Creating Accessible Documents

JONATHAN: Hello to the people joining us. You are early, thank you so much. We have a huge number of people who have registered for this webinar. Sounds like a subject which is of real interest to huge numbers of people. Thank you so much for arriving early, about the 50 of you who were here before we get started. We’ll start in about 5 minutes time. For those of you that have not heard my voice on podcasts and things like that, I’m Jonathan Hassell, CEO of Hassell Inclusion. And I have two of my team doing most of the presenting, and I’m here welcoming a huge number of people who have signed up for this particular webinar from all over the world. We hope we can give you the best hour of your month when it comes to accessibility. You can tell us afterwards. If we achieve that for you. So as I say, we’ll start around about 3 minutes past the hour, it normally takes quite a number of people a little while to get through the zoom sort of registration process, and all of that. So we normally start a few minutes late. Thank you for arriving early. Just bear with us whilst some more folk join us. It would be really great if you could let us know in the zoom chat something about who you are. So we have about 1,000 people registered for the webinar. So that means you are all muted, so you can hear us, but the chat is available for all. It would be great if you could use that to ask any questions during the session.

And just to get used to that, it’s nice to make this feel like a community, rather than a one-way street of us giving you information. It would be lovely if you could pop into the chat who you are,where you are in the world. Helen is just sorting out her sound and is somewhere in the world. Thank you, Helen. It would be nice to know a little about you – maybe something you’re focussing on in accessibility at the moment. You don’t need to put in there who you work for. We have people from all sorts of companies, from all over the world. We have people new to accessibility, people who have been doing this for a huge amount of time. People that have probably been to every webinar that we have done since 2020. I see faces I recognise. Great to have you with us, and, yes, it will be a really interesting session. I have got a few people who have put themselves in chat already. Vicky is from Bedfordshire – there’s so many people. This will be impossible to read. We have a number of people from the Black Isle of Inverness. Manchester, Bristol. This is the UK for those of you that don’t recognise counties, Bedfordshire folk in London. Dublin, East Essex. Deana from across the pond. We have a lot of people all over the world that have signed up. A lot of people in Canada, there’s a lot happening in Canada at the moment about accessibility. Lovely to have you all with us. I hope you will find this a very interesting session.

We’ll start in a moment or so. But just to provide some more information whilst we get everyone onto the call – if you like these webinars, you can get all of them. We have pretty much recorded all that we have done since we started in 2020/2021. There’s about five days of free training, in terms of hours. There’s about 60 webinars available completely for free on HiHub. All you need to do is register. What we find is we have been working in accessibility for most of our team for a long time. We are sort of thought leaders in a lot of these areas and a lot of our competitors come on to these calls and are desperate to get hold of all of our stuff. This is really for the community in general. We do like people to kind of register so we know who is looking at what is becoming one of the biggest archives of video material for accessibility – all completely free. If it sounds like it may be useful for you, do that. If you prefer listening to us on a walk – I was talking to someone that said, “Gosh, your voice is in my ears every time I go for a walk at the moment.” We take all of our webinars, and we put them out there as podcasts. If that is your preferred way of learning more about accessibility then you can get all of that. Again, completely for free. Digital accessibility experts Podcasts are available wherever you get your podcasts – Apple, Google, Spotify and there are full transcripts for everything we do on the website aswell.

Great to have so many people with us, I think we are 4 minutes past the hour. I’ll move on to what we are going to be looking at today. Just a bit of housekeeping rules to start. So because we have so many people, 300 on the call already, you are all muted. It’s lovely if you can turn on your video so we can see people and make sure it doesn’t feel like we are talking in the ether. We are all working from home these days, it feels. Anything in your background is fine. It’s one of the things that makes this a friendly place. We do give out two copies of my books to the two best questions from each one of our webinars. It’s rather, rather difficult to send you a copy of my book if you ask a great question but your zoom name is, you know, not your name. If you can make your zoom name your name when you ask the amazing question you will ask, we’ll be able to get a book through to you. What tends to happen in these sessions people ask loads of questions in the chat all the way through the hour. So I hope that’s not, if you like, overwhelming for you. You can focus on what is happening in terms or what we are sort of presenting, but a lot of questions and things will happen in the chat aswell. We’ll try to answer as many questions as we can all the way through and we’ll have some questions reserved for the end. We do have live on-screen captions that you can turn on in zoom. MyClearText are our partners in that and they do a great job. If you need captions, if there’s anything I’m saying or co-presenters that you can’t hear clearly enough, then that is a great way of making sure that you are getting this in the most inclusive way. Similarly, if there’s anything that you are having difficulty seeing on the slides, don’t worry, the important stuff we will vocalise as well. Let things wash over you, and you will be able to get all of this content in about a week on HiHub. If there’s anything that you want to kind of revisit or whatever like that, then you’ll be able to get that in a week’s time.

Presenting today I have got two of my esteemed colleagues. I’m Jonathan Hassell, CEO of Hassell Inclusion. I have been doing this accessibility thing for a long time, which is why my hair is now greying. With me I have Liam, who works more on the strategic side. And Yac, who does a lot of our work around document accessibility and especially PDF. You have some real experts today to give you a useful session.

And that session is all about “Making Accessible Documents.” As we have found when we put this out there as a topic, this is interesting to a huge number of people over the world. Unlike websites, we all make documents all the time. You are probably making one now, taking your notes from this session. How do we make these accessible. That is what we are about today. You know, it could be PDFs you are publishing on your website or sending to clients. It could be PowerPoints in company presentations, yes, we are doing a PowerPoint to you now. It could be spreadsheets to track progress within digital production teams and you want to make sure everyone can get all of that information. We are creating loads of digital stuff all the time how do we do this in a way that doesn’t disenfranchise our customer or colleagues that have particular types of disabilities, that’s what we are about today. We’ll look at how WCAG relates to documents. Free tools that will allow you to check the accessibility of your documents. Why you need to go beyond WCAG for some things we are talking about. There’ll be hints and tips. Yac will give you a demo of great stuff we have done in our PDFs at Hassell Inclusion, and at the end I’ll bring it into a bow by looking at this in a scaleable perspective. We work sometimes with enterprise organisations that have hundreds of thousands of staff – how would they make this work. It should be an interesting session. Just one last thing, you are going to get about 45 minutes of great content. This is just the tip of the iceberg for the sorts of things that are available in our training all of the time. If you like what you hear, there is loads more where this came from, please get in contact at the end. We can talk you through that. I’m now going to hand over to Liam, who will take it away in terms of why accessible documents matter. Liam. Over to you.

LIAM: Perfect. So, thank you, Jonathan. Hopefully this is now coming across to everyone. We are going to go through why do accessible documents matter. Documents can be the user journey or they can be one step on it. Through a lot of our webinars you’ll hear us talking a lot about accessibility from a wholistic point of view, looking at the full end-to-end journey, documents can play a big part of that. They can be the main part of a journey. Take, for example, the maternity allowance claim form. That is the critical part of the journey, and the main part of that. Alternatively you may have a PDF form or a different document that is an element within a process. Think about things like The Disability Students Allowance Guidance Notes. It is information that is part of the journey, not the core aspect. Another example is something like insurance, and the terms and conditions you get at the end once you have chosen the product you are going with. It’s important to think about documents in that overall journey, if one element of that journey is inaccessible it can cause a barrier to all of these different users that we’ll go through.

It’s not just the documents that you yourself create and upload onto your systems, but also the documents and the different ways that your systems can generate content. For example, you may have a system that does things like own charts. Maybe you can change the data, it will live update for you, you spend loads of times making it accessible. The colour contrast is brilliant. The labelling is brilliant. But have you thought about what happens if the data is downloaded. If I download it into something like Excel, does the chart come with it, do the colours maintain or does it default to something else – do I still get the labelling. Alternatively, if I download it as a PDF, are we sure that when it downloads that the reading order is correct. That I have considered what the heading hierarchy should be. It’s important when you think about accessible documents, it’s not only the documents you create but the ones that your systems can create for you too. It’s really important to think about document accessibility, it’s required in various different legislations. If we take the Innovate UK’s new consumer duty, an element required from the financial organisations is that consumers are equipped to make effective decisions and organisations need to make sure that consumers get the information they need at the right time and in a way that they can understand.

And this information can come from a host of different mediums, as a report, document, brochure, website or a contract. There’s different ways it could be. What you’ll spot there is that the regulation has not required a particular standard, hasn’t required a particular guideline, it simply said make sure the consumer gets the information they need. This is important. A lot of legal action coming from accessibility and document accessibility comes because a user can’t do something. It can’t get the information they need at that right time in a way that they can understand it. And it’s becoming increasingly important for things like digital take up. And documents are becoming parts of forthcoming standards. If you look at the European Accessibility Act demonstrate only does it have requirements for document accessibility but requires documents in and of itself. If we take for example of your SAS platform and you create a successful platform. If the training materials and supporting documentation that go with it are not accessible you shoot yourself a little in the foot. The people that would benefit most from the accessible system will not be able to learn how to use it. If we think to the future a little bit, to WCAG 3 – most of us are getting to grips with 2.2, we have a few years. WCAG 3 is already stating they want e-Pubs and PDFs, they want to support those with disabilities to have all the information they need whether it’s on a website as a digital product or in documentation. Fundamentally, getting this wrong can be problematic for users and organisations. An inaccessible document can prevent consumers from surviving in a process and lead to complaints and legal action. Both examples on screen, a blind individual is taking legal actions, they were going through a process, and the documents were not accessible in part of that process. They were not able to fulfil that. It caused stress for the individual and the organisation that has to deal with this.

Documents are commonly overlooked. They can be a key area of risk for you if they are critical to the overall journey. I have a document. Where do I start with all of this. First off, think about where do you want or need to be. There are standards or guidelines that will affect your different user journeys, scenarios your level of digital inclusion, there are pros and cons for each of them. The more comprehensive a guideline might be the more time-consuming it might be. It may provide a more accessible experience, but may require software that it requires you to invest in. As an organisation, what have you committed to. If you have committed to being WCAG AAA you can’t put out a document meeting the Double-A requirements Have you considered PDF/UA. But also think about your audience, if you speaking to a lot of people who might have vision impairment, have you thought about best practice from RNIB. Or have you thought about neurodiverse individuals and looked at the national autistic society. Most importantly in any of this understand who will use the document and how. Think about when you start a document, is this just for me, or will I share it. If so, with who. Also, under what context. It’s okay to create an accessible document. It could be used in an accessible way.

Take this webinar for example. If we did the presentation to you in person, perhaps we’d do a handout. Within this webinar you’ll see various different links. If we hide the links within texts in the handout you are not going to know where that end source document goes to, you know. As a document it is accessible. In the way that you are using to it no longer is. What you will see throughout this its that we have expanded the links so you can explore them. It’s important to be aware of that. Because one size doesn’t always fit all. You may need alternative format or reasonable adjustments, and you will find all of this out by doing user research and testing. If you take the Windrush Compensation Scheme they have a variety of source documents, PDFs, HTML open source documents, they did research to see what the customers want. What do the people that need this want. They created something specific to them. When you’re starting documents, especially for anything external that goes to your consumers, always have in your mind who will be using it and how. I’m going pass over it Yac. And he’ll talk about what the most accessible format may be and tips and tricks to make your document accessible. Over to you, Yac.

YAC: Can you hear me now.

LIAM: You are all good.

YAC: Brilliant. Give me a moment to start this presentation. So thanks, Liam. Liam nicely set the context of why documents are important. One of the questions we are asked a lot is what is the most accessible doc format. The simple answer to this is it depends. There’s a huge variety of factors which influence how well someone can use a document. Some of those – we won’t go through them all, are the actual end users, for example if people use sign languages, HTML documents, PDF documents, just aren’t going to cut it. They may need the video. The IT literacy of the audience has a huge effect. In the example of Windrush people were required to download software, to open PDF documents, and those people aren’t as IT literate or struggle to do that, maybe we need a different type of source document. Vulnerable customers may not be able to afford propriety systems. The key thing in understanding how accessible a document is is about giving users choice. You can have the most accessible PDF, HTML document in the world, but someone may want it printed, easy read or braille. As long as you can accommodate, we’ll have an inclusive process. We’ll go through more of this as we go through the next slides as well.

So, we considered that people need document, we’ll go through quick tips on how to create documents and we have a pneumonic so people to remember the important things to look at with documentation. When I worked in Government doing lots on PDFs and documents we used the pneumonic scope. Structure, colours, ordering, pictures, editorial and do you want to create a PDF. We’ll look at those in turn, give you a couple of quick tips and go on to a bit more detail in Adobe as well.

We all create Word documents, they are probably one of the easiest to create. What we do with word is look at structure as an example. So we look at two things in the structure of a word document – that these equally apply to things like Excel, PowerPoint, InDesign and so on and so forth. For Word documents important things could be images, the alt text which we’ll talk about in a moment, the heading structure, lists, tables and colour contrast. Headings are one of the most used structural items for screen reader users in finding content. If you are creating a word document rather than visually styling a heading by making it larger or changing the colour, we can do, as per the screen shot is use the styles within word, and what that will do is visually styled headings will also be marked up in a code so when people use assistive technologies, such as screen readers or dyslexic software, those headings will also appears in the document if you export to a PDF, they will appear, the screen users list headings and I’ll show you later, use those headings as bookmarks to allow people to get to content quite quickly. Moving on, another structural element that we look at are tables. The most important thing to consider with tables is if you have a visual identifier – for example, the top row has a table heading, screen reader users need to know that that exist. It can get confusing if you are a screen reader user moving through the table if the data is similar to understand the column and row you are in. Within word, if you create a table in the bottom left corner we see we are able to say that a certain part of that table is a header row. In some cases, in Word and PowerPoint we can create headings for the first column if you have a two dimensional table. We’ll look at that in InDesign in a moment as well.

Moving on then. The next thing in our pneumonic is colour,lots of organisations have great websites, but when they produce annual reports, the data visualisations and colour contrast don’t meet the brand guidelines. Within Excel we’ll look at a couple of things, whatever you produce colour wise, info-graphics, data visualisations, organisational charts – is not necessarily going be seen by everybody in the same way. This graphic is seen by majority of users in this fashion. Someone that is colour blind or has equipment not rendering colour or using a mobile in low light conditions may see it differently. It’s important to appreciate people see things in different ways, and we design and accommodate those differences.

Couple more things. WCAG has a couple of guidelines around contrast. The main one is colour contrast of text against a background. On this data visualisation I made the AT users in government a lot lighter and this would fail the WCAG standard for contrast. A lot of websites get it right, it is checked on websites. Unfortunately in PDF documents colour contrast has a lot of failures. As well as text contrast, you need to think about non-text contrast. If you have a pie chart and the colour against a background doesn’t meet non-text contrast. It can mean people will see a blur, pixels or nothing at all. Moving on. Another success criteria that WCAG has around colour is, is there an alternative to using colour as a meaning. Using this data visualisation, we have a series of assistive technologies that people in government may use. We only know what they are through the legend which gives colours. If I’m colour blind or using something like an ear reader, monochrome monitor. If I have a visual impairment letting me see in grey scale this will be difficult to see. Other documents are RAG status, where you use different colours to indicate meaning. Again, people have visual impairments or equipment that doesn’t render the colour well, you need an alternative. Adding the text to the bands of colour makes sure the document is more inclusive than just the colour alone. There’s more information about colour, design and text in our Content Author Training which we’ll mention later in the session.

Moving on. We’ll talk about ordering. If any of you have produced PDFs from documents. Reading can be problematic. We’ll do a demo of that in a second well. If you have a document created in PowerPoint or InDesign and as an atypical reading Order. Clockwise, top to bottom, left to right instead of top to bottom traditional left to right in a Word document. You need to think about reading order. An example in PowerPoint is using the accessibility view, and the reading order pane to look at which pieces of your content will be read in a specific order. Generally, for PowerPoint what we are trying to do is make sure in the reading order that the thing at the top of the reading order is a thing that we want screen readers to read out first. You can obviously chop and change that order to emphasise importance, what you are doing is trying to create a logical reading order. If we move on, using this as a complex example, this could be difficult to get right. This is where we get into software like InDesign that has a lot more flexibility in how you control reading orders. If you’re converting this to a PDF you need to consider that sometimes PDFs have more than one reading order based on a tool that people are using to read and download the PDF. And we’ll go into that in a second.

Pictures we’ll skim over. If you have an image that is meaningful. We need an alternative for people to get that meaning. Now, it could be that someone is blind and cannot see the picture. In which case they need to use text. There are a group of users with limited bandwidth who may have mobiles, who turn images off and what is left is alt text. Don’t just think about images being for blind people, there are groups of users that benefit from alternate text. Using PowerPoint again, if we have an image, what we can do with the image is right click and edit the alt text. A lot of modern versions will generate a caption or alt text. What we are doing to try and make the document accessible is making sure it’s fit for purpose. In the top example we see description automatically generated, you can improve that or add your own text. If you feel that the image is decorative, effectively it’s hidden from screen reading users. Some cases if you have too many images, when a screen reader is going through a document that can be frustrating and annoying, and here being repeated countless times. Again, there’s more guidance on alt text. On the surface of things, deciding whether something is decorative or meaningful seems fairly simple, it can be a complex process, you need to do a lot of user research to understand who benefits from the images.

Last thing we’ll look at before PDFs is editorials. This is more or less a catch-all for the content in your documents. Key things we need to think about are the reading level. It only comes in to WCAG at the reading side of things. There are many PDF documents where a website is fantastic, set at a certain reading level. If you download the PDF it has complex vocabulary, is not expanded and in the worse cases a lot of anecdotal text or miscellaneous text can be a small size. Using the screen shot we have, often body content on a PDF is good – sometimes it’s too small. As we get to footnotes, terms and conditions, that can get down to a level of 7-8 point font. Often too small for some people to read. You can magnify PDFs, that requires people having a certain level of IT literacy. We’ll talk about PDFs with that in mind and have a look. You may have a document that you need to export to a PDF for various reasons. Can they be accessible – absolutely. I worked in civil service for 20 years before moving to the private sector, and looked at weird and wonderful PDF documents. Liam mentioned the Maternity Benefit Form, it’s complex but totally accessible. The key thing to think about is user research. What are the requirements, what do they need, what is their IT literacy. How easy is it for them to get to their PDF. If they download the PDF will they find it later. Some struggle to find out where a document has gone. The diagram on the right is an indication when you look at PDFs, auto checkers by themselves will give you some accessibility. It’s probably the least inclusive option. If we think of this as gold, silver and bronze, as we move up the triangle. Spending more time and effort into making it accessible, it reaches a more inclusive audience and more users. Think about printed PDFs and whether you use the full URL. Think about people using mobiles, and how accessible PDFs needs to be for them.

If you decided that you want to make a PDF, generally the most accessible way of doing this is to make sure your source documents are accessible before exporting them across to a PDF. You can fix PDF in Adobe Pro. It can be time-consuming and take a lot of effort and time. If you have a Word document, a PowerPoint or Excel document, using something like the accessibility checker will give you a good starting point as to whether your document needs alt text. Have you considered reading orders and in this section – do you have colour contrast effectively below the WCAG standards. All the checkers are good starting points. They won’t necessarily find everything. Key considerations when you are exporting to PDFs are make sure you create a tagged document. The more up-to-date versions of Word, PowerPoint and InDesign will do it automatically and it’s done by default, but always check this. I have seen many many people create fantastic accessible source documents, that get exported to PDF and the tags go missing and it renders the document more or less inaccessible.

We’ll look at InDesign in a moment. Tags are hidden mark-up in documents, in Word documents, PowerPoint telling assistive technology what is going on. And they’re used to understand things like structure, reading order, Alt text et cetera. If you don’t have them things are inaccessible to a large group of audiences. When you have a PDF there are various ways to check that for accessibility. So on screen, we have the Adobe Accessibility Checker. This is a good starting point. It will not cater for everything. On the right-hand side you can see that this will not look at logical reading order or colour contrast. They are the things you need to check manually. This demonstrates the importance that getting this stuff right in the source document can be critical in some stages. If we move on to another tool, this is the PACtool. This looks at more than Adobe tool does. It create a report against PDF/UA universal activity. We’ll talk about that later. It will attempt to look at contrast. It’s not going to find all of the things that will affect people with lower IT literacy with different types of equipment. There are loads and loads of tools available from a huge number of organisations, on screens is an example of some of those. Some are free, some cost. Some are subscription based. The key thing is to find a tool working for you in your organisation and against your documents. As good as the tools are, they can generate false positives. So human intervention is needed.

Once you have got to a stage where you are happy with the document source, you have converted to a PDF and it is working well. One of the best ways to produce PDFs, is to save that as a template. You can have a word document with placeholders or a PowerPoint document or InDesign. You protect that so things will be headings, lists or tables and allow people to add content into the place holders, and fingers crossed all of your PDFs going forward should be accessible. Creating the templated process can pay great dividends in the future. So, what I’m going to do, is show you a quick demo of using this process in live effectively, what we are going to do is bring up an example of InDesign. I want to check can people see the screen okay, can someone put yes in the chat. Sometimes there’s a delay.

JONATHAN: All good.

YAC: What we have on screen is a PDF report that we produced at Hassell Inclusion, helping older users and digital literacy. We are just going to do a couple of checks in InDesign, we have not touched on this. One of the first things we’ll be doing is looking at colour contrast. Because we have good brand guidelines at Hassell Inclusion, we hope it’s okay. I look at images, let’s take the lovely Jonathan. Because his name is given and title. This is a decorative image as far as I’m concerned within InDesign, what I can say is on the PDF side of things I’ll say it’s an art design, I’ll hide it so they don’t hear Jonathan Hassell and picture of Jonathan Hassell, it’s not necessary it can be irritating or time-consuming for some users. Moving on, what we’d do is checking that tables are set up correctly. So we can have things that look like tables, but are not actually structured tables. We look at the table options under the table set up and check that this table on the left has a suitable header row. Generally if you’ve used table mark up in the design and export to a PDF it comes across really well. We’ll carry on, if we get to a page where there’s an ambiguous reading order.

What we need to consider is how do we want it read out to different groups of audiences. So if we take this page by itself, what I can do within InDesign is in the articles panel. Let me move some of these things out the way I can choose what I want to be read out first. In this case I’m saying the clearer font and colour of text I want read out first to screen reader users, I’m having that at the top of the articles panel. The next thing is the heading. I move that to the next thing in the articles panel and in the articles panel there’s an option to use in tag reading order in PDF. When I export it to PDF and a screen reader reads through this. The text panel reads it in the order I expressed in the articles. This is useful for making sure screen reader users get information in a logical way and an important hierarchy to them. There’s a couple of things in InDesign that allows us to control the content reading order. We’ll go into that very briefly. Let me flip to our PDF then.

What I have done is I have just exported that PDF from InDesign. Now into Adobe Pro. And I’m going to open the text panel. What you will be able to see is when we click on the first tag in the tag free, the clearest font is the first thing to be read out. As we move down we have the heading as the second thing to be read out. A lot of PDFs have two reading orders. This tagged reading order is used by screen readers, there’s a secondary reading order which is the content reading order or the reflow reading order or the Z reading order. People use the names interchangeably. These numbers represent the content reading order. And this is different to the reading order that we set up for screen readers. Here, the heading would be read out first, and then in the bottom right, this text would be read out next. One of the most important things you can do when you are looking at PDFs is make sure you have reading orders as far as possible alike, and test them in different tools. Screen readers look for tagged reading orders. Tools such as browser add-ones, for example in Edge, something like Read Aloud looks at the content reading order. Read-write. Will use content reading order and VDH, voice over using a tag reading order. All to bear in mind when looking at reading orders. Last thing to look at is the worse case scenario for PDFs.

So hopefully you have the source document. You can talk to the designer, you can make the changes. But invariably what will happen in a lot of cases, when you get a PDF you’ll receive that PDF with no tags whatsoever. So you just get something. If you look at document properties in this area, it will say tagged PDF. What that means is the structural mark-up doesn’t exist. The reading order doesn’t exist. It’s difficult for people to navigate, using IT. There are manual ways to get around this. I’ll show you one quickly. What I can do with the reading order tool, is I can mark up the PDF. I can highlight the heading and say I want that to be heading one. Imagine if you had 100 page document that was a PDF. This would be hugely time-consuming. Many PDF tools allow you to automatically tag this. It will cancel the text. I will confirm that and what it will attempt to do is tag the PDF for me. Anyone with a lot of legacy PDFs that are not tagged and you don’t have access to the source Document 1 of the best starting points you can use is an autotagging facility, Adobe Pro gives you two options, you can go to locally in the loud. We’ll go into that in more detail later. I’ll pause there. Stop sharing and Jonathan I’ll hand over to you.

JONATHAN: Really great presentation Yac. What I will do now is take us through to a final session about how to make this work on enterprise scale. We had questions about this. The key thing here is that say, for example, you have, you know a large organisation with hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom are probably generating at least 10 documents a day. How do you actually make all of that accessible. Giving people, if you like, the light framing is generally not enough. It’s always a good things, and we always do it. Sometimes when it comes to scaling this within an organisation which is large, or even scaling this for the sorts of documents that we all might be creating ourselves – time is the biggest enemy here. It’s important to try to look at all of this in terms of are there some things that we can do to bring strategy to this as well as those hints and tips for how to do things technically. Hints on strategy. No.1, I think Yac would have mentioned it there before he went into the Demo. Templates – are really, really helpful. If you think about it, if you create a document without using a template.

Then all of the things that we have been talking about, especially all the stuff about focus order is something that you will need to check and make sure you have right and fix and all the rest of it. That can be something that takes a lot of time. If you like, if you are not trying to embed this in something like a template that can help you get a good springboard, you are literally doing this for fresh on every document you do. That is just not a sensible way of doing things. You know, to give you an example, those slide lay outs that Yac was talking about, in terms of the reading orders. So anything – this would also apply to something like Figma which we are not really talking about in this one, wherever you have something, mind mapping software where you can place things wherever you like on a page – trying to get the reading order for that sort of thing right is difficult. It’s the same. If you use PowerPoint, for example, in a way where I’m creating a text box, filling it in. Creating another and filling it in. I’m not getting any help to make sure the reading order is good. One way of getting that help is to use the slide layouts in PowerPoint. Where you can embed in the layout, say, for example, something simple, something that you have seen on a number of slides. Literally two columns of text. You need the left read before the right one. If you use a layout that has that reading order already there, and you just fill in the boxes and say yes, I want a slide with two columns, you automatically get that. Similarly – we haven’t touched on tables so much. That kind of heading, marking out the top row as a heading row is something people forget when they create tables.

If they are creating a table from a template, that already has that built in it, and they are filling things outs in the table say in a Word document. You get the help there already. So, it’s really important to make sure that whoever is setting up – especially your PowerPoint templates, that they understand the role of accessibility and what they do. We work with a huge number of organisations who do new brand identity work. Brand identity – these days is normally here is a logo, here is a typeface, you know, a huge amount of design sort of guidance coming off the back of that, including page templates. And we have a number of digital agencies who work with us and say we’ll never do a brand identity for a new company unless we have Hassell Inclusion working with us to make sure we have embedded accessibility within those templates so that that organisation gets more support to get things right. That sort of thing is really, really helpful. So, yes, don’t assume that brand agencies understand that sort of stuff. If you would like us to have a look at any templates that you are using – it could be that that is one of those things, if you like, like making an accessible component’s library for a website that will allow you to raise the accessibility across all of what you are doing. If that might be of use to you, please get in touch.

That’s one thing about trying to, if you like, improve your process, if you like, if we start with templates we may get some accessibility for free. What about the other thing that people ask us all of the time which is what should we do with all of the inaccessible stuff we have already got. If you think about the intranet. SharePoint, any other mechanisms – Google Docs, Google Drive – you’ll have hundreds of documents in there, and the question is should you actually fix the accessibility of all of this stuff. It’s a question we get asked a lot especially by universities, oftentimes when they moved across from libraries that had sort of huge storerooms, with a lot of paper in them, you know, when I was doing my Ph.D. I read hundreds of academic papers, all of which were fetched for me. These days what people do is scan them into a PDF. You can get them wherever you are, that is great. The problem is most of those are not accessible. Especially if you scan the PDF, rather than doing optical character assessment on them. A key thing with organisations is they have an archive that they thought was the strength of the company and realise it’s a headache. The key place this is happening at the moment in case you want to know is in the e-book industry. The European Accessibility Act that we were talking about a few months ago applies to e-books, all e-books need to be accessible from June next year onwards. We have been working with publishers that have backlogs of books that are not accessible. They want to know do we have to fix everything because some of these books maybe are not particularly current. They don’t really get bought by a lot of people, it’s not sensible to spend money doing that, this is the sort of place where strategy comes in. The good thing is the first blog I wrote when I created Hassell Inclusion was about this. We republished about 2012, the idea of drawing a line in the sand.

I want to give you a hint from this. It is impossible for you to make all of the documents in your organisation fully accessible. It’s not possible. If your organisation achieved that, what you create with the notes in front of you is probably breaking that. It’s really good to say these are the processes – like templates, training our staff. All of those things, about how we are going to do things going forward. Going backwards we’ll look at that in a particular way. That’s the first line. The second line is drawing a line for the documents there already between what we would term worthwhile and non-worthwhile legacy documents. I’ll take you through a bit of an exercise that we do with organisations, cost benefits analysis to see how that works. The key thing is you don’t have to make everything perfect. This is the gov.uk accessibility statement. These guys know if they get things wrong according to P.S. bar, this is the key thing that the government needs to get right. And the key thing in here is disproportionate version, PDFs are in this section. People say look, we have so much of this stuff, we don’t think many are using it. We’ll not fix everything, until people ask. That’s a sensible way of doing this. If you are in a situation where you think you have loads of documents whether PDF or something else, do we need to make them accessible. These are the strategic things you can go to make something unmanageable slightly more manageable. First thing, Web analytics are your friend. The only stuff you should be fixing is the stuff people are using.

What is important to your users, normally the things that are accessed all the time. If you want to start somewhere, it’s there. Secondly, user feedback, if people are complaining about the lack of accessibility for a particular document that gives you an indication and that is a good place to look as well. Similarly, what we find is that there are loads of documents around, some of which are not current. So you should just get rid of them completely. Others, the information is available on web pages elsewhere. Why make the PDF accessible. Point to the more accessible form. What this does if it enables you to say these documents I’m not going do anything with, these ones, high, medium, low priority, if we have enough money to do some fixing, that’s what we’ll do. It gives you a smaller subject of documents to work on. Then, in terms of those important documents, you can try to fix them yourself. You have seen some of the stuff that Yac was showing you. Some of you, who are very into Acrobat Pro are thinking, yes, I can do that. Most people are thinking, golly, that’s hard. Yeah. You need training to be able to do that. There are automated tools and services out there. We are not vouching for any of these saying which are good or aren’t because actually their capabilities bounce up and down if I’m honest.

The key thing really here is that it depends on how good or how complex the document is. So, really simple documents, an automated tools can give you if you give the PDF to that tool. It can probably first of all, you know, 90% of the stuff in it. If you have a complex document like your annual report, don’t expect an automated tool to fix that for you. Our way of thinking is user automated tools for what they are good at. You probably need to have one around if you are doing a lot of PDFs. You need to train people in your organisation or have a service where people can help you fix the stuff which is important, but complex. So, you need skill sets for the internal people. Adobe are doing interesting things, their autotag API is there now. We’ll come back if you have questions as to what we think about some of these things. The key thing really is that you can’t just rely on automated tools to fix everything for you. It’s a combination of that and real people helping. That is the sort of thing that our PDF is there. The reason I say this, Yac does the course, people adore it. I didn’t want him to say that about himself. The reason why it’s such a great bit of training is it’s a workshop rather than loads of slides, it’s training by doing, if you like, so people come out of the course not just understanding how to fix PDFs, and how to create accessible PDFs, but come out with fixed PDFs, if you like because that’s the thing we do on the course. Really, really commend that to you.

What you have seen today is quite a lot of stuff. We like giving you real value from our webinars, even though they are completely free. If you want to go further, our training courses and service to help you get stuff right in your templates are good things that may be helpful in the future. Before we get to questions at the end feel free to share anything that you have seen on the webinar, and say we are here to help the world be more accessible. Please credit us when we do that. The number of times we find our stuff appearing in other places without a credit is just a little disspiriting every now and again. You can get all of our stuff for free on HiHub. Questions. Yac, I wanted to ask there was a number of questions about the difference between printed PDFs, and digital PDFs, any thoughts on if you like the difference in how you would approach PDFs that are designed to be viewed on screen and PDFs designed to be printed and people interacting in that way.

YAC: A great question. A lot of stuff I did in government, the key thing is to get user research up front for printed output, you don’t have the flexibility to magnify that. People are not necessarily able to see the font you are at. In some cases you need to think about the colour contrast of the text more thank you go for digital. People can’t use dark or high contrast mode. You need to think about the format and structure. You can have long digital PDFs, people using summaries, ChatGPT. If you have a 100 page document printed people don’t have the same tools to look through that. In summary, user research up front, lots and lots of it. Make it as flexible as possible. In some cases you need more than one variety, Liam showed this, when I worked on the disability strategy in the UK government. There was a print version, Welsh translation, easy read version, a Dyslexic version. If you have a printed document you may need to create more than one version to make it accessible to a majority of the audience.

JONATHAN: Thank you for that. We can go on all day, time is running away from us. I saw a conversation about do e-books need accessibility statements. Yes, not in the e-book itself, there’s a meta data scheme for this so if you like, if you can imagine in the future if you go to a digital library, you’ll be able to say just show me the e-books that are accessible or just show me the e-books that correspond to my needs as somebody who has a disability. The accessibility statements normally come from those situations that we were just talking about in the scaling thing, which is where organisations need to say not all of our e-books will be accessible because it doesn’t make sense. If you think about it, if I created a new publisher, I would be able to make all of my e-books accessible and it would be easy. It’s better for you if you don’t have a backlog of publications. That can’t be good for business, a lot of work on the accessibility statements is helping organisations have what we term a defensible strategy for how to do this stuff.

Thank you so much for your time today. If you have more questions please send them through to us. We have more webinars coming up next month, yes, you can ask me anything, I do like people to send me the questions beforehand so I can have something on screen I can show. If you are around at the end of August and you have questions then we will try to answer as many as possible. It’s normally myself and a few from the team to do that. Also, you saw it earlier, when Liam was introducing some of these things, WCAG is great. But not for everybody. There are a lot of people’s needs, people who are neurodiverse that are not in WCAG at the moment. There’s more to accessibility than WCAG. That is what we’ll look at in September, to try and help you work out some of the stuff that may come in WCAG version 3, how do we bring it to now. If we care about people with all sorts of different types of disabilities and want to make sure they can access the information we have, WCAG does not give us all that we need. We’ll give you more. Thank you so much for your time and attention. We hope that that has been massively valuable to you. If you had colleagues that couldn’t get onto the call. Apologise for us. Somehow zoom got things wrong, the capacity of the call that was 1,000 – they mucked up. When we got to 300 it got are capped at that level. They got it wrong. We are trying to kind of work out how to fix that so we can get this to any of your colleagues that may have missed it. Fundamentally you’ll be able to get the recording of all of this in about a week’s time. Over a week, when we have all of the transcripts and everything sorted. Thank you so much for your time. Any questions that you have going forward contact us. We hope that’s been of great use for you.

See you next time. Thank you very much everyone. Take care.