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Speaker 1: OTAN-- Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Melinda Holt: Hello, everyone. My name is Melinda Holt, and I'm a PS2 for OTAN, the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. I'd like to welcome you all for joining this month's OTAN Tech Talk-- Turn PowerPoints into Accessible PDFs. This presentation focuses more on making sure the accessibility features placed in a PowerPoint convert over to the PDF. Our presenter, Paul Yung, is a teacher with LAUSD and an OTAN subject matter expert. Paul, take it away.

Paul Yung: Thank you for that introduction, Linda. Hello, everyone. My name is Paul Yung. I'm an ESL teacher with Los Angeles Unified's Division of Adult and Career Education. I led the development of the ESL video series Putting English to Work on Moodle. I am also a subject matter expert with OTAN. Currently, I am assisting OTAN in migrating the PETW courses to the new learning management system, Canvas.

Today, you will learn to generate a 509-compliant accessible PDF in your PowerPoint presentation for distribution with minimal remediation. There are three steps we'll be going through to achieve our goal. First, you have to make sure the PowerPoint document is accessible. Two, generate the PDF from the PowerPoint with the best options. Three, check that the accessibility in the PDF is correct.

I will demonstrate with my Putting English to Work PowerPoint presentation, making sure it's accessible before I generate a PDF from the source file. For each slide, I will be sure to create unique title slides, set reading order, add alternative text to messages, name hyperlinks, check color and contrast, and run the Accessibility Checker.

As you can see here, some sample slides from my presentation, at the very top of each one, there is a title. Because readers often skim presentations, unique slide titles will serve as guideposts, making your content easier to navigate. Next, use the Selection pane to set the reading order of your slides. First, select Home on the upper left, then Arrange. A window will open up with the option to choose Selection Pane at the very bottom.

The Selection Pane opens on the right side of your screen. Notice on my slide the title of today's presentation is at the top, and should be read first, followed by the bullets in the text box, and finally, the alt text of this picture. This is counterintuitive, but remember, it's important to remember that the reading order in the Selection Pane is arranged from the bottom up. As you can see, the title is at the bottom of the pane, which is correct. Next up, we see the text box, and then the picture at the top. Keep in mind that I would be doing this for every slide of my presentation.

To add alternative text, right click on the image. A menu will appear. Select Edit Alt Text. The Alt Text panel will open on your right. There are instructions. And in the box, you can see that I've added training components image as the alt text for this picture. Remember, all images that convey meaning need to have alternative text. Screen readers read the alt text to communicate what is important in images and other visuals.

Name your hyperlinks. Giving your hyperlink a name and keeping the actual link hidden will make it easier for screen readers to identify. And of course, check color and contrast. The free tool at webaim.org is easy to use. Sample the foreground of your slide with the color picker. Sample the background color of the slide with this color picker. And you will see immediate results displayed as pass or fail. Fortunately for me, my slides have passed, as you can see here.

And finally, use the Accessibility Checker. You can find it by clicking Review at the top, and then Check Accessibility. Once you do, you will receive immediate results, as you can see in the accessibility window here. It says no accessibility issues are found. People with disabilities should not have difficulty reading this presentation.

Now that my PowerPoint presentation has earned a pass, I am ready to generate the PDF. Let's look at Microsoft's Help page for best practices in generating a PDF. In PowerPoint, click File on the upper left. Select Save As. In the Save As dialog box, choose PDF as the Save As type list. Number four is the most important step. Click Options, and make sure the Document Structure Tags for Accessibility checkbox is selected, and then click OK.

This is critical. What are tags? Tags are metadata that indicate the structure of a document. They communicate the order in which items will be read. When you make a PDF, you want to preserve the accessibility of the original document by including its tags.

For Mac users, Microsoft's Help page tells us that the Mac OS does not provide this option with saving as a PDF. But you can save your presentation to OneDrive, open it in PowerPoint for the Web, and download as PDF from there. PDF files generated from PowerPoint for the Web preserve tagging.

So I'm on a Mac today, and I have signed into Office.com and uploaded my PowerPoint presentation to Office.com, and have used the PowerPoint on the Web to open my document. So I want to follow Microsoft Office's Help page instructions. I'm going to choose File, Save As, and Download as PDF.

Once you've downloaded the PDF, locate it on your hard drive and open it in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Be sure that you are using Adobe Acrobat Pro. The free Adobe Acrobat Reader does not offer the Accessibility Check feature. Once I've opened my PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro, I'm going to check to see that the tags have been preserved and are in the proper order.

I'm going to locate the Tab icon on the left and select it. As you can see, the tag tree has opened up. And if I click on each of these tags, the items that it references on the slide will appear. And you can match the order of the tags with the order that the items are read on your slide.

To begin the accessibility check, I'm going to choose Tools at the upper left of Adobe Acrobat Pro and select Accessibility, the Accessibility tool. Once you do, the Options window appear, and Accessibility Check is here. I'm going to select this, and the Accessibility Checker Options window appears.

You can go through this list to make sure all the relevant items are checked, and select Start Checking. Not long after you make that selection, the results appear on the upper left of the screen. As you can see, I have three issues in document, but page content, forms, alternate text, tables, lists and headings all pass. If I click this arrow, it'll review the issues within this category.

First, it's telling me that logical reading order needs manual check, which means that I have to review the reading order myself. The title has failed, and we'll have to address that. And the color contrast needs manual check. First, we'll take a look at logical reading order.

I will have Acrobat read the slide to me in order to verify the reading order. To do that, I will select View at the top menu. And in the menu that appears, I will select Read Out Loud, and Read This Page Only.

Speaker 2: Today's presentation. Why use Putting English to Work online. Hands on demo. Technical requirements. Obstacles students face. Keys to success. Challenge to teachers. How your school can get access, training components image.

Paul Yung: OK, that reading order was correct, and it read the alt text for this image at the very end, which is exactly what I want. So I go back, and I'm going to right click on Logical Reading Order and click Pass. So I am giving it the manual pass. OK?

Next, we'll look at this title. I right click on the title, and I get Options. I'm going to click Fix. So this title was a blank text box hidden behind OTAN's first logo. I could check Leave As Is and click OK, and it will skip this fail, but I'm just going to put Welcome here because I might want to use that title later. And I'm going to click OK. And once I do, it's passed.

And now, I'm going to review the color contrast. But as you recall, I already have. I used a webaim.org's free color contrast checker, and I checked the whole document. And I'm just going to give it a manual pass right now by right clicking on this link and selecting Pass.

So the final results of my PDF accessibility check looks good. Everything has passed on the document. Logical reading order passed manually. Color contrast passed manually. No issues in these categories. My document is accessible.

So to wrap up, don't forget the three steps to ensuring that you have an accessible PDF. First, check to make sure your PowerPoint is accessible. Two, choose the best output method to preserve tags. Three, check the accessibility of your PDF after it's generated.

To wrap up, so there you have it. Thank you for watching. Melinda, take it away.

Melinda Holt: All right. Thanks, Paul. It's time to start making those PDFs accessible. And that is the end of the OTAN Tech Talk. If you have an idea, tech tool, or technique to share with other adult educators, please submit an OTAN Tech Talk proposal at bit.ly/OTANWebinar. So that's bit.ly/OTANWebinar, where OTAN and the W are uppercase.

I'd also like to encourage everyone to subscribe to the OTAN YouTube channel, where more videos, including Tech Talks, can be found. All of this information and more is available on the OTAN website at www.OTAN.us. We hope to see all of you at future OTAN Tech Talks and webinars.