Adobe Product Accessibility: Transcript

ROUGH EDITED COPY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
CIRCLE CAMPUS
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY EXPO  
NOON SESSION B
ADOBE PRODUCT ACCESSIBILITY
12:30 p.m. ‑ 1:00 p.m.
APRIL 9, 2009               

CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
DILLON REPORTING SERVICE
100 NORTH LA SALLE STREET, SUITE 1500
CHICAGO, IL 60602
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This is being provided in a rough‑draft format.  Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facility communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> SPEAKER:  All right.  Anyway, let's get started again with the next session.  And after this I can go and move my car.  I'm getting towed right now.  I'm happy to have here this person at the last minute.  He couldn't make it.  He's using an Internet conferencing system like we have here, and he's very good at all kinds of ‑‑ he's very good at ‑‑ and he has a meeting at 1:30, but he's an excellent speaker.  He's come to UIC before and he's going to give us a little talk on making web accessible pdf files and other things like that.  So that's Tim.  I understand we don't have a microphone that we cannot hear, so but we are going to take some questions at some point and type them with the text, but now we are going to indicate that we are ready to go. 
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  Thank you, Ed.  I'm sure you said wonderful things about me, and thanks for inviting me to the conference.  I'm going to focus on Acrobat with my colleagues today in this session and I'm actually going to record this session and I'll make the recording available so if there's anything you want to look at and make sure that you heard or there was something that you needed to reiterate for yourself.  So I'm going to start that recording now.  So again I'll make this recording available to whomever wants it.  I'm going to turn my camera off.  I just like to have it on briefly so I can wave and say hi to everybody and let you know I'm a real person here up in Portland, Maine.  As much as I'd like to be there, with the economy the way it is and other scheduling issues, it's nice that I can at least be able to present to you this way. 
I'm going to start sharing my screen.  I'm actually going to resume sharing my screen and jump right into Adobe Acrobat.  And although Adobe has a longstanding commitment to the content of accessibility within our products, I wanted to focus on acrobat because it's kind of one of the places where a lot of people have a lot of questions about documents and there are a lot of things you can do to improve the accessibility of the file that you're working with.  And that's kind of what I wanted to show you a little bit of in the 25 minutes or so that we have together this afternoon. 
It's best to say our commitment ends there.  In fact, if you are looking for specific information about accessibility in our products, I want to take you to a web site, and I'm putting this in here for as much to have this in as possible, or as much to have this in this recording as anything else.  I want to make sure I spell it correctly.  It's Adobe.com slash accessibility.  And you'll find information there about all of our products, including dream weaver, so I would encourage you to take a look at our web site.  You can get into some of the details that a session like this really don't allow me to get into. 
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start in Microsoft Word and take a look at a standard document.  And it's pretty clear right up front with respect to accessibility, really you can work with any of our tools, and that is accessibility is as much a process as it is an end point.  That process means learning about the kinds of things that are going to have an effect on the accessibility of a document that you're working with.  And by accessibility, I'm thinking about how many people get the information from the document that you're looking at?  Oh, I'll tell you what.  I'm going to make it ‑‑ I'll make it so that you can do that.  Hang on.  It will take me just a second.  So you can do that. 
>> SPEAKER:  I want to make it so that this screen ‑‑
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  Okay.  So you should see a button that says full screen in the lower left.  If you click on that, that will hide the pod of me and the chat button so it will probably be easier to ‑‑ thank you for the question.  So I'll be able to see those as well when I'm presenting.  So in any case, for example, the word prereq here, if I have someone who is very, very comfortable with terminology, then prereq is a word that I understand.  But in a world where everybody may not be comfortable with the terminology that you're using or assistive technology having to try to figure out how to read that, this is probably not a good word to use.  You should probably write out the word prerequisite.  And that's what I mean about this thing not being a just an end point.  It's a journey and a journey you will continually learn from.  The reason I bring this is up I use acrobat to read this document to me and it just spelled it out, prereq.  And if I were expecting that, I wouldn't have any idea what that meant unless I thought to jot down the letters or to make note of the letters, I should say.  When it comes to creating what would be considered an accessible pdf, there is one best practice that I can give you right away, and that is to generate your pdf file correctly in the first place.  Now, I'm using office 2007.  This applies to office 2003 on windows.  And I'll talk about the Macintosh situation in a moment.  The way to generate a pdf, when you install acrobat to a work station that has the office tools, that you get this option or it's a menu item on 2003 that allows you to create a pdf with what we call pdf makers and they're just a set of add ons to the Microsoft office product line that generate a pdf but they don't just create a pdf the same way you can create a pdf by choosing file print and then choosing Adobe pdf as your printer.  And I'm going to tell you that for accessibility's sake, I don't recommend choosing file print and making a pdf using this method if you're creating something from office or any product into which we put these pdf makers, and they include just about all of the mining row soft products.  There's a few other products out there.  And that's because this method does not produce what is called a tagged pdf.  In fact, I'm going to click on what will tell you that we have this option here.  Enable accessibility and reflow.  So I'm going to cancel this because I don't want to make this file.  But if you don't turn it off and use this button for producing a pdf, I'm not going to say you're going to have a perfectly accessible pdf but you are going to have one that at least meets the requirements for the things like section 508.  But you're also going to have a pdf that understands that this content group is a paragraph.  And knowing that this content group is a paragraph is very important, especially when ‑‑ and I'm going to go to here to page lab, and I'm going to convert this to a two‑column document.  Understanding that this content group is a paragraph and that the paragraph flows this way means that the editing device when they read the pdf that's created from this is going to be able to understand to go from this line down to this line, and then from this line up to this line with reading.  And it's one of the most basic things that people ‑‑ or one of the most basic mistakes that people make, is they choose file print to print a pdf file or in some cases I've known from working with customers that for some reason they felt like turning off the preference to enable accessibility, refro the tag pdf, if they turn it off, that that was good.  Frankly, what you're adding to the pdf is so negligible, file size wise, and so valuable accessibility wise, there just isn't any good reason to turn that off. 
So that's sort of issue No. 1.  If you do that, you're going to have a pdf file at least that is more accessible.  I'm going to skim ahead here and open up a version of the file and we'll talk about a little bit of a different situation here.  Now, this file was created using that same method, and I'm thinking that everything is okay, however, I'm going to choose under advanced accessibility to do a full accessibility check.  That's one of the things that we offer in acrobat so that you can check your pdf files to see if they're accessible.  Now, I want to click on full check here and I'm just going to hit return except the values.  Now, what happens here is that in accessibility checker, if it finds problems, is going to point out that it found problems, that it's going to tell you that there is a report for more details.  So we're going to click okay, and on the, over on the side, we have accessibility panel that will appear.  And it provides the accessibility report.  And what that does is it gives me a sense of all of the issues that I might run into with this particular document.  And it's a pretty robust report.  So I'm going to scroll down in the report, and it's telling me that there are issues on the page, and I'm going to skim all the way down to this issue here.  Now, I don't have time to get into each and every issue that you might run into.  I will talk about a specific one that's a very obvious and big issue that you might run into.  That's part of the reason that I showed you the disability page because the issues you could run into and a description of how to work with them, a robust description of how you can work with them is what you'll find at that accessibility web site that I first pointed out.  I'm going to go ahead and click on there is no alternative text for figure.  It's going to highlight this picture of me.  If I roll over it, it actually knows it's a jpeg file, but there's no actual alternate text for this figure and frankly to underscore Plummer.JPEG may not be accessible.  So I'm going to try to fix this issue for you because this is the second question I get asked most, how to create documents that will flow correctly which is what that first session was talking about, how to produce tagged media that will flow, whether it's two column, four column, with paragraphs, across pages or whatever.  So to fix this, I'm going to select under my tools menu, advanced editing, the touch up object tool.  This thing is an object.  If I select it, I can tell it it's selected because I'll get some handles around the corners.  Now, what I need to do is right click on the subject, and I'm going to choose its properties.  And I'm going to add some alternate text.  The descriptive, a picture of TIM Plummer.  Author of this document.  Again, I like to be very descriptive, whether it's for the purpose of supporting a pdf or I can go to a web site or whatever.  So I'll close that, and all the text associated with it and a screen reading device will read that in the flow of the document. 
And if you're not sure what that flow is going to be like within a document like this, in acrobat under the view menu, this should be observed because under the view menu, we have the read out loud.  And what the read out loud will allow me to do is actually literally read this document from top to bottom, but following the flow of the tagged content in the document.  Now, I'm not going to do this because I don't have the computer hooked up, but this is just a quick way to get a sense of what the structure of the document looks like to an assistive device and though most people who need assistive technologies to help them observe a document, whether it's to hear it or for low vision or whatever, have something like window eyes or jaws or something like that, they ‑‑ most people don't have reader or acrobat for this.  This is a good way to see what the structure of the document looks like to give you a sense of what that structure should look like to a product like window eyes or jaws.  And the reason you would use this is those products can be fairly expensive.  So at least you can get a sense of this inside acrobat.  And I did mention this read aloud function is within windows.  So you don't have to buy acrobat in order to have something read a document to you.  So the two things that we've talked about, just to kind of reiterate, are to kind of get you started, are first off, use tagged pdf.  And the best way to get tagged pdf in an office document is to make sure that you're using the what we call pdf makers or the pdf plug ins that we installed in excel.  What they'll do is pick up the structure of the document and create tags from it. 
Secondly I talked about alternate text.  Use the tools in your authoring environment to tag things.  Now, I'm not a Microsoft office officianado, so I'm not sure how to create it here, but for some reason if it isn't created in the pdf, you can.  I'm going to talk about briefly about the situation because to get our hooks into the office tools on the Macintosh just don't allow us to create this kind of tagging.  So if you create a pdf file, we'll say that file here, I'm going to close out the accessibility report, and you either don't know if it's been tagged or you know that it hasn't been tagged, for example, you created it using word out of Macintosh and you generated the pdf file by using file print, then you can always select advanced accessibility and add tags to the document.  Now, this document doesn't have any tags in it or you can't do that because it already has tags in the document.  But if this is visible and available to you, then select it because what that will do is it will look at the document and try and create groupings of text that look like paragraphs and isolate them under a tag, or if you're in a document such as this document here, which is a multi colored document, it will actually do a pretty good job of recognizing the fact that this is multi colored text and go from there.  And Ernie, I'm going to end in about a minute, so that will give us about 10 minutes for Q and A.  So I just want to wrap up this one statement and then we'll go from there.  So anyway, the tag thing, the tag feature will actually tag at the back of it.  They do a pretty darn good job of recognizing that this needs to be tagged.  Then of course after you do that, you can run the accessibility checker and touch the document.  The other thing I wanted to do, though, was open up a different document.  I want to talk about a document that's going to start up having absolutely no accessibility whatsoever.  And that is a document that in the Adobe file, and it's a document that came off a scanner.  Now, this document, it started out its life as a piece of paper.  And it's actually, forgive me, that's not the correct version of that. 
This document came off a scanner.  It was a piece of paper.  It was a TIF file, though I can scan directly in the pdf, someone scanned it for me.  And what acrobat is asking me here is a step that you should take with anything that you create from a scan into a pdf, and that is to run character analysis.  Now, I'm going to hit cancel because I'm going to show you how to do this manually if you for some reason don't get that dialogue box or don't have an option for that dialogue box.  And that is to choose document, OCR text recognition, recognize text using OCR, and then I'm just going to click okay.  Acrobat is going to create some text underneath the picture of the document so that it is at least searchable and also will work in an accessibility situation, and that from there I would add tags to the document to finish it off.  Once the tags are done, then there are some other ‑‑ some other accessibility issues that may come up that I may want to look at.  For example, there are some graphics here that I may want to add some alternate texts to because there's the text here, didn't get captioned.  So those are your basics for working with accessibility in a pdf.  There's a lot more questions probably that I've raised that not necessarily answers and for the answers to those questions, I want to direct you back to the accessibility web site.  I'm going to stop the screen sharing now and actually what I'm going to do is throw my e‑mail address into the shared card and I'll say it, it's Timothy P at Adobe enable accessibility Adobe.com.  And if you have any questions today, I want to answer those for you.  So questions from the audience.
>> SPEAKER:  We're going to take questions in a minute.  But remember I have to type.  
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  You're the one fielding the questions. 
>> SPEAKER:  So any questions you want to ask him, quick questions, short questions.  Yes? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I design forms in the life cycle for use with jaws, and we seem to be having an issue when we set the tab order and finish the document.
>> SPEAKER:  Adobe forms? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yes. 
>> SPEAKER:  Acrobat forms.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  In life cycle, created in life cycle.  When we open the form with jaws, it jumps all over the page, doesn't read it in order.  What are we doing wrong? 
>> SPEAKER:  So life cycle created forms.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  With jaws.
>> SPEAKER:  Created forms don't work well with jaws. 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Any help.
>> SPEAKER:  This is not going to be good, but it's life cycle in Adobe product? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yes, it's part of acrobat. 
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  Life cycle forms don't work well with jaws.  It probably has to do with the underlying structure of the life cycle created form and it's really designed for the information of exchange that the form record represents.  And actually jaws is something that can really engenders an entire discussion on its own, but it's probably that now, there are some things that one can do to try to improve that situation, but, for example, using tool tips and things like that with form elements.  But and also to make sure that when you create a set of form elements, that you make sure you pay attention to the tab order.  But without knowing exactly what the issues might be, it's probably a result of the fact that the underlying structure of a life cycle created form is XTP, which is really XML, not necessarily standard PDF.  What do I think of common look for inaccessible PDF?  To be perfectly honest with you, I'm not really familiar with the product.  I with say that common look is a few products I've heard of that are designed to do that.  And my feeling is this.  If you know that there is a deficiency in your PDF file, that acrobat isn't able to help you with through the accessibility report and the stuff that you can find at the web site, at the accessibility web site, then anything that you can do to make a PDF file more accessible than it was before is a good thing.  And so I can't recommend common look specifically because I haven't worked with it directly, but I will say that these tools generally are good tools because they do what is necessary, which is to make a PDF file more accessible.  That was kind of a coy answer, but I don't want someone to think that we don't like a product that can enhance a PDF.  That is absolutely not the case.  I'm going to go ahead and put my e‑mail address up in very large letters. 
>> SPEAKER:  He's my face book friend, too, so he cannot hide. 
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  I'll make those nice and large. 
>> SPEAKER:  So it's Timothy P.
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  The last question was great, we're doing a lot of work behind the scenes on flash in the world of accessibility, and it's actually the case that flash is already a searchable technology, and the ‑‑ and I don't want to make it sound like so you just push a button and then you're done.  In fact, what makes flash searchable isn't necessarily that it's flash or not.  It's what you do with that captioning text.  We actually have a demonstration that isn't quite done yet, but it's a searchable movie with captioning example.  And all those are something that can be made available to you when they're done.  Unfortunately they're just not quite yet done.  So what I'll do is stay in touch with Ed and the folks there.  As soon as that ‑‑ it's sort of like an SDK kit that you can work with to work with the accessibility flash.  As soon as that becomes available, A, I'll probably blog about it.  And let me see if I can get my blog address up there before we have to end.  It's just blog Adobe.com/edtec.
>> SPEAKER:  I will get all these addresses and put them up here. 
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  Let me increase that a little bit.
>> SPEAKER:  Any other questions while he answers some other questions, please? 
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I've moved to office, and I have Adobe probe, but ‑‑
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  Okay.  Flash created with, can easily get captioning.  Well, actually the new version of captivate has a ‑‑ creating the captioning part is still going to require somebody to do the captioning work.  Something I see people starting to experiment with is the Adobe sound booth has speech to text transcription capability that allows you to do some of that work.  Now, it's nowhere nearly as good as the actual captioning service because it makes mistakes, but if you don't have access to captioning service, you can at least get some text out.  But then you can throw that in and work with it.  So it's a process.  It's got its journey.  So it can get captioning.  You can build it right inside Captivate if you want it in the new version. 
>> SPEAKER:  So you move to.
>> TIMOTHY PLUMMER:  If you upgrade to office, if you go into acrobat and choose from the help installation, that may fix it.  I'm not really sure why that would be otherwise.  It looks like we've run out of time.  I want to thank you very, very much, Ed, for inviting me and I look forward to tackling this with the community to resolve the problems because it's not something we need to do for legal reasons, it's the right thing to do with accessibility.  Thank you all. 
>> SPEAKER:  All right.  So thank you very much for this session.  Now I can go take care of my car.  And Kevin can take over.