GABY DE JONGH: So I'm going to go ahead get started. Again, thanks Doug for asking me to present to this group. And I'm actually going to focus on three questions that Doug post. So the three questions are, what PDF work does UW do in-house? The second question is, what tools do you use for which tasks? And then the third question is, for complex forms, do you job them out? 

So those are the three questions that I'm going to focus on. And this is going to be kind of informal. So if you guys have questions, feel free to stop me in the middle and ask the question. Unmute yourself and feel free to interject. 

So the first question is what PDF work does UW do in-house? So that's we do a lot of remediation of PDF documents and also office documents, but primarily PDF documents. And that's for faculty coursework but not as an accommodation. We actually do have disability resources for students who perform that function. 

So our purpose is really in a proactive manner. If faculty would like to have their coursework be accessible without having to have that trigger of an accommodation request from a student, we will do that for them. And so that's one of our services. 

We also provide remediation for staff, which is usually through departments or other units that have their supporting documents or administrative documents or reports or things that go out on an annual basis or quarterly basis to their stakeholders. So those kinds of things. 

And then we also do remediation for students. But that's usually if they're submitting on behalf of a student program, such as Student Life or other kinds of programs that students have throughout the University. And there is a process for this. So I'm going to switch gears here. 

There's a process for this. This is our website, the UW IT Accessible Technology Services website. And over here on our Navigation menu, we have creating documents link. And if you select that, gives you a little bit more information. Actually, a lot more information about creating accessible documents. 

If you scroll down, there is a heading here that says you're using-- I'm sorry, UW IT PDF remediation service. And that is the service that I was referring to. And the idea is that we will remediate PDF documents in a proactive manner that are highly visible, that are high impact. That are used multiple times in a course or throughout year and are strategic. 

And so we also include examples. So PDF documents that are available to the public on a high use website, documents that will be used multiple times in a course or documents developed by several faculty members to be used in several classes. 

And then we provide a link that folks can click on and then they can submit. It's pretty simple form. It's just their name, email, basic contact information, a description about how their documents would fit into this high visible high impact multiple user or strategic category. And then how the document is going to be or disseminated for their particular audience. 

And then once that application is received-- I'm actually the one who will receive that application. And then I evaluate those questions that are based on this criteria of highly visible high impact. And then I submit that on to a selection committee who will review that. So the selection committee is comprised of the director of Accessible Technology Services, our office administrator and my supervisor. 

And so then they look at the summarization of the application that I have sent to them and then I give them a recommendation as to whether or not we would remediate that in-house or if we want to send it out to a third party remediation service or if we're going to reject their application. And I've only rejected one application. And that was due to the fact that it actually should have gone to disability resources for students. It was an accommodation rather than a proactive remediation request. 

So I recommended that particular application to our disability resources for students. But after that application process has been accepted, then we set up either shared drive if it's multiple files for a course, where folks can upload their documents to a shared drive and then we pulled them down and remediate them. Or they'll send it to us via email and then we'll remediate them that way. 

Then I have a team of students who remediate the documents I have about five students right now that are composed of undergraduates and graduate students and they've gone through a pretty rigorous training process. And they do the bulk of the remediation through the service. 

And then I quality check every single document that they remediate and make sure that it passes success criteria as mentioned in either Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, and I'll talk about that a little bit later on depending upon the document or I will use another accessibility checking program called PAC 2021. And I'll talk about that in a little bit as well. 

So that's a little bit about the service itself. At this time we don't remediate math PDF documents primarily because math does not translate well in PDF. That will hopefully change soon. LaTeX is a program that actually does a lot of math content and you can save that to PDF. 

But the developers of LaTeX and Adobe or in conversations to move forward the possibility of having math content be supported in PDF. So that's great. That's very excited. And it should be pretty simple. The reason being is that when we were first doing LaTeX documents, the file size would be so huge because it had to contain all of the information of the math content. 

And so now we have the ability to save huge files. And so we can go back to having or we cannot go back to, but we can actually start the process of having math content be accessible from LaTeX documents. So that is something to look out for in the future on the horizon but we're not quite there yet. 

ZACH: Gabby, I don't want to derail this whole thing but I'm like curious enough to ask, is it going to be like math email kind of way that it's accessible or is it going to put the LaTeX source into PDF? 

GABY DE JONGH: My understanding is it's going to put the LaTeX source into PDF. 

ZACH: Yes, that's what I would prefer. 

GABY DE JONGH: Yeah. There should be a lot more variability that way or you should be able to walk through the equations more easily that way. That's my understanding. Actually, if you go to the LaTeX website, they have a little bit more information about their working in combination with Adobe on that process. 

ZACH: Doing that right now. Thank you. 

GABY DE JONGH: You're welcome. You're welcome. So then the next question posed is, what tools do you use for which task? So primarily for myself and for the students that we have remediating these documents, we use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC for remediation of most PDF documents. 

Back in 2018, we did a pilot test with Equidox and I'm not sure if you're familiar with what Equidox is but it's also a remediation tool. It's web-based, which is very cool. But at the time that we were testing it in 2018, there were serious limitations with what it could do with forms. Actually at that time, I don't think it was possible to remediate forms using Equidox. 

And there was also challenges with remediating tables. And so at the end of our pilot program, we decided not to continue on with Equidox and go back to using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC for remediating documents. 

Now Acrobat Pro DC is not the only tool that's used for remediation but you can do all the remediation that is necessary within Adobe Acrobat Pro DC without using another remediation tool. With that said, we do use ABBYY FineReader for PDFs that are scanned images. 

So if you have a PDF document and you're not able to select any of the text, that means it was probably scanned. And so it's an image and it doesn't have any underlying text to it. So we use ABBYY FineReader to do the OCR scanning rather than using the built-in Adobe Acrobat OCR scanner. We find that ABBYY has a higher success rate for accuracy for converting the image rather to accurate text. 

And it's a lot easier to use and a lot easier to make edits to any of the OCR content in FineReader than it is in Acrobat Pro. And then we do the final remediation. After we use it ABBYY FineReader for OCR scanning, then we go back and open it up in Acrobat Pro and do a final remediation using that tool. 

I mentioned PAC 2021 earlier. It is a free accessibility checker. But it's only available for PC, it's not available on the Mac platform. But we use that because it is one of the only or one of the few accessibility checkers that checks against PDF UA and WCAG success criteria as well. 

And so we use this primarily for UW Medicine forms and other complex PDF documents as well. But we use them specifically for UW Medicine forms because those forms are usually uploaded to a DocuScan. And one of the requirements for having PDF documents in DocuScan is that the documents have to be PDF compliant. And PAC 2021 is one of the few accessibility checkers that will do that. 

And then I also use JAWS to spot check larger longer PDF documents that have a lot of more complex elements such as a table of contents or links or lists. Specifically I use JAWS to look for specific things. I don't just have JAWS running in the background. I'm actually calling up lists of links or the table of contents to make sure that the document will perform the way that it should perform. 

I'm not an expert JAWS user by any means, but I do know enough to be able to call up lists of elements and see that they are presenting in the way that is expected for screen reader users. 

And then the third question is, for complex forms, do you job those out? So most of the forms that our shop does is for UW Medicine forms and those are through informed consent. And I'll show you examples if I have enough time here. I'll show you examples of some of the forms that we do for UW Medicine. 

But on occasion we will get a form from a unit or department as a checklist or something like that. So whenever we encounter forms from other entities besides UW Medicine, we encourage them to not use PDF forms and instead use HTML based forms instead. 

The reason being is because PDF forms from a remediation standpoint they're difficult to do. They're very time consuming and there's a lot of complexities and there's a certain workflow that you need to adhere to in order for them to turn out the way that they are expected to turn out for four screen reader users. 

And for screen reader use to consume a PDF form is rather challenging as well. So we really encourage folks to use HTML based forms instead the two that we've done a little bit of testing with our Google Forms and Microsoft Forms. And I'll talk about that in a little bit as well. 

We will send out forms to a third party service if those forms require a quick turnaround and we're not able to get them done in the amount of time that is required for that particular form. Or if a form is in a foreign language. We don't have the skills, we don't have the staffing to do forms in a foreign language. 

What is required of forms is that you have to go into the tooltips and explain what a particular form element is requesting. And so you have to be a native language speaker in the language of the document it was created in order to use accurate language to describe how that form fields should be filled out. 

So if we do encounter any foreign language forms, we will send that out to a third party service. 

And the service that we use, we have a relationship with Open Access Technologies or OAT. They were recently purchased by Crawford Technologies, which is totally fine. And so we're always looking for other remediation services that do the same thing just to see if we can get a good price, see with the turnaround times are and see what their skill set is of their remediation. 

So we've used VASTEC in the past and we've use accessible IT for other remediation. But currently we have a relationship with Open Access Technologies and we're using them. So I wanted to share with you a few resources. I'm going to go back here. 

One of them I already showed you, our website that has the link to the PDF remediation service. I've also included a link to Equidox PDF accessibility software in case you guys are interested in that. And I've included a link to the PAC 2021. And I have that web page open as well. So again, it's free and it's for the window side. Unfortunately, it does not work for Mac. 

And you just download that. The nice thing about the PAC 2021 checker is if you have a bunch of PDF documents, you can batch process a bunch of PDF documents at the same time or you can use them individually. 

Another resources that I wanted to show you is this is from Deque University. This is a JAWS keyboard shortcut website that I use when I'm testing PDF documents for accessibility. Essentially, what I do is I use this as kind of a cheat sheet for just some basic navigation within JAWS just for reading. 

But really what I do when I'm spot checking is I look at the elements list, which the command for that is insert F3. And that shows a list of all the buttons frames graphics lists and links and et cetera, and I can check and see if they are appearing or if they are behaving the way that they should be in that element list. 

Let's see. Other resources that I wanted to share as well our PDF training. If you are remediating documents and you need and you're not quite sure how to do that, pubcom.com is a great resource for PDF training. Bevy Shannon is the proprietor of pubcom.com. And she does basic training on PDF remediation. 

She'll also do specific training on remitting PDF forms, specific training on creating InDesign templates that export to accessible PDF documents rather. And then this last one, the PDF Association is a great resource for all things PDF. It really is the clearinghouse for all information that is associated with PDF. 

They have the ISO document that has a PDF UA success criteria guidelines. There's also a manual, a syntax manual that is posted on their website that states how to tag complex things or things that you would come across that aren't just a paragraph or a paragraph and a link. 

So let's say you have a form in a list in a table. Hopefully, you don't have that. But if you did have that, how would you tag that so that it would be presented accurately to the screen reader user? 

So those are the primary resources and those are the major questions or the major answers to the questions that I wanted to present. And I did want to go ahead and show you an example of the forms that we see from UW Medicine. So this is an example form from informed consent. 

And you'll notice here that the signature section does not have a form element. So with PDF forms for informed consent, the idea is that patients will download this form, fill it out on a computer and then print it out. And then get a wet signature. And then they'll take that document with the wet signature back to the clinic, to the hospital and then they keep it on file that way. 

So we haven't figured out a good way around that because UW needs to have that wet signature for some of the procedures that they do. This is not something that we can easily transfer from a paper-based form to a web-based HTML form. 

But the nice thing about these kinds of forms that we get from informed consent is that before they even come to us for accessibility, these documents have gone through several different committees for readability, for understandability to make sense. Make sure that it passes DEI initiatives. 

So it goes through a bunch of different committees first to make sure that it is comprehensive and makes sense. And that makes it a little bit easier for us to include the tooltips for the form elements. So in this particular document-- Let me go ahead and make this bigger. 

So in section 1 here, you can see its patient information and they're asking for things like name, last, first, middle initial. And if I hover my pointer over those form elements, you can see that the tooltip, which is what the screen reader would announce, also reflects that same information as well. 

Now if I go down here to some of the checkboxes under records to be released from, I have a checkbox next to the text Harborview Medical Center and Clinics. Now if you use that text as the tooltip, it's not very informational. So we have to include more informational text to make it more understandable for screen reader users. 

So the tooltip for this particular checkbox is records to be released from Harvard Harborview Medical Center and Clinics. And as you go through, it says for each one records to be released from UW Medical Center and clinics, records to be released from UW Medical Center and Clinics Montlake. So it gives a little bit more information about that particular checkbox. 

Oh, one other thing I wanted to show you guys is if I go back here to our website. I wanted to talk a little bit more about-- Let's see. Here we go. About accessibility of online survey tools. So my supervisor, Terrill Thompson, he has a blog that's posted within our website there and he does a bunch of different experiments. 

So on this particular blog post is an experiment of accessibility reviews of online survey tools. So he surveyed catalyst WebQ, which is a proprietary UW system. Google Forms, Microsoft Office Forms, Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey. And you can read all the methodology here. 

But towards the end, really the conclusion is that Google Forms and Microsoft Office forms are the most accessible HTML based forms as opposed to a more paper-based PDF version. So feel free to use our website as a resource for whatever accessibility questions that you have. 

And the blog posts that Terrill Thompson puts up there are pretty useful as well. So that was just a brief overview. I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and ask if anybody has any questions. 

VICKY: This is Vicky. I have a question about your timeline when you're actually document is submitted. Do you give a timeline? Do people know how long they need to expect for them to get the document back after you've remediated it? 

GABY DE JONGH: Yeah, that's a great question. After they after the application has been accepted, then I asked them to send me the document so that I can review them and give them an accurate turnaround time. So I'll review all the documents as I receive them and then I review them before I send them out for quality assurance. And that's how that works. 

VICKY: Thank you. 

GABY DE JONGH: Any other questions? Looking at the chat here. 

ZACH: I have one if nobody else does and it's a little off topic. So don't go too into the weeds. Is there a post on your website or do you happen to know of a good accessible document signing platform that isn't Adobe, like DocuSign or the kind of platforms I'm talking about? Like when you buy a house and you have to sign some documents. 

GABY DE JONGH: Yeah. We actually work with DocuSign to their development team. And one of the folks on our staff and our team is blind and uses a screen reader. And so he's been using kind of a DocuSign portal and it is accessible. That's one of the only portals that we've used so far. So I can't really speak to other portals. 

I know that Adobe Sign is another PDF form kind of a portal but we haven't done any testing or any type of research into that particular platform. There is another platform that recently came across my desk. I'm totally blanking on the name right now Zach, I'm really sorry about that. We did come across but it was also not accessible. 

So I can only say with confidence that DocuSign is one that we've used and tested. I don't want to say that it's 100% accessible but it does have-- They are aware of accessibility and they are working towards becoming a more accessible platform. 

ZACH: Cool. Yeah, that about matches my experience and I will say that at Clark we tested Adobe Sign about a year ago now and it did not pass our process. 

GABY DE JONGH: OK. Yeah, not surprising. Adobe is not very easy to work with sometimes. I'm trying to be diplomatic. Any other questions? All right, if no other questions, I think I'm going to go ahead and hand it back to you Zach and Doug. 

ZACH: Well, thank you. 

DOUG: Thanks so much, Gaby. 

ZACH: And that was really informative.