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Thread: automatic document testing
Number of posts in this thread: 13 (In chronological order)
From: Lucy Greco
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 12:03PM
Subject: automatic document testing
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Hello:
I have been given the task of helping users provide accessible documents. The more I tell my director that the task of providing accessible documents is not an easy three step process the more he wants a simple way to check the accessibility of documents and quick fix. Does anyone have a tool that will check PDF files and indicate if the document is accessible. And if it is not accessible what to fix in it. I tried the web aim instructions on how to create accessible files but was told they were too complicated. Someone please help me find a way to give a simple answer to a hard problem thanks Lucy
From: Mark Guisinger
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 12:21PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
Did you try the built in accessibility checking tools in Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 and
above? I find them easy to use and it does provide some suggestions on how to
correct the issues. You will find them under the Advanced menu.
MarkG
----- Original Message ----
From: Lucy Greco < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List ( = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = )"
< = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Mon, October 24, 2011 2:04:12 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] automatic document testing
Hello:
I have been given the task of helping users provide accessible documents. The
more I tell my director that the task of providing accessible documents is not
an easy three step process the more he wants a simple way to check the
accessibility of documents and quick fix. Does anyone have a tool that will
check PDF files and indicate if the document is accessible. And if it is not
accessible what to fix in it. I tried the web aim instructions on how to create
accessible files but was told they were too complicated. Someone please help me
find a way to give a simple answer to a hard problem thanks Lucy
From: Lucy Greco
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 12:27PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Yes I actually gave these instructions but once again I was told to complicated
Lucy Greco
Assistive Technology Specialist
Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
(510) 643-7591
http://attlc.berkeley.edu
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
From: Duff Johnson
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 12:33PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
Can you say a little more about precisely who are the users who are trying to make these documents more accessible? Are they... the authors? The people running scanners? The web-content administrators? Who?
Also, are we talking about one specific body of existing documents that just has to be fixed, or are we talking in more general terms about how to improve the process of creating new documents, or... what?
Duff.
On Oct 24, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Lucy Greco wrote:
> Yes I actually gave these instructions but once again I was told to complicated
>
> Lucy Greco
>
>
From: Lucy Greco
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 12:51PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Hi:
This is meant to be steps used while moving forward. I have been asked to give a three or four step process to make sure readings for students are accessible basically it's a set of instructions I am to give to faculty to assure that the documents they put online e are accessible. These documents might be scanned articles library readings exerts from books and so on. I have been told that it cannot be more than three or four steps so that it would not be intimidating and that talking about structure and tagging is getting to technical. I am at a loss really because what I think I am being asked to say is that providing the text is all that is needed. And I really don't want to say that. One of the other things I was asked was if there was a way to flag a potential problem document on the way to it being uploaded. I am really frustrated on this process I know access is not extraordinarily hard but three or four steps is not enough ether. At least I am not looking at making
forms in this project. I have to have the documents be usable by a highly intelligent group. but I have also been told that the faculty don't want steps that will take more than a few minutes to do.
Lucy Greco
Assistive Technology Specialist
Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
(510) 643-7591
http://attlc.berkeley.edu
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
From: Bevi Chagnon
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 12:57PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
First, my condolences. You're in a hard place!
Automated accessibility checkers and remediation software can have severe
shortcomings. One example that can help make the point to your boss is
Alt-text on graphics. I reviewed a government client's PDFs that had been
automatically remediated with a tool (sorry, don't remember the company or
name) which created Alt-text for all graphics in the PDF. Every graphic --
including photos, logos, informational charts, and decorative stuff that
should have been labeled artifacts -- had the same Alt-text, "Graphic."
Technically the graphics had Alt-text but just the word "graphic" isn't
useful or accurate, and definitely shouldn't be tolerated for accessibility
standards.
I doubt we'll have a tool anytime soon that can objectively and accurately
determine the Alt-text for graphics. That still takes a trained, intelligent
human being to write Alt-text and a few minutes of labor.
--Bevi Chagnon
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PubCom - Trainers, consultants, designers, and developers
Print | Web | Acrobat | XML | eBooks | Section 508
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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Mon, Oct 24 2011 1:03PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
I'm not going to say that repair of PDF documents is always quick and easy, but nor will I claim that for HTML files.
I'm interested what would qualify as NOT too complicated for your correspondents. Can they quantify what they are willing to do to help provide a target?
Thanks,
AWK
Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility
From: Shuttlesworth, Rachel
Date: Tue, Oct 25 2011 8:27PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Hi, all.
We have been asked to develop a plan to make all of our online materials accessible, including all of the readings, documents, etc. in the learning management system. I appreciate that we will need someone who knows the subject matter to adequately describe graphics and we will have that, but my question is even more basic:
If you were starting from a few thousand online classes filled with documents like powerpoints, PDFs, Word documents, html or other files that is mostly text with some images, how would you go about making them accessible? Where would we find a checklist or some other steps letting us know what all we need to do?
Any advice, resources, ideas are most welcome. BTW, We are sending several folks to the Accessing Higher Ground conference in November to try to get as prepared as we can for this endeavor. I hope some of you will be there!
Thanks,
Rachel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Rachel Shuttlesworth Thompson
Director, Emerging Technologies and Research, Center for Instructional Technology
University of Alabama
Box 870346 * Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0346
205.348.0216
From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Tue, Oct 25 2011 8:45PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
The problem with making sure documents of this type is that there
isn't a simple fix, this is coming from a person who was a student and
worked in a large AT lab. The scanned articles are 2nd,3rd maybe 4th
generation copies. The built in OCR into Acrobat usually destroyed the
text. The disabled student's services at the university would require
that if a student needed an accessible version, bring their reading
into the office and the disabled student's services office hires
students who takes a hard or soft-copy version and run it through
ABBYY FineReader, then editing as need be. We started to work with the
library, who manages the e-reserves, I moved onto another job, so I
cannot say what the current status is. The university that I worked at
is equal size to Berkeley. We are too large to make each e-reserve
accessible, even though people are trying. We try to advocate the use
of HTML files whenever possible, for example, professors tend to grab
an article from Lexus Nexus and turn that into a PDF. While the HTML
version doesn't have headings, it is usually easier to use over a PDF.
--
Ryan E. Benson
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Lucy Greco < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Hi:
> This is meant to be steps used while moving forward. I have been asked to give a three or four step process to make sure readings for students are accessible basically it's a set of instructions I am to give to faculty to assure that the documents they put online e are accessible. These documents might be scanned articles library readings exerts from books and so on. I have been told that it cannot be more than three or four steps so that it would not be intimidating and that talking about structure and tagging is getting to technical. I am at a loss really because what I think I am being asked to say is that providing the text is all that is needed. And I really don't want to say that. One of the other things I was asked was if there was a way to flag a potential problem document on the way to it being uploaded. I am really frustrated on this process I know access is not extraordinarily hard but three or four steps is not enough ether. At least I am not looking at making
> forms in this project. I have to have the documents be usable by a highly intelligent group. but I have also been told that the faculty don't want steps that will take more than a few minutes to do.
>
>
> Lucy Greco
> Assistive Technology Specialist
> Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
> (510) 643-7591
> http://attlc.berkeley.edu
> http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
>
>
>
From: Duff Johnson
Date: Tue, Oct 25 2011 9:54PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
As a practical matter, near-arbitrary input is a very difficult problem for ANY shop where "it's gotta be simple". The content mix you are describing is more typical for a service bureau than (for example) a government agency.
It sounds like these are PDFs for the most part, and you've been asked for a function that, unknown to the bosses, just isn't a few pushbuttons away. That's tough. I know of only two other-than-farce strategies for this situation... presuming that a solution must occur sometime before the faculty gets comfortable making their own properly-tagged PDFs (LOL).
Option 1 - state that the only "simple" solution based on your research is that documents going online are sent to you (or other competent person within the organization) to tag and return to the faculty member in question prior to going online. You'd do as many in-house as you can, outsource the rest. Offer training to interested parties, and encourage such interest. Essentially, sell the administration on the plain fact of the matter, which is that documents have to be checked and corrected before anyone can or should represent them as "accessible". If you sell them on this idea, then you can focus the four steps the faculty are willing to do simply to ensure the documents are prepared properly before they come to you. Happily, this IS relatively easy (a file-naming standard, 1-up scans and alt. text provided for content images would be very nice!)
I've noticed before that this is a powerful way to represent the issue to management. Once they understand that this will mean an (impossible) 1,000 hours of work in a given month (or whatever), they'll get serious about dealing with it.
So I would say, first try communicating in specific terms about the nature of the problem, and let them do the math - literally. They will probably come back to Option 1. Once that fails then...
Option 2 - <cynic-mode> Identify an arbitrary, easily-attainable 'standard' such as "each PDF has tags". Be sure to advise the powers-that-be that it's arbitrary but that's all that can be done in 4 steps, and let it go at that. </cynic-mode> This is, of course, not the spirit of the matter at all, but you shouldn't be responsible for recommending a 'solution' that you know isn't anything of the sort. Someday, a lawyer might want to know where that so-called "standard" came from!
To flag potential problem documents I suggest you offer a short list of tips specific to the types of docs that are typical in your workflow. Complicated pages (in layout terms) are... complicated - provide some examples and explain what makes them so. Scanned document must be OCRed, and the OCR corrected before tagging. Tags must not only be present, but for simply establishing valid reading order, to say nothing of structures such as tables, they are essential, and simply _must_ be validated.
Once they see what "complicated" means in detail, they will better appreciate why the task in question is so large... and the more they realize this, the more they'll have to reassess that "four steps" idea, one way or another.
This doesn't help much, of course, but the truth shall set you free, right?
Best regards,
Duff Johnson
President, NetCentric US
ISO 32000 Intl. Project Co-Leader, US Chair
ISO 14289 US Chair
PDF Association Vice-Chair
Office: +1 617 401 8140
Mobile: +1 617 283 4226
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
www.net-centric.com
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On Oct 24, 2011, at 2:53 PM, Lucy Greco wrote:
> Hi:
> This is meant to be steps used while moving forward. I have been asked to give a three or four step process to make sure readings for students are accessible basically it's a set of instructions I am to give to faculty to assure that the documents they put online e are accessible. These documents might be scanned articles library readings exerts from books and so on. I have been told that it cannot be more than three or four steps so that it would not be intimidating and that talking about structure and tagging is getting to technical. I am at a loss really because what I think I am being asked to say is that providing the text is all that is needed. And I really don't want to say that. One of the other things I was asked was if there was a way to flag a potential problem document on the way to it being uploaded. I am really frustrated on this process I know access is not extraordinarily hard but three or four steps is not enough ether. At least I am not looking at makin
g
> forms in this project. I have to have the documents be usable by a highly intelligent group. but I have also been told that the faculty don't want steps that will take more than a few minutes to do.
>
>
> Lucy Greco
> Assistive Technology Specialist
> Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
> (510) 643-7591
> http://attlc.berkeley.edu
> http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
>
>
>
From: Ted
Date: Wed, Oct 26 2011 2:06AM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Hi Lucy
The bad news is that the tool you are looking for is called an "attitude
adjuster", more on which below, but first .
The good news is that making a PDF accessible (at least to some level) can
be relatively straightforward.
Firstly, if you are dealing with scanned documents, which are effectively
just pictures of text, you will need to convert them to actual text. Acrobat
Professional does a pretty good job of this these days, via OCR (Optical
Character Recognition).
You will then need to add some structure. How much depends on a number of
factors including: the nature of the content, how long the document is and
how accessible you want it to be.
To give you an idea of the amount of work involved, I recently did a similar
job, making a 750 page book as accessible as possible for a blind academic.
It took a (long) day to apply a basic tag structure, to mark up paragraphs
and, crucially, add a heading structure. This made the book readable but
certainly not fully accessible. This is because, among other things, most
chapters had data tables and charts.
Retrospectively making all of these accessible for a book of this length
would have bee an enormous job (as it would be in any format, including
HTML), but the key word here is retrospectively. The long run aim has to be
to get content authors to add accessibility features at source, simply
because it is so much more efficient to do so than it is to fix documents
after the fact.
Finally, back to the attitude adjuster. Here in the UK, in the absence of
any relevant prosecution under either the Disability Discrimination Act or
the Equality Act, I'm afraid there is no off the shelf, ready to go attitude
adjuster that I know of. You will probably have to generate your own. When
programming it I would suggest that, at a minimum, it includes modules for:
- modern, professional document production techniques absolutely require it
- it's the law
- it can actually be quicker, cheaper and easier to do than not
- it is profoundly, morally the right thing to do
Good luck.
Ted Page
Director, PWS Ltd
www.pws-ltd.com
Registered in England no. 06508410.
Registered office: 4 Riverview, Walnut Tree Close, Guildford, Surrey GU1 4UX
From: John E Brandt
Date: Wed, Oct 26 2011 8:09PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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Lucy,
Digital documents that eventually end up as a Portable Document Format (PDF)
file are almost always created by some other application (e.g., MS-Office
products, Adobe products, etc.). The issue of making a digital document
accessible is best accomplished at that beginning stage of the development.
The later versions of MS Office have an Accessible Checker built in and will
not only check the document for accessibility, but it will provide easy to
understand directions for making it so. If you then simply "Save as a PDF"
all of the access features *should" come across intro the resulting PDF. But
I emphasize the word "should." That is what the Adobe Acrobat Professional
accessibility checker is for.
I've written a series of short articles about how to make Accessible Office
Documents http://mainecite.org/awd/accdocs.html but I admit most of them
need to be updated (a project I am slowly working on). But a basic premise
of all of the articles is that it is best to work from the source document
rather than trying to fix the PDF.
The other subtle philosophy in the articles is that you should use the right
format of document in the right situation as some documents are simply not
made for sharing in digital form. For example, a newsletter beautifully
compiled in Adobe InDesign and intended to look good print should not be
converted into PDF and distributed. While you can certainly make the
InDesign file into an accessible PDF, why bother. If the point is for folks
to read it on line, just put the content into an attractive web document.
The same philosophy is true for PowerPoint documents. These are intended to
be used in a presentation. If you want to share the content, dump it into an
accessible Word document or into an accessible web page and edit it so it
can be understood and an independent document.
~j
John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA
From: John E Brandt
Date: Wed, Oct 26 2011 8:18PM
Subject: Re: automatic document testing
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In reading this later comment, these thoughts comes to mind....
If you are dealing with resistant faculty you might encourage them to think
of their digital documents as being similar to their published material.
They would never submit an article to a refereed journal without making sure
all of the headings, titles, running heads, graphics, and indices were
perfect. Why would they then publish their work on-line without the same
level of care?
For students, it's a tougher sell. You might be able to use a similar
analogy noting that what they put on-line is like what they would put in
print, it's permanent and they will be judged accordingly. But students
might also respond to the egalitarian and moral aspects of accessibility.
~j
John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA