Chax Chat Accessibility Podcast

Chad and Dax take a look at some interesting new trends from the WebAIM report published every few years. #9 has some really interesting turns in the statistics that we take a closer look at.

Accessibility Advocate Cam Beaudoin joins Chad Chelius and Dax Castro on Global Accessibility Awareness day (GAAD) to talk about ways to keep your company motivated to take action to improve accessibility beyond the celebratory day.

Chad Chelius and Dax Castro talk through some of the nuances of the European Accessibility Standard, EN 301 549. Do you know which countries adopted this standard? Some things we found were surprising and others just made sense. Stick around to hear our discussion on Reflow and why it is missing from the accessibility standard.

In this podcast, Chad Chelius and Dax Castro talk about the top 7 things that usually come up for people just starting their PDF remediation journey. How many of these have you experienced? Not only do we talk about them, we help you solve them! Listen in as we cover the following 7 struggles for new PDF accessibility remediators. If you want to know how to fix or address any of these errors ake sure you listen to this episode on your favorite streaming platform or watch us now on YouTube!

This episode of Chax Chat discusses what you need to know when transitioning from WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and getting ready for WCAG 2.2 for your PDF documents. We cover: 1.4.10 Reflow AA - Users with low vision who need to make things larger. The content will wrap inside the viewport instead of causing horizontal scroll. 1.4.11 Non-Text Contrast AA: Extends 3:1 contrast minimums to important graphical information, visible focus indicators and other interactive controls when those indicators are necessary to identify the control as interactive. 1.4.12 Text Spacing - people think this applies to PDF but it does not. Listen to the podcast to learn why. 2.5.8 Pointer Target Spacing (AA) - The size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 44 CSS pixels 3.2.6 Consistent Findable Help (A) - Contact info in footer consistently 3.3.7 Redundant Entry (A) - Fillable forms with repeat entries should have the same Field Name. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/VZoQmerCwmo

Chad and Dax jump in front of the camera for this episode. You can find the video on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@a11y. In this eposide we cover the steps to making sure your document is compliant and usable. Many people do not understand what it means to be accessible and think that passing the PDF checker is all that is needed to "be accessible." You do not want to miss the key steps we cover that you need to make sure your document is actually usable for people using assistive technology and those with low vision, color blindness etc.

Accessibility Podcast: How to use the FREE ISO-32000 PDF/UA Standard PDF Standard ISO 32000-2 is available for free! Chad and Dax peel back the cover of the 1003 page PDF/UA standard. They focus on Chapter 14 and key areas you might find useful. Download the standard at PDFA.org/sponsored-standards and follow along with us. Make sure you are using MS Edge because we found the cart has some compatibility challenges. Chax hits 25,000 podcast downloads Pave the Way to Global Accessibility Awareness Day Visit: http://nic.edu/PWGAAD Be sure to listen to our findings about Hidden or Invisible Content if you have ever thought you cannot use hidden content or that it is illegal or against WCAG to do so. We reference specific directions on this important technique for providing enriched user experiences. In Chapter 14 Document Interchange we answer the following questions: 1. What is an MCID? - Table 357 2. Why you get the duplicate MCID error 3. We reference 14.8.2.2 "Real Content" and "Artifacts" to understand what each of these elements are 4. What is a BBox and why do you get a BBox error and how to fix it? 5. Can you use Hidden or Invisible Page Content? We reference Section 14.8.2.4 and the answer might shock you! 6. What is the difference between Page Content order and Logical Content (Tag) order? We take a look at 14.8.2.5 Page Content order and Logical Content Order (Tag Order) and what it says there. 7. What are Container Tags and why should I care? We look at 14.8.4.2 Nesting of Structural Elements to look at the Document, Part, Article, Section, Div elements and even the non-struct tag and when you should use it. 8. What is the Aside tag? We also talk about how the Aside could be improved. 9. What is the difference between a block-level and inline-level element. Not only do we explain what it is, we look at the table in section 14.8.4.5 10. What is a Caption tags and how to use it? This is an episode you will want to listen to over and over again. We unpack a lot in this one! Did you have a favorite topic from this episode you want us to dive deeper into? If you want us to do more disection of the PDF/UA ISO-32000 please let us know in the comments below. http://nic.edu/PWGAAD

Guests Jeremy Seda IT Accessibility Coordinator and Jacalyn Stallings Vocational Rehab Counselor tell us all about the upcoming Pave the Way for Global Accessibility Awareness Day at North Idaho College April 19th. We talk about creating a culture of change and a few teaching moments related to unintended microagressions. It was great to hear Jeremy's approach to keeping momentum and building a culture of intentional accessibility at North Idaho College. Jacalyn brought up an amazing benefit for audio descriptions that we had not considered. This is a great episode that you definitely don't wanna miss.

Should certifications be hard? Chad and I discuss Karl Groves' recent article that discusses the question and why we agree. Chad and I discuss another great question: "Do links always need alt-text?" We take a look at what WCAG 2.4.4 Link Purpose says and whether it supports, or doesn't support the idea that hyperlinks always need alt-text. You have to listen to Dax's analogy as he compares an insole and a shoe to an annotation and the link text. Listen to the What do you think? Did you know that when you apply alt-text to a link the descriptive text replaces the URL? It fundamentally acts like Actual text and does not voice the visually available text. So you need to be careful about what you use as a description. Be sure to tune in to hear Chad walk through how to map new styles in MS Word to accessible heading styles and even how to properly map the existing Title style to an H1. He continues to drop serious knowledge when he talks about what not to name your styles in Adobe InDesign.

Special guest Harpaul Chadha (Paul) from Recosoft Corporation, joins us to talk about solutions for creating InDesign files from Accessible PowerPoint and PDF documents! WHAT??!?! Yep. PowerPoint to InDesign is a thing and DecksMoveIn makes it happen, accessibly! Paul talks about how DecksMovein considers accessibility when importing your content. This plugin transfers your reading order, alt-text and creates styles to properly import your PowerPoint content into InDesign. Chad and I mention the possible opportunity to move clients from PowerPoint to InDesign. We remeniss about a client or two that use PowerPoint to create flyers and other documents and how this might be a good tool to bring them into a formal design program. I really enjoyed listening to Paul and his authentic consideration for InDesign users. It was really great to hear his passion and commitment to producing quality content that considers how users create and format their files. Be sure to stick around to listen to Chad discuss Paul's other product PDF2ID that literally takes a PDF and resets it into a useable and viable InDesign document. I had no idea the product had been around for 15 years! If you have ever wanted to grab all the assets from a PDF (images, charts, and graphs) to use elsewhere, Paul's tool Assets to ID is amazing. The fact that it put them in folders by page is really smart! At the end we brainstorm about how to make the tool even better by maximizing alt-text and a few other cool thoughts! Be sure to check it the free demo at www.recosoft.com

Chad and Dax talk about the journey of accessibility for the online design platform, CANVA. You may be surprised to know that just a few months ago there were no tags available for any CANVA document. While they have made some improvements and documents are now saving with some semblance of tags, there is still a long way to go to meet the WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships. If you are using CANVA as a design platform you do not want to miss this episode. Share this post with your Art Director if they are telling you to use CANVA and still want you to make the documents accessible. Stick around for our discussion on inline Figures in Microsoft Word. If you struggle with passing the Microsoft Word Checker error of "Images not inline," you will want to hear us discuss why this happens and what you can do or not do about this error.

Accessible Tables Podcast Chad and Dax jump feet first into dispelling some myths about accessible tables and have a change in thinking about another common table practice. Be sure to listen how Dax's opinion on the A1 cell has changed. Chad makes a great arguement for maintaining the best practice of adding a meaningful label in the A1 cell. Make sure to say tuned to hear our plea to Adobe to allow us access to a key area of a table from the tags tree and Dax's super secret tip for troubleshooting a broken table. Link to Blank Cells Blog Post http://bit.ly/Blankcells Link to Podcast on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/6p76kx2LHProHMFdcuRmmf Link to Podcast on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chax-chat-accessibility-podcast/id1561464055

Join Chad Chelius and Dax Castro as they welcome Jason Taylor Chief Innovations Officer at UsableNet to discuss the ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits and Trends Report. Learn how they collect the data for the report. Find out what happened in 2017 that sparked the report. Chad brings up the topic of Overlays and the ensuing discussion may shock you. Dax has a suprising point of view on them. Find out the answer to the question of "Who is checking anyway?" Chad brings up the different legal point of view between Canada's legal outlook on accessibility and the USA. You won't want to miss his comments on web accessibility and Jason's closing comments on a corporation's legal risk relating to accessibility.

Join our guests Christine Foushi and John Foliot of Content Industries as they talk about accessible epubs. We explore the different versions, how they are structured. Did you know that epubs are basically HTML 5 documents? Stay tuned to listen to us talk about the importance of metadata at the book-level rather than the data-level. We reveal the secret of converting a zip to an epub and how to reverse engineer a word doc to get to the hidden zip contents! Christine and I also have a great discussion about the woes and wonders of alt-text for images. Finally, we get to hear about the online epub testing tool currently under development. This was a really interesting episode!

Listen to Chad and and Dax talk about the accessibility problems that are created when typed hyperlinks span multiple lines. We give you the reasons why it happens and some workarounds to fixing it or planning for them. Make sure you listen until the end learn how to set alt-text using Adobe Bridge and our thoughts on captions and alt-text uses. You will learn when to use either. Are you using them correctly?

Guest David Herr, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Allyant joins us to talk about accessibility checkers and discuss the answer to"Are they enough?" Do you know what the standards are they are checking for? David talks about the difference between CommonLook Validator and CommonLook PDF and announces CommonLook Online. We take a moment to lament about fixing errors manually and with power tools. Make sure you stick around to hear the announcement of PAC for MAC! It is here (online)! We wrap up by talking about Perfection versus No Significant Barrier and why State and Federal institutions cling so tightly to the Standard versus "no significant barrier" Chad's Ah-Ha moment at the end about tagging a list item as a paragraph will make sense once you hear why!

Join Chad Chelius, ADS and Dax Castro, ADS for a special podcast featuring the benefits of using Axaio's MadeToTag plugin for Adobe InDesign. Do not forget to listen to the end for the special Adobe MAX giveaway! • Setting Row Headers in InDesign • Layout Tables? No problem • Fixing Complex Table • The 7 steps for accessibility using MadeToTag • Extended Style mapping • Easily edit alt-text in one place • New features releasing at Adobe MAX • Set the Initial View preset • The End notes paradox • Addressing Multi-line Hyperlinks • Why long style names break the role map • Callas PDFgoHTML • Special Adobe MAX Giveaway

Our guest Caroline Desrosiers of Scribely joins us to talk about her role in the upcoming Adobe Bridge update for accessible meta data. She also discusses why alt-text can be so challenging and even reveals some of the questions her team uses to create meaningful descriptions.

The question of when to edit the source versus the PDF document almost seems obvious to answer. But our discussion might surprise you. We also talk about the Content Key for Alt-text in Adobe InDesign and why (for now) filling it out might just be time NOT well spent. Do not miss this episode if you are an InDesign user. We promise there are some great nuggets of wisdom in this show.

Accessibility Podcast #32: Understanding the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Word. There is so much packed into this podcast that I can hardly believe it myself. Chad and I walk through some of the handouts for our upcoming MS Word Accessibility class on Sept. 29th and we also talk about several key features and steps for making your Word docs accessible. We also discuss the most common Checker errors you will encounter: 1. Missing Alt-text 2. Image or Object Inline 3. Merged or Split Cells in a table 4. Check the Read Order 5. Hard to Read Text Contrast 6. No Header Row (in your table)