Description

CommonLook PGA provides much more sophisticated remediation support than that offered by Adobe Acrobat Pro alone. It includes many one-click fixes for machine-checkable errors that are found in automated checks, provides an advanced table editing feature, and makes actions such as inserting and converting tags faster and simpler than in Adobe Acrobat Pro. We will review some of CommonLook PGA’s most powerful features in more details.

Automated Fixes

Once an automated accessibility check has been carried out on a document, you can go through each of the issue items in the results window (with only failed results selected, since only these require attention). Double clicking on each error will open up a pop up window that will contain:

1. the name of the standard used in the check
2. the checkpoint that corresponds to the error
3. the error description, and
4. fix options.

As errors are fixed they will be automatically removed from the list. For many errors, the solutions are one-click fixes. For example, in the example above, once the user clicks Finish, the error is fixed and removed from the list. In some cases fixes requires several steps. For example, when images are missing alternative text.

The error pop-up window provides several solutions, either adding alternative text, converting the tag, or untagging the selected element (untagging in CommonLook tags the content as an artifact rather than deleting a tag).

The solution you choose will depend on the image:

• If the image is decorative, untag it.If the images is not a figure, change the tag to a different type.
• If the image requires alt text, select the Provide Alt, Actual Text, or Expansion Text option, and click next.

Table Editor

PDF documents often contain data tables. While visual users can identify relationships between table cells and headers visually, this information needs to be marked programmatically (through the use of tags), so that AT can accurately relay it to non-visual users. To be accessible, a table needs to programmatically define header cells, scope of header cells, and any cells that span multiple columns or rows. This is especially true for complex tables–tables that contain both column and row headers, and tables that contain cells that span multiple columns or rows.

Complex tables can be difficult to remediate in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Table editing capabilities in Acrobat Pro are limited and difficult to use. CommonLook Global Access, on the other hand, provides a sophisticated and easy-to-use table editor that allows the user to quickly identify and edit column and row headers, header scope, cells that span multiple columns and more.

Let’s go through an example of editing an incorrectly tagged complex table.

1. Find the root table tag in the structure tree (if you select the content in the viewer, it will automatically locate and highlight it in the tag tree), select it, and click Table Editor in the Windows tab.The visual presentation of the table, as seen in the PDF document, is shown in the viewer window above. The structure of the table will be shown in the table editor, with header cells marked in bold, and spanning cells visually spanning all appropriate columns. In the table shown, row and column header cells are not specified. They are marked with TD instead of TH, and do not appear in bold in the table editor. And although Group 1 and Group 2 cells span the entire width of the table, the table editor reveals that this is not specified programmatically because the cell is only one column wide.
2. First, let’s mark the header cells. Click on the cell in the table editor. In the Properties panel, open the Type drop-down menu, and choose TH.
3. Scroll down in the list of Properties, check off the Has scope checkbox, and specify the Scope (in this case: column).
4. Repeat step for all column headers.
5. Do the same for row headers; select TH under Type, and specify the Scope (in this case we have a row headers so specify: “row”).
6. Next, click on a cell that spans multiple columns. Under Properties, change the Column span (in this case: 5).
7. Repeat for any other cells that span multiple columns.

Other Features

CommonLook PGA offers additional functionality such as adding and converting tags, editing metadata, properties, role maps, and more. To learn more about CommonLook PGA’s features, refer to its user guide.

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Task

1. Select a PDF that contains at least two tables.
2. Run the PDF through CommonLook PGA’s automated accessibility check using either PDF/UA or WCAG 2.0 as the standard.
3. Fully remediate the PDF within CommonLook PGA.
4. Upload the remediated PDF here, ensuring that the "Is this for an assignment?" dropdown is set to the name of this lesson.

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Continue to Lesson 6 - Converting PDFs to HTML documents »