until I get to that point in the document. In terms of accessibility, we also have the ability to save PDF as other formats. And this again, is primarily due to the tags and in the document. I can save the document as a Word document if the security settings permit.

I can also save as an RTF or DOC document. Now some of the visual formatting will come through, but not the structure. Let me just see. Yes. And it doesn't mean, if the document wasn't tagged properly in the first place. For example, if everything was just a paragraph or P tag, that's what you're going to get when you move into Word. If there are headings in the PDF document, they may or may not come through. And that's kind of a, well not kind of, that's a glitch in the tagging tool, in the ability. One of the things you have to remember when you're looking at accessible PDF is that the goal is to make the PDF document accessible in allowing people to save the document out to a different format, you're allowing PDF content to be more portable because we don't have an Acrobat version for Palm devices. We're stuck with desktop, laptop and tablet computers and I mean tablet in the sense of the windows system. I don't mean Apple. I haven't tried it on an iPad tablet yet. If we want to read them on our handheld devices, then we have to convert them to other formats such as Word, or text or HTML.

So we have the option of created a Word document. Visually you might see the headings, but the underlying structure, the H1,the word style that implies the heading structure is not going to be there. In Acrobat 10, it's a little bit of a step process. I can go to file and then I need to go to other options and choose the Word document. Or accessible text. So there's a little bit of a step process in order to save your document as another format. On the other hand, everything is right there, you don't have to go through the save as dialog if you don't want to. You can also save a document as accessible text. What this allows you to do is if the images has ALT text in the main document, in the PDF document, I should say, then the ALT text will be available to you in the accessible text version of your document. Now some people suggest that as a way to do the quality assurance on your documents and to make sure that everything was tagged properly, you should create an accessible text version of your document and compare the two. I find that this takes a lot of time. And for those of you who are doing repairs, time is money. And people are expecting, since we've been able to create tag PDF now for a number of years, that the price of repairing and quality assurance of PDF documents is going to go down. It's not going to stay the same or increase.

So while you do have the ability to save out as accessible text and compare it to the PDF document to make sure that everything is there, it is also one of the more time consuming ways of verifying your document. Going down the tags tree with a highlight content is a much faster way of doing that. You also have the ability to save your document as just a plain text document or a TXT document. And the difference, this image shows a ‑‑ it's all the same content. I always caption my Word documents so that if there are images in the Word document, they always have an ALT text and they a caption. So the difference between a plain text and accessible text is that the ALT text is not available in the plain text version of the document because I had the caption, you can see the, what is it? Figure one, the app key is the one that was associated with this text. So again, someone has the option of taking the information that has been tagged in a PDF document and exploiting it as Word. Oops! I got accessible text in there twice. As Word, accessible text or plain text or even HTML. And here's the Word document. The Word document also snagged the ALT text for the image as well as the caption. This is a look at the original piece of text from the PDF document where you can actually see the image and the caption below it. I included that just so you knew after we took a look at the accessible text what we started with in the first place.

So which format? One of the items in the draft refresh of section 508, I think it's around provision 503.2, is that when you have a document that is accessible, you have to be able to convert it to different formats and retain the structure. Which should be interesting given the number of players in the file format industry. It would mean that Adobe and Apple and Microsoft and Corel and IBM, to just name a few, are going to have to make sure that if a document is created in one format, that any structural things like headings or paragraphs or tables or lists, are going to transcend to other formats. So as I said, this should be interesting. It is your responsibility to create the PDF document to be accessible. It is not at this point in time, your responsibility to allow for the creation of differently accessible documents that have exactly the same structure. And it's not possible in many many cases. So your responsibility is to make the PDF document accessible. Not to look at what happens when the end user makes a choice to save that content out. Security is another issue in terms of PDF documents.

I can make a completely accessible PDF document, and if I uncheck the check box that says allow access to adaptive technology, then no one with a screen reader or text to speech tool is going to be able to read that document. It's something that document authors don't really understand. Because if you look at the security settings for a PDF document, the only thing that's checked is allow access for adoptive technology. And I think it might say people with disabilities. Well if you are trying to protect your intellectual property, you want everything nailed down and you don't really understand that. And this is where I find a lot of people sort of make a mistake. They will work very hard on their PDF documents. They will get them accessible. And then when it comes to applying the security, they will be afraid that if they leave anything, that their content is going to go. Having said that, there was a bit of an issue with earlier versions of reader in that if you were using a screen reader or the keyboard, even on a secured document with access to adaptive technology, you could copy and paste information from the PDF. That was fixed in later versions, I believe, in Acrobat 8. And it was fixed in nine and it's still fixed in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 10. If you have a document where you have selected text and you try to copy it, you will get a message that says the security settings of this document prevent the copying and extracting from the document.

As I said, earlier versions of Adobe Reader may still allow for that. However I know this was something the document authors were very concerned about. And it is the right of a document author to put some securities on it. One of the things that you have to balance is the right for people to have access to the content if they have a disability, if they're using adaptive technology, or even if they're not accessing it visually. With the need to make sure that your content is secure. And it's something that I think we'll be talking about for many years to come. In document properties, you have a list of the things that are allowed to be done to the document. And this is you find your security settings. If you do decide to put security on your documents, there are options. At the top of this dialog you will have a version that is compatible with this document. I think by default it says that you have to have Acrobat 8 or higher in order to open this document. You can go in and change that so that someone with Acrobat 5 or six can open the document. Most of the time, I just leave that. Because I want to encourage people to update their Adobe Reader. Having said that, there are people out there who are still using older versions of operating systems and adaptive technology. So again, you have to know your audience and know the range of tools they're using to access the PDF document. You have the ability to put a password for someone to open it. Unless you are really really secretive, I wouldn't recommend that. Because trying to keep track of passwords is bad enough without having one to open and one to modify the document.

The securities setting that relates directly to accessibility is in the bottom part of this dialog. And it is the check box that you would check to prohibit people from modifying or changing the content in the document. The items under this are printing. So you cannot allow printing. Or you can allow high resolution or low resolution printing. The theory behind low resolution printing is that if it does get printed and scanned back into the printer, there's going to be a lot of clean up and not worth someone's while. The low resolution for someone to take a quick copy of it. There are a lot of people with learning and visual disabilities who like the feel of paper. Just like people who like to read books rather than digital books. There are people who like to have the print out of the documents. In my documents I allow low resolution printing. Unless I'm working on a form, I do not allow copying and extracting or any of the things like commenting, fillable forms, unless of course I'm working on a fillable form. And then I do leave that checkbox to allow access to adaptive technology.

So knowing what the security settings are is as important as creating tags in your document. And this is just an example of some of the accessibility settings, the things I would set up on my documents. Again, the low resolution printing, allowing the filling in of forms, if I'm working on a form. But nothing else if I'm not working on a form. If you are working on a fillable form or if you want to allow commenting on a document. And I will say commenting, although I can add comments, they're not accessible in the sense that I have no idea where those comments are being put on the visual representation of of the document. However, you can extend features to Adobe Reader. And this is important to do if you are working on fillable forms. Because it allows the person filling in the form, to save that form and work on it at their leisure. If you have someone who fatigues easily or who needs to go away and think about some of the questions or the answers to the questions, being able to save that PDF document and come back and not have to start at the top of the document and fill in all of the information they've already provided, becomes an accessibility tool. Being able to save that document and come back to it and fill it in gradually is part of the accessibility of a PDF document. So as we move along, we need to start looking at some of the important things that you need to include in a document, if it's going to be considered accessible. Every document has a base language. Even if you have a bilingual document.

For example, here in Canada, we are a bilingual country. Most of our documents are produced in English and French and the two languages exist in the same document. In those instances, you just choose one. And then you tag go, and you tag the pieces of content that are in the other language. And I'll show you how to do that in just a minute. The language settings for the document are found under document properties advanced. That hasn't changed. The keyboard command to open the properties dialog is control plus D. And I recommend that you use plain old vanilla English because if you use English, Us S, and someone is using a British synthesized voice, you're going to force their synthesizer to switch to American pronunciations. And like wise I do use the British voice in jaws. If I force people to use the British synthesized voice, they're not going to understand some of the things being said. You have to get used to listening to that voice. Those of you who use adaptive technology especially audio output are used to the voices that we prefer. That once we encounter a document in a different voice, it does take a few minutes to get used to that voice if indeed, we can.

So I prefer to just use plain ordinary vanilla English and let the person who is reading the document, choose which English pronunciations they're going to use. If you have a multilingual document, you can go to the tag for that paragraph or heading, or that ALT text, that figure tag, and you have the option to adjust the language for that tag. What happens is that, for example, if I've said that my document is English but I a paragraph in French, as my screen reader comes across that French paragraph, the synthesizer automatically switches to French, reads that paragraph and then switches bag to English. It's pronouncing French words with a French synthesizer, not French words with an English synthesizer. Which can be catastrophic if you're trying to understand something. If you use proper heading styles and any custom styles on existing styles, your documents will be tagged properly. The amount of repairs you will make on a PDF document are directly related to the design of the source document. Again, I can't emphasize enough, garbage in, garbage out. And working with, as we'll see next week, working with well structured documents doesn't mean you lose your creativity. Doesn't mean you have to have a document that is boring and plain. It just means that you need to learn the tools that are available to you in your application to create a well structured document.

Most of the times, when I do workshops on accessible document design, people find it so easy, they don't know why they weren't taught to do things this way in the first place. We then have an accessibility full check. The thing you need to remember when working with PDF documents is that it is fallible. You can get false negatives and false positives. There is one repair that this will happen. I won't get into it now. I will find this error in my document, I will fix that error, save my document, close my document. And when I come back it still tells me the error is there even though it is not. So it is fallible. It's also a mechanic tool. All it's doing is looking and making sure your tags are correct. It's not telling you whether you have appropriate ALT text. It's not telling you whether you have a whole paragraph with a heading tag. It's simply saying yes, the tags are in the document. There is ALT tag in the documents that I see. I find the accessibility full check to be the best of the choices that you have in the full check options. In the full check options, about the center of the dialog, you have your choice of Adobe PDF Section 508. And I believe it's WCAG one and WCAG two. If you use Section 508 or any of the WCAG full checks, you're going to get a list of the check points and you're going to get, for the most part, I can't determine this, you're going to have to go and look at it manually. Section 508, for example, make sure that images have ALT text. It will go through it, it will say I can't find any images that have ALT text.

The second one provision is multimedia. It will say I can't really check this. You need to check this manually. Provision C is color. You'll get a message I can't really check this, you're going to need to go in and check this manually. When you choose the section 508 and the WCAG criteria for the accessibility full check, you're simply going to be told that there's a lot that you have to go in and check through manually. I recommend the Adobe PDF because that's where you're going to find your structural errors. That's where you're going to find the real flaws in your document. And the things that need fixing before it goes out the door. One of the things that I've heard in the last couple of years is that I want a JAWS compliant PDF or I want a window's text compliant PDF. And I'm here to tell you there is no such thing. I refuse to take any work where a jaws compliant or any other adaptive technology based compliance is the criteria for accessibility because it's like chasing the wind. It very much depends on the version of jaws, the version of Adobe Reader, the user settings, for both Adobe Reader and jaws. And there are too many variables. I end up, I did start working on one of these.

Actually I started talking to a client and once we've started going through the list of possible settings, you know, is it compliant if the setting is changed? Is it compliant if this setting is changed because it affects the way that the document is being read or parts of the document are being read to you. We also know that not everyone that has adaptive technology knows how to use it effectively. So one of the things you want to avoid is anyone who says I want a jaws compliant PDF. Try to talk to them about what an accessible PDF means. An accessible PDF means that the document has tags, that it has heading tags, paragraph tags, tables are tagged properly, things that you can quantify to them and provide as a checklist for your quality assurance. Saying that something is jaws compliant is, as I said, chasing the wind. You also have flawed or fragile PDFs. When I first mentioned this to Greg Pisocky of Adobe, he wanted to solve it because he encountered it too.

Most of the time it comes from desktop published documents. It's because they were created with so many layers or poor design. They were intended for print. They were not intended tore digital consumption. I had one document where if I fixed something on page five, it set loose the layers on page ten. There are times when the only way to effectively tag a fragile or flawed PDF document is to do each page individually and then reassemble the document. There are some fragile and flawed PDF where I can't even do that to because of the way that they're created. If I create ‑‑ if I fix something at the top of the page, it sets something loose somewhere else on the page. This is primarily where you find the disappearing content because you've moved a layer. If you can image some of these documents are like pulling a single layer of filo pastry out of all of the other layers without touching any of the surrounding layers and making it visible or tagging it. So you do have some fragile or flawed PDF documents where you will be able to make them maybe 75 to 85 percent accessible. But there will be components of the actual relevant content that you will not be able to make accessible.

Acrobat ten also now has an action wizard. We'll go back to some of the tools that you now have to help you. One of the tools that you now have in the action window wizard is accessible process. You can go to file action wizard and go to accessibility something, and it will run through your document and tag it. It's not going to repair it. It can only do what it can do. Again, if you have a poorly constructed document, you're going to have a lot of repairs. But at least the process is consolidated into one step. If you don't know much about accessibility. Having said that, there are parts of the accessibility wizard that are again, accessible. I can go to the file menu, choose the accessibility wizard and decide I want to edit, sorry, the action wizard, and I want to edit one of the actions and create a new action. And what opens is an accessible flash based dialog. So again, maybe not a tool that you want to use if you're using a screen reader. And it is available in Acrobat ten. But for those of you for whom it isn't an issue, it is a tool that you can use.

We're also moving more and more into the whole idea of portfolios. I like the idea of portfolios because I can have a collection of files and when I was able to, in Acrobat 8, when I was actually able to archive my mail messages and folders from Microsoft outlook in an accessible tagged PDF file, it was great. With outlook 2007 and 2010, I no longer have that ability. And the default has shifted so that I'm not, if I'm archiving a folder in ‑‑ yeah, if I'm archiving a folder in outlook, the default isn't going to be to create a PDF document, it's going to be to create a portfolio. And portfolio is an inaccessible flash application. Adobe has worked a lot, from what I've heard, on the accessibility of portfolios for Acrobat ten. However, in Acrobat ten, after saving some documents as a portfolio, the only thing I could do was read the title of the documents that had be consolidated into my portfolio. There are two places where you need to turn off portfolios. If you're in outlook, you would go into the Adobe conversion settings. And there's a checkbox about halfway down that says always create portfolios. You want to uncheck that. If you are using Acrobat or reader in the user preferences under accessibility, down near the bottom, there is a checkbox to not use portfolios but to use, it's similar to programmatic discovery. I forget what the wording is only because it's awkward wording. But the word portfolio is in that check boxed text.

So you want to make sure you uncheck that and what that will do is try to open a portfolio without being in portfolio view. One of the problems with the portfolio is that now while I can read the name of the file, I cannot find information in a file. Portfolios allow you to do a search and in the case of archived mail look folders, I ‑‑ it will show me ‑‑ or that portfolio. That contains that text. I mean it's a really nice way of putting files together and then being able to search them all for information. But right now, in Acrobat ten the find tool is still not accessible. It is an accessible flash thing. You also have the option if you select files on your computer or flash drive to combine the files as a portfolio. Again you want to choose no. You want to just create a PDF document. If you create portfolios of untagged PDF documents, there is no tool to go through that portfolio and tag every document. You have to open every document and tag it separately.

So again, my one e‑mail folder archive was an embarrassingly 828 megabytes having to go through and tag every e‑mail message so that when I need it, you know, to go and review a project or if questions arise about a project, it's going to take too much to do. So in Acrobat ten, I still have the ability in outlook to save a mail folder as an untagged PDF document. And then I can go and add tags to it. But I really miss that tool. As someone who works in academia, I can archive class correspondence in outlook. I can create a mail folder for specific projects. I could archive those in accessible format. And I can go back if we're doing a post mortem or if a student as an appeal or something like that, I can go into that tagged PDF collection to find information and it is there in a secure format. It's one of the reasons that I really liked the ability to tag information from outlook. However, with a portfolio, as I said, you can also create a portfolio from just files on your computer. Now if you create a portfolio using tagged documents, then they will still be tagged. It's only when you create a portfolio with untagged documents that you run into the problem of having to tag each document individually in order for it to be accessible. And this is just a slide that goes over how to tag portfolios. If you have untagged documents in a portfolio, you have to do each one of them. There isn't a global tagging tool when you're working with portfolios.

So even as we move into Acrobat ten, there are still some ways of created PDF documents that are very awkward to tag even though you may have something that is well structured or simple to tag, there are tools that are either broken or have changed or haven't progressed significantly enough to allow for access. When we're talking about tagging PDF documents, most of the time we look at the documents we create from Word or PowerPoint or InDesign or Excel. We're not looking at documents that come from other places. One of the other things to note about Acrobat ten is that the comments panel is still not accessible. It has moved now over to the list of sort of expanding collapsing tools. But it is still not accessible. So I can't use comments. If I'm saving my PowerPoint presentation and it says do you want to have the speaker notes converted to comments, I can't do that because as someone who uses a screen reader, those comments are not going to be accessible to me. I find another way of getting that information in an accessible way into my PDF document. So in terms of an overview when we talk about a tagged PDF, we are talking about just documents we're creating. Not documents that come from a mail merge or documents that have come from portfolio collections or archived from outlook. We are talking about the documents we are working with every day.

So next week, we're going to take a look at using styles to create navigational points in our document. Also using styles to replace those nasty text boxes that are inherently inaccessible. We're going to talk about ALT text for images and links. Captions for images, tables and equations. There is, by the way, in Acrobat X no support for ‑‑ we're going to look at proper spacing for lists so you don't break them and what making a list means. Proper table structure. Looking at the accessibility checker for your documents in office 2010. Yes, office 2010 now has an accessibility checker. In Word 2007 and Word 2010, there are also some really nice tools that will help you with the accessibility of your documents and working with Legacy documents. And I'm hoping that I have enough slides. I tried to keep my slides to about 43 or 45 because I find that fits nicely in the hour. I'm going to try and make room for these new tools. One is the ability for you to get a list of headings in your document, the same way that I can with my screen reader.

Another is the ability to import and export styles which comes in handy if you're working with Legacy documents. So that's next week. We're going to actually take a look at the structures that lead up to the tags and then week three, we're going to take a closer look at what you can do in Adobe Acrobat in terms of creating and working with the tags. If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to e‑mail me. My e‑mail address, and I'll type it in the text message once I let go of the key for the microphone, but please feel free to e‑mail me. If there's anything that you want to see covered, I tell you now, we don't have time for forms. If there's anything that you want to see covered or a question that you want to see addressed in the next 3 weeks, please e‑mail that and if I can, I'll fit it in. If I can't, I'll answer your question. So I'm going to let go now and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them.