Experiences: Trying Out Evaluation Tools/Methods

Jan 23, 2016 by Natalia

I used the following PDF, which contains mostly form fields, for this purpose: https://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/Documents/Add+Drop+Courses.pdf

I didn't use CommonLook PGA (due to the price tag of both the software itself and of Adobe Acrobat Pro...), but used PAC 2.0 instead.

It came up with well over 2000 errors, mostly due to lack of tags and missing language for the multitudes of form fields, but also some other errors like lack of alt field names and table irregularities, for example.

Next, I tried interacting with the document using only my keyboard. This was actually entirely doable to my great surprise! There were no keyboard traps, no parts of the document unaccessible by keyboard, etc. The only issue was with the reading order - it tabs first through all the links found on the PDF, and then through all the form-fields, which is slightly disorienting, but not too troubling in this particular case, as it's only a one-page doc, with just five links (three of which do indeed come before all the forms/fields).

Lastly, I tried using the form with NVDA. This was an utter disaster! Majority of the tables, rows, form fields were mislabeled terribly, so the voice-reader would announce something like "combo1x2doclockblank" instead of "Degree"/"Last Name"/etc., so I gave up before I even reached the end of the first table/the half-page point, because the gibberish was just extremely frustrating. I am pretty sure a non-sighted person would not be able to complete this form without help from another individual.