- [Rob] Thank you very much Laura. And I wanna thank deque for the opportunity to partner with them on this presentation. As Laura mentioned, my name is Rob Haverty and I am the product manager for our Document Cloud Products at Adobe. Primarily, I focused on PDF. I realized a couple of weeks ago when I was doing a webinar that I've actually been doing accessibility for almost a quarter of a century and that makes me feel very old. When I started at Adobe approximately four years ago, I knew very, very little about PDF accessibility. And so I to learn and I went through some trainings and some videos and thought I had learned everything and thought, great. I'm an expert. And I set it aside because I have many other duties at Adobe as well. And started doing the other duties and about six weeks later I went back and to remediate a PDF and forgot everything. And I realized that PDF remediation is one of those skills you have to kind of keep practicing and keep current with. The other thing is that Adobe is always changing the product. As I started using it, there were a lot of things that I just stupid. And it's like I wanted it easier. So we are trying to update Acrobat Pro DC on a fairly regular basis to make it easier to create accessible PDF documents. So I encourage you to stay current as I encourage with any technology. The more current you are, the better product you have. So today we're going to go through, fairly quickly. So this slides pretty fast. And I'll spend most of my time actually in Acrobat and in PDFs and in word documents doing work. So as Susan, a slide show and and talking head. I will go through some of the basics. I actually have a recorded webinar that is more detail on the basics if you're interested in that. This is more about actually doing the work, but I'm going to touch a little bit on the basics. We're going to talk about the source document and how to convert and to a PDF. And then we will go through some of the sort of basic skills you need to know in order to remediate a PDF. Now, many of you may have been doing this for a long time and you have your own way of doing things. I'm not here to tell you you're wrong or that my way is right. My way is my way. And there are many different paths to success. You will find that I am basically a lazy person and I want few steps as possible. So the way I'm doing it may not be the way you're comfortable with. It may not be the way you like, and that's perfectly fine. This is just the way I do it. I know I've had people sometimes try to teach me, "Oh, if you do this in outlook,this is going to be so much better." And it's like, "Yeah, but that's not the way I'm used to doing." This is my approach and you may have your own approach to remediating PDFs that is equally valid. In many cases there isn't a right or wrong. I will point out some gotchas in Acrobat where if you do it one way instead of another, you may create issues for yourself. But we'll be going through my approach to remediating a PDF. And I want to start with just a very high level. I have a recording and you'll see in the slides at the end. I have some recordings of other webinars that I point you to that go deeper into kind of the basics around PDF accessibility. Today is going to be more about actually just doing the work. So I do want to start with PDF/UA. Regardless of where you are in the world today, most countries have some kind of laws or regulations around accessibility. Many of these point to the web content accessibility guidelines for content accessibility. And when you're in wikag, it will reference PDF/UA for PDF accessibility. Now this is not all of wikag's requirements. Wikag has requirements on color contrast and things like that that are not covered in the PDF/UA standard because they're already covered in wikag. This is more about talking about the text and the structure of that text and the organization of the content in order that an assistive technology can access it and expose it to the user. So the PDF/UA standard ISO 1429, right now, it's a dash one. They're working on a dash two. References the ISO standard for PDF. That's the standard for PDF 32,000 is huge. And complex and lots of information. And so this subset standard really helps you kind of focus on, well, what are the key things that assist your technologies need to know about the structure of the document so someone can affectively read that document. One of the things that I'm going to highlight here, and we'll talk about again, is the PDF/UA standard says that the tag tree, and if you don't know what a tag tree is, don't worry about it, we'll get there. Or in standard language, the structure tree must be in the logical reading order. Before we had a structure tree or a tag tree, screen readers would infer the reading order from the order panel. So many people are still sort of familiar with that order panel. And they want to make sure that the order panel is in the correct reading order. The problem is that sometimes when you do that it causes the tag tree not to be in the correct reading order. And since the standard now speaks specifically to the tag tree or the structure tree must be a logical reading order. For a tagged PDF, screen readers and other assister technologies are looking to the tag tree. So we'll be focusing in the tag tree, I live 98% of my time in the tag tree. And you're gonna see if you're familiar with using Acrobat, some changes that have come out in the last few years that enable you to stay in the tag tree and work more efficiently. The other thing about standards is most standards have a shell or things you must do and a may or things that you can or should do but you don't have to do. And this one is no different. And one of the examples of that is in lists. So a list must have a list tag and a list item. It doesn't have to have the label or LBL or the list body or L body tags. So be aware that your organization may have its own interpretation of the standard. Or as we get into talking about conversion, different conversion tools will interpret the standard differently. The other thing I want to mention that that really confuses us, I think is not all tools are created equal. And when you go out to read PDF, the most important thing is it needs to be tagged and it needs to be tagged correctly. But the assisted technology that's being used is also an important player and must recognize those tags. And the readers that you are using, whether it's Acrobat reader or it's in the browser or it's the Apple PDF reader. Whatever reader that you are using to display the document, also needs to fully respect and understand the PDF/UA tags. And then of course if you have an untagged PDF, a screen reader or a suit technology is going to try to infer the reading order from that order panel. And so it will give information, it will read the document, but in some respects it's like reading a document with no paragraphs, no structure. So it's just gonna read the text. And that is not conducive to understanding. So what I have found a lot of times is when I have remediated a document and I send it out, then someone will say it's not accessible. And what is frequently the cause of that is it's not that the documents not accessible, it's either the tool that they are using, the assisted technology does not fully support all of the tags or the reader that they are using to display the document does not fully support all the tags. So when I am remediating a PDF, I make sure that it's tagged, all the tags are correct. I will use NVDA for a couple of reasons. And I'm not promoting NBDA here as a screen reader please. But I know that in NVDA supports the tags, because NVDA is open source and companies help fund it. And we have helped fund them. Adobe has to make sure they do support the tags. And it's a free screening here. So it's a great tool to use for testing along with the Acrobat reader because I know that it fully supports the tags and it also is free. Keep in mind that if you've done all the work and you and you've done a great job and you've put a lot of effort into it and then somebody complains, it may not be because you didn't do the right work. It may be because the tools they're using do not support the tags correctly. And the last thing I want to point out, and I'm going to switch over to Acrobat Pro DC for this. I wanna show you that over on the left side of the screen, where I'm sort of moving my mouse right now, this is the navigation pane. And there are a number of icons in there. The bottom three, the content, these order and the tag tree, which looks kind of like the luggage tag, those are not there by default. And so if you are in a new instance of Acrobat, or you've upgraded from Acrobat 11 pro to Acrobat pro DC, you may not see those there and you need them. You particularly need the tag tree. And so you can just put your cursor over the navigation pane or you can navigate to it using the keyboard and you can right click and the context menu will come up. I'm in the wrong place there, sorry about that. The context menu will come up and you'll see a bunch of things you can add. And you want to add the content, the order panel, and the tag tree. So all of these three you'll want to add to this if you don't have them here because you're going to use them a lot. There's a longer way to do it by going up to the view menu. But I'm going to show you mostly the shortcuts for everything along the way is also documented in the deck. All right, let's talk about the source document. The source document is the most important thing for the accessible PDF. It will save you worlds of time if you get folks to focus on making sure that the original document is accessible first. So I always like to say that source document is supreme. Now there are some things that you need to think about though. First of all, does the authoring tool itself support creating an accessible document? Not all of them do. And so you know the good old adage of garbage in, garbage out. This is never more true than it is with a source document to a PDF. If you have an inaccessible source document, there is no magic tool that is going to automatically make that thing an accessible PDF. If you look at word for example, and we're gonna talk about word a little bit in some other places. Using word styles, using the accessibility checker. So use heading styles, use styles for lists, use paragraph styles and run the accessibility checker, which they have made easier to find. It is now in the review tab of the ribbon and there's accessibility checkers right there. So it's easy to get to, to make sure that your document is accessible first. However, I have found that in most cases the author doesn't know how to use word to create an accessible document. So if you are in an organization where you may be teaching people about creating accessible PDFs, I highly encourage you to start with teaching people how to create accessible word documents. It will save everyone a lot of time and grief. It is almost always easier to fix the source document than to actually fix the PDF. And so many times if I have access to the source document, I will go back to that and fix it and reconvert it rather than do all the work in the PDF itself. Now let's talk a little bit about converting. This is another important part. There are many, many, many ways to get from a source document to a PDF and they are not all created equal. If you are in Office, you have a pretty good chance of having that accessible Office document convert to an accessible PDF if you use one of two methods. And we're gonna go through those. One is, Acrobat has a plugin for Office. And that will use our interpretation of the PDF/UA standard to tag the document based upon the structure that is provided in Word for example. Additionally, then you have within the application itself, you may have a save as not all applications give you a well tagged PDF, but Word does. However it will be a slightly different interpretation or maybe of the PDF standard than what you will get from Acrobat. So I encourage you to play with those and figure out who does the best job and gives you a PDF that requires the least amount of work. Because at the end of the day we want to do as little work as we have to in fixing a PDF. You can export to PDF and again, depending on the tool, it may be very similar to a save as or the Acrobat plug in. You can print to PDF, which will always give you an untagged, therefor inaccessible PDF. There are times when it's valuable to actually start with an untagged PDF. However you want to use that judiciously and just know that if someone does print to PDF, it will be untagged and there'll be work for you to do. And then there are many, many other conversion tools and plugins that you can play with and try to see what works best for you. You will get different results. Tables and lists may not be tagged correctly. The PDF itself may be completely untagged or you may get custom tags created. Now the PDF standard is very precise on the formatting of a tag. For example, a paragraph tag is a capital P in angle brackets. Not a lowercase P, not the Word paragraph. So you need to be very precise. Otherwise it will be a custom tag and an assisted technology won't recognize it. Alright, let's go into a document and do a little bit of conversion. Word document. Let's get to work. There we go. Alright, so we're in a word document and if I look at the word document, I can see that I use my heading style. That's the heading one. Oops I just reformatted that somehow. My paragraph, you use my headings. I've got paragraphs, spacing styles, so there's no blank line between my paragraphs. I've got all texts on my image, I've got my list bulleted and numbered and got my table. Now I'm gonna show you one thing about tables in word that has changed. If you select the table itself. So I've put focus in the table. You'll notice it up here in the ribbon, there are two, there's actually under my name there. There's a nother that says table. And then there are two tabs under that, design and layout. If you go to the design tab, you will notice over here on the left, there are some check boxes. This first checkbox for header row means that I'm saying that this header row in my table are column headers. The next checkbox to its right, the first column I'm saying that my first column are row headers. Also, you have a choice of last column. Sometimes the row headers are over on the right. Which I personally think is of a laps. But that's just my opinion. So you can check these, used to be in the old days, you would, select to repeat header row, to order to get that first row as column headers. That now repeat header row is truly used for the functionality it was originally designed for. Which is... Oh, I have a table that goes over multiple pages. So don't use that to indicate your header rows. Only use it if you're going to go over multiple pages. All right, so let's go back up to the ribbon and you'll see here there is the Acrobat tab has been added because I have Acrobat produce seed on my windows machine. And oops, there's loss focus there. There's a little problem with the zoom thing popping in and out. Alright, so if I select the app Corvette, I'll open the Acrobat ribbon. I wanna highlight one quick thing, Preferences. There's no real need to go to preferences. We have them set by default. There is one thing here that people love, enable advanced tagging. Advanced always sounds better. It's not, don't use it when you're tagging your PDF. It will create a bunch of tags that you don't want. So leave that unchecked. So all we have to do is click on create PDF. It will ask me to save that. It will convert it. The dialogue will come up. It's converting it. It will pop up automatically Acrobat for me. And if I go into the tag tree, we're going to see that I have my H1, my H2. I'm going to scroll on down, I go to my figure tag, and I right click and go to properties. And I'll see, I have my alt texts that I created in word. My lists are tagged correctly with the list and the list items. And if I go to my table, and we're gonna talk about tables and more details so don't worry about this. But I'm going to go into my table editor and I have an error. It's showing everything as a header cell. Because I checked that repeat header row and so it made everything a header cell. So that was a mistake. Let's go back to that just for grins. Back into our table. Let's turn off repeat header rows. There we go. Go back into my act path, Academic Acrobat tool. Create PDF and let's say over, yes. Go back down to our table. And now you'll see, Oh, it got most of my... Well it's still messed up my table headers. Alright, so we're going to talk about tables. So that's conversion. You're gonna get a pretty well tagged PDF If you've done the right things in word. You can also go to office, save as and save as a PDF. And one thing I want to point out is within a PDF, there is a tool, If you have an untagged PDF, and we're gonna pretend this one's untagged by get rid of getting rid of those tags. I can go over here to the accessibility tool and auto tag the document or I can just select the route. There are no tags available, right click and say, add tags to the document. And I'm gonna get a tag tree. But notice, my very first tag is an H3 and not the H1. Because when we do it within Acrobat, we no longer have the structural information from word to know what these really are. So we have some heuristics, but effectively we're guessing. And you'll notice that the second heading, the H2, we didn't even make that a heading. We made it a P tag. So you will get different results between PDF maker, which is the tool in word or make accessible, which is tagging it within Acrobat itself. So just be aware of how you do it gives you different results. Alright, a little bit talking about on the basics for actually tagging and fixing tasks. Remember the content shell, which means it must be tagged in the logical reading order. So the most important thing is to make sure your tag tree is in the logical reading order. Some things that you always should check and some things that will always come across as wrong. You should always check your tables. Currently to my knowledge there is no tool that automatically tags a table correctly, particularly if you have a complex table with nested headers or merged header cells. Figures. I always want to check my alt text on my figures. I always want to check for things that I may need to artifact like blank lines or decorative images. And I'm always going to check my lists. If you have complex lists where you may have multiple paragraphs within the same bullet, those will not get tagged correctly. Some things that are completely unique and outside of our scope today, scan documents, role mapping. If you have custom tags, you need to role map them. Links and form fields, which are all very complex. Alright, so let's get into actually doing some work here. I'm going to... I need to make this taller so that zoom controlled and keep popping up there. All right. So I'm gonna close this one. One of the things that I have found in Acrobat, if you have too many PDFs open, and too many is usually more than 10, but I usually stop at five. It can lock up on you and confuse or can crash. So I don't work on more than one or two at a time. So we're gonna get rid of that one. We're gonna start it here in document that it says example one. When you get the documents, you should get all these different documents and I have the examples and it's highlighted in the deck, which example document to use. I also have them fixed so that you can play with them yourselves and check the solutions against the ones that I have. So, first thing I always do is my tag tree. And the first thing I do once I've opened the tag tree is I go to the first tag and the tag tree. Now this word tags is not a tag. This is the root for the tag tree. So the first tag I have here is this section tag. It may a document tag, it may be an article tag, it could be a whole lot of different things. All of them are sort of semi synonymous in the standard and so it doesn't really matter. And I want to look for these pink boxes. Used to be blue boxes, but you couldn't see them around tables and you couldn't see them around images. So we changed it to this kind of fuchsia color. And if you're not seeing them, you can right click and notice here that highlight content. But if you unchecked that I lose my boxes. All right, so here I have my very first tag is an H4. And it needs to be an H1. Now PDF is a little bit different. And PDF/UA is a little bit different than wikag. It allows multiple H1s on a page and it requires that it be that the tags be in a hierarchical order. So I need to start with an H1. What I've found is a lot of people who might know a little bit about styles don't understand the importance. And so they may look at them and choose them based upon how they look. And it's like, my first heading. No, it's an H1, it's an H4. So we need to go in and we can either double click on it or I can use the F2 key to bring this into edit mode and change that four to a one. Now notice it does not change the visible book of the document. The point of PDF is the fidelity of the visible layout. But we're changing it for the assisted technology knows that that's an H1. Now to go to this next one, H5 yet needs to be either another H1 or an H2. And if I don't know the formatting. Now remember I said that the formatting is really important. I can right click and go to properties and in the tag tab I can go to type and I can look for heading level two and say and close and it will automatically format it correctly. So if you don't know that a list tag is a capital L not the word list, just go into properties and you can find a tag there and it will format it for you correctly. So we've learned how to change tag. Alright, going to get out of that, save that. And I'm even going into my next example and we're gonna spend the rest of the hour in this document. Again, I select the upper most tag and I can start narrowing down and looking at, you know, things are looking pretty good until I get here. So lists tags were not, or list styles were not used in word for this, but I know it's a list. It says, so list of Canadian provinces. So I need to fix that. So in order to fix this, I need to add a list tag. Now there is no other way today in Acrobat to create list tags without manually doing in the tag tree. We'll talk a little bit later about the reading order tool. But the reading order tool will allow you to create figure tags and paragraphs and all kinds of tags except lists tags. They are very complex and we just haven't quite figured out a way to effectively create that whole tag structure by the click of a button. So to add my list tag. When you add a new tag to the tag tree, it will always add it below where you have focus. So I want my list tag to be right under this H3. So I put focus on the H3, I right click, I can use some context key on my keyboard, and at the very top of the context menu will be the word new tag. I select that I get a new tag dialogue in the title section. I want to scroll down until I see the word list. And you don't need a title. Title actually lives outside of the tags so it has no value and does not impact to technology at all. You may decide to use a title sometimes if you have a big document, a 400 page document. So it's going to take you days to get through it and you've gotten to a certain point. You may put a title on that tag that says restart here or I'm, I'm done through here. Just so that you know and where to go back and it's easy to find it. But you don't need a title. Let's see. Okay, now you'll notice two things happened. I got a brand new empty tag. The L tag. I know it's empty because it does not have the expand collapse arrow to the left of it. And the focus went back up to the top of my tag tree. Now fortunately if you're on a long document and the top was out of view, it doesn't automatically shift the tag tree up to there. It'll keep this L tag in view. I'm working on getting it to fix be fixed. So it either leaves it on the age three or moves it automatically to that new tag I added because that's where I want my focus. Now in the old days, which is only like a year or two ago, you would have to go in and manually change like we did with that heading tag each one of these tags to a list item or capital L capital I tag. Now I can undo, that's one of the things that we added when I first started I couldn't believe we didn't have undo. So let's undo that. What I can do now is I actually can bulk select by holding down the shift key and I can select each of these. And while I'm doing this, I'm watching my tag tree, but I'm also watching over here in the document for those pink boxes to make sure that I get all of my items. All the content that should be in that list. And I've selected them all. I can right click, I can go to properties and again, on the tag tab I can go to the type and I can select list item. Now you'll notice even before I close out of this, it's changed all of those to allies. So I'm going to close out, they're still all selected and they need to be children of that list tag. Now you can drag and drop. And I say you can because I can't. For some reason I don't quite have the manual dexterity to be competent in drag and dropping. Or you can cut and paste, which is what I'm going to do. So I'm going to right click there and I'm going to cut it. Go up and select the L tag, right click and I'm gonna paste it as a child. And now I have an acceptably formatted, a standard based format for my list. I have the list and the L, I. I expand that L, I, There's my content Ontario. I don't have an LBL or a label tag because there are no labels on this one. And I don't have an L body tag. It's not necessary. And again, I'm gonna do things as quickly as I can. And so this is the quickest way for you to create that list. And then when I go here, you can see that I've got my list tag, L tag with all of my list items and they all get selected and shown in the pink boxes. So now we've had to add a new tag and move tags. So let's move down to the artifacts section of the document. Artifacts are things that are unnecessary. They may be visually interesting, but from a screen reader or assistant technology standpoint, they don't do anything for you from a content standpoint. And what happens a lot of times, particularly for people who learned how to type before we had computers and we could do a paragraph styles, they would enter insert a blank line or a carriage return for paragraph spacing. Now those are not the end of the world and some screen readers allow you to actually ignore those. But if you have not, the screen reader will read it as blank. And so it will say according to the PDF, ISO standard blank, blank, blank, blank. Additionally, because they are not considered blank. One common error in the word document blank. And that's annoying. And where it becomes problematic is when people have used blank lines for page formatting and to push things down to the second page. Because you may get to the end of the first page and it will go blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. Not only is that annoying, but it can also confuse the user. The person reading the document, "Is that the end of the document?" What's going on here? So we want to artifact those. Now in the old days, I won't take the time to show you. You'd go to the reading order, you'd go to the order panel. Actually I will show you go to the order panel, you'd select the drop down, you say show the reading order panel to bring up the reading order panel. I don't do that anymore because I can do this all in the tag tree. So I kind of like to, sometimes you will find that content is layered on top of content and it's hard to know which content you are selecting to artifact. So by going into the tag tree and selecting that tag first, I get my pink box, I can right click and I can go to the reading order tool directly there. I also have a hot key of X and it opens the reading order tool, which used to be called the step reading order tool or the Turo. It's now just the reading order tool. And you'll notice now I have numbers and associated with that pink box is the number 18. So I can select that and go over here and you'll notice that when I selected it, these buttons became active and I want to choose background artifacts. Now two things happened. First of all, the 18 moved down because this is no longer in the reading order. And if I go back to my tag tree will notice that that blank tag is gone. This is the result you want is you want the tag artifacted items are not supposed to appear in the tag tree per the standard. This is the only process I know that does this seamlessly in one step. There are many other ways you can artifact, but you won't always get rid of that tag in the tag tree and then you have to go and manually get rid of it. So this takes care of it all for you. So now I have some other ones. I've got 19 20, 23. And I can instead, I can hold down my control key and I can select 19, 21, 23 and go over to the background artifact and remove them all in one fell swoop. Go back to my tag tree and my tag tree, and as an arrow down it goes paragraph, paragraph and it skips all of those. So an effective way to do this in the tag tree, you can watch the results in the tag tree, which is where I like to live. All right, now we have another option here. So let's go down to our figure tag. Now this is a figure of, Let me make this a little bit bigger. This is a figure of my dog. And the purpose of this figure is for me to point out the fact that my dog has a goofy grin. It's not to point out that he's a black and white lab, a border Collie mix, not to point out there's a TV in the family room, there's a towel on the floor. Don't care about any of that. So because we have a caption that says figure one my dog with his goofy grin. And that is all the context I wanted you to get out of this picture. I don't need to have alt text on it. So in this case I can also choose to go into the reading order panel and artifact that picture. Now there may be some debate on this, and I'm not telling you that artifact your pictures because they have a caption. But it is something to consider. Now let's look at next figure. Now this one shows a bear standing in my driveway. And the caption says, "Figure a new neighbor comes to visit." Well, no, that captions not sufficient. Because I don't know, is that a person, children, a dog, a cat, what? So I need alt text on this one. I'm not gonna artifact it on the figure tag itself, I can right click and go to properties and add, a black bear in our driveway on a sunny afternoon. So I have out text and caption, so I would have both here. Alright, let's go down to tables. Tables are complex. So let's take a look at this table here. Now in the old days, you would go into the reading panel, you would find what I swear was a four pixel square to the left of the word table that would show up in the table itself and you had to click on that to activate the table editor. You don't have to do that anymore. You can select the table tag and the tag tree, right click, choose table editor or hit the hot key queue. And I'm now in the table editor. Now in this case, I didn't select my first, so I didn't get hetero cells there like I should have. I can select any cell here and I can go into my table editor options and I can choose my colors. Now the colors I have are not my default colors. I've chose them so that my selection box shows up well and things like that. You also have the choice of turning on or off the T H and T D for the type. I turn it off typically because it tends to cover up. So I uncheck the box. It covers up the words and I may need those. Alright, so we're in our table editor and I know so because my table is all these great colors. I can select my first cell, the color cell, right click and go into my table cell properties. Now, regardless of what I've done right in the source document inward, the one thing that currently does not get set is the scope and you must set the scope. So color is a row, I'm sorry, is a column header. So I need to choose the scope of column. If I do not set the scope, assited technologies will guess that the scope is always a column. Now for a column header, that's not the end of the world. I'm gonna say okay there. But for a row header it is and I'll show you why. So let's go into that row header. Select Ruby Red, right click the cable sell properties. I need to make it a header cell and I need to give it the scope of row. I say, okay, the color will change. Now you may need the TH and the TD if you can't recognize the colors. So you have that option. If I do not make my row headers, give them the scope of row. If I'm down here in the bottom right most data cell, that has the number seven in it and I wanna know what headers are associated with that, it would tell me the assisted technology would tell me that truck color, Ruby red, midnight black and triple yellow are all associated with that because I did not tell it that these are row headers. Let's go back in and I can bulk select by holding down the shift key and using my touch pad or mouse just like midnight black and triple yellow. Right quick going to table sell properties, better sell scope of row and I say, okay. Now that I have my rows all set up correctly, and down here in this number seven it will say the header cells associated with it are trucks, color, triple yellow. So it's really important to set scope. We need to set the scope for SUVs and sedans and trucks. also to call them, but I won't do that in, keeping aware of time. Alright, so let's go it down to a slightly more complex table. I get laughed at all the time for calling a complex table because it really isn't. I've dealt with some that have four or five or six rows of nested headers and all kinds of interesting stuff. But let's go into our table editor here. So I've selected the table tag, it's blue. I'm going to right click and I'm gonna go into my table editor. I don't know look first of all at this first quarter 2015. Now this is a merged header cell. It merges over January, February, March. So I need to go into that right click, select table cell properties, set my scope to column. And then I need to make sure that I set my column span to the number of columns that are under that merged header cell. And there are three. You wanna make sure that your scope and your span match that you choose column to column. The road span will only be one because this is a column header. It's not a row header. The only time that you would use both rows and column span if you had a header that was for both rows and columns. So this is a column header, my column span, I'm going to get an error. That's our message that says that I'm merging cells. I've got a weird structure and this can cause a problem since your technology has gotten much better at handling us today. So it's really not a problem. I just say yes, I wanna proceed. Color changed the color I chose for merged header cells. And then I'm gonna do the same thing for the other ones. And I can bulk select, get this back down size here a little bit. There we go. So I can, if you click outside of the table, you will exit the table editor. So I can select all three of those. Second, third and fourth quarter, right quick table, cell property, header, cell column and they span three. And I say okay. And I get the message and then the last thing I need to do is I need to make sure and select January, February, March, April, we'll knock the last thing. The next thing I need to do is select all my months. Let's see if I actually got them all. Right click, table cell properties, header cell, and these are column headers. Say, okay, I missed one, I missed July, I'll go back and fix that or I can go back and fix that. I need to set my scope for sales person and annual total. I need to set my scopes for my row headers Susan, Bill and Jeff. The blank ones you can kind of ignore. I like them to look like they're friends, but the reality is assisted technologies ignore them so it doesn't really matter what you do with those. Okay, very last In our remaining few minutes. I wanna talk about architects for figures. Now you may remember on the previous figure I selected the figure tag. I did a right click. I went to properties and I typed in my alternate text. That's a lot of work to manually go to each individual tag. So instead I'm gonna go up here to my accessibility tool. Now if you don't have the accessibility tool in your tools pain on the right, which you will not by default, you can go to the tools tab up here on the left, scroll down to the bottom, find accessibility and click on on add. Like I would here under the redact tool, you'll see the word ad cause I already have it in there. The word is open, but I can add it by clicking on that and it will add the tool to the bottom of my tools pain. And then I can use the keyboard to move those. So let's go back into our document. And we'll go to my accessibility tool and if you want to see the names you can expand that. And they collapsed the tools pain cause the accessibility tool. And I'm going to select set alternate text. It's going to tell me that it's going to select all the figures. Awesome. That's what I want. You can check the box don't show this again. And you'll notice it went to the black bear figure first because remember we artifact of the picture of my dog. So that's no longer a figure in the tag tree. You have arrows here to move back and forth. Don't hit save and close until you're done with all your figures. So when I click on the arrow, it'll take me down to the next figure. I can go back to the other figure. Now there's a wonderful little box here that says decorative figure and that sounds really exciting. It's like, ooh, I don't have to artifact my figures I can just go in here and click on decorative figure and it will automatically artifact them for me, it will and it won't. It won't clean up the tag tree correctly. We're working on fixing that. So right now I encourage you not to use that just to go through the tag tree and manually using the reading order tool to manually artifact, what needs to be artifacted. But I can add my alternate text field. We go to the next one. Don't hit your enter key because save and close has the focus you need to go up to here. And saving clothes still has the focus, which drives me a little bit crazy. I'll just say barn for that and I can go to my next one and I'm gonna say tree that's are those are all really bad old texts. And then I can hit save and close. And now I'm done. So that gives us kind of the basics. I'm going to go back into my PowerPoint and you'll notice the slides have all the steps on how to do everything that we did. You'll also have the recordings. I'm gonna go down to the end here and come back up a little bit. I wanna point out that I have a bunch of webinars. I did webinars on forms and scan documents and complex tables. Also a basics and an intro which is very similar to this one that you can look at. Those are free, you are free to share them, copy them down, do whatever you want. And there's materials for exercises. There's some other resources available in the deck. There's information. If you have things that are really complex and ugly and you've gone through my webinars and you can't figure them out, feel free to contact me. If you're using Acrobat pro DC and you are really unhappy with the way it's working and you have some great ideas how We could improve it, please feel free to contact me. That's how we make it better. And then you can also connect with Deque who has a whole lot of awesome trainings available. So I encourage you to reach out there as well. And that gives us two minutes left.

- [Laura] Lovely job, Rob. Lots of really good feedback here in the chat. So yeah, I'm just going to hop right in just so we can answer a few questions here. So I got a question. We currently test PDFs and PC, Mac, Android and iOS. Can we successfully reduce the scope of these platforms to a few and still feel confident that we are sending out accessible PDFs?

- [Rob] Yeah, I actually would not test my PDF on multiple platforms. Because as I mentioned before in reading a PDF. The different platforms are not really going to tell you whether you've tagged it correctly. You're gonna then be testing the platform and the assisted technology. So if you're on a Mac for example, using voiceover and voiceover may not support all the tags. And so you can't do anything about that. Like I say, I typically test whether you're on a, well, I typically test on windows because I can use NVDA on windows and I can use the Acrobat reader. If you're on a Mac, the Acrobat reader works equally well on a Mac. So I would make sure I'm using the Acrobat reader with voiceover. But you really don't need to test on multiple platforms. It's really about checking to make sure that you have tagged the PDF correctly.

- [Laura] Great, thank you. Another question here. If you have bulk of web hosted PDFs, could you do a batch scan for those issues to be addressed like you would for a webpage?

- [Rob] There are some tools available and there is a way within Acrobat to do a bulk check or a book scan to sort tagged and untagged ones. There are some other tools out there also that allow you to bulk scan them and do some bulk fixing of those as well. Commonwealth is one of those I believe that has that tool built in. We're working on some additional tools in Acrobat to allow you to do that as well.

- [Laura] Great, thanks. Yeah, so we're at the end of our time today. I wanna thank you again, Rob for doing a fantastic job. Just from the reminder that we'll be sending out the slides, the recording, any of the resources Rob used, as well as the transcript and an email probably later this week or early next week to all those who registered for the webinar. I also want to say if there were questions in the chat, I'll pass those along to you, so you can answer those offline.