Listen to Chad and Dax talk about alternate descriptions for hyperlinks and what WCAG has to say about it. We mention PDF/UA-2 set to remove the mandatory requirement for alternate link descriptions. Chad shares a users comment "I want users of assistive technology to have the same crappy experience a sighted person has when reading long URLs." You will get a chuckle out of our "Six Degrees of separation from Dyson," and why where the link takes you matters. Later on we discuss how visual cues r...
Aug 24, 2023•42 min•Season 3Ep. 24
CAUTION: Highly controversial accessibility topics in this podcasts: Do we need to set the reading order in my PDFs? 2. Title Tag or H1? We discuss a real-world situation where someone's barrier to information in a PDF is not vision. However, because of a traumatic event this person has dyslexia and requires audio input to fully understand the content on the page they are reading. We discuss how reading order is affected by the source document. We look at MS Word and InDesign and discuss the cha...
Aug 15, 2023•53 min•Season 3Ep. 23
This week's podcast is truly an amazing goldmine of information if you struggle with creating accessible infographics? Chad Chelius and Dax Castro walk through 7 Questions to ask yourself before creating an accessible infographic: What do we want the user experience to be? What is the most important information? Does Content order matter? Does color or line weight indicate additional information? What is the volume of data? (Do I need an alternate presentation?) Can I support the graphic with ad...
Jul 31, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 22
In this episode we talk with Recosoft Founder, Paul Chadha about Decks MoveIn. This is a great plugin for creating InDesign documents from PowerPoint slides. We all know that PowerPoint was never meant to be a desktop publishing software. It is a presentation tool. However, there are times when we need to push the content limits. Instead of spending an hour or more fixing your PDF, just move from PPT to InDesign and let the Decks MoveIn plugin from Recosoft help speed up the process. Stick aroun...
Jul 26, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 21
In this accessibility podcast episode, we discuss designing with accessibility in mind when it comes to the covers of magazines and maps in your PDF documents. We talk about the importance of reading order and understanding how a user might want to read the document from both a screen reader and a sighted user experience. This is a really great episode packed with some really interesting ideas on methods for presenting accessible content. For sure one of my favorite podcasts to date!...
Jul 21, 2023•40 min
In this episode we talk about the difference between barriers, violations and poor user experiences. We review a practice we are seeing more and more of, navigation bars inside PDF documents. We discuss a few solutions using Adobe InDesign to use these navigation bars in a more accessible way. Listen in and Chad will give you a huge time-saving way to incorporate those nav bars in the most accessible way possible. Dax talks about ways to structure your PDF document to improve the user experience...
Jul 12, 2023•42 min
In this episode we cover the potential risks for remediation professionals concerning the newly released Assembly Bill AB 1757. We also reveal a very important bug in the latest update of Adobe Acrobat. Stick around to hear Chad and I explain the difference between alt-text, actual text and expansion text. Then Chad reveals how to turn off the new switched layout in the latest Acrobat Interface Update. Make sure you listen to the end to hear how Adobe fixes long style names and Chad reveals a to...
Jun 29, 2023•42 min
Join Chad Chelius and Dax Castro as they discuss some great tips for presenting accessibly when giving a PowerPoint (or OneNote) presentation. If you stay til the end you will get the URL to the handout that goes along with their talking points. I bet there are at least a few you hadn't considered!
Jun 20, 2023•46 min•Season 3Ep. 17
Chad and Dax take a look at some interesting new trends from the WebAIM report published every few years. #9 has some really interesting turns in the statistics that we take a closer look at.
May 23, 2023•35 min•Season 3Ep. 16
Accessibility Advocate Cam Beaudoin joins Chad Chelius and Dax Castro on Global Accessibility Awareness day (GAAD) to talk about ways to keep your company motivated to take action to improve accessibility beyond the celebratory day.
May 23, 2023•51 min•Season 3Ep. 14
Chad Chelius and Dax Castro talk through some of the nuances of the European Accessibility Standard, EN 301 549. Do you know which countries adopted this standard? Some things we found were surprising and others just made sense. Stick around to hear our discussion on Reflow and why it is missing from the accessibility standard.
May 08, 2023•24 min•Season 3Ep. 14
In this podcast, Chad Chelius and Dax Castro talk about the top 7 things that usually come up for people just starting their PDF remediation journey. How many of these have you experienced? Not only do we talk about them, we help you solve them! Listen in as we cover the following 7 struggles for new PDF accessibility remediators. What is the correct size for accessible text? My content disappeared! Reading Order messed up my Tags Tree! Links in my header/footer are not being tagged! My hyperlin...
May 02, 2023•44 min•Season 3Ep. 13
This episode of Chax Chat discusses what you need to know when transitioning from WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and getting ready for WCAG 2.2 for your PDF documents. We cover: 1.4.10 Reflow AA - Users with low vision who need to make things larger. The content will wrap inside the viewport instead of causing horizontal scroll. 1.4.11 Non-Text Contrast AA: Extends 3:1 contrast minimums to important graphical information, visible focus indicators and other interactive controls when those indicators are necessary...
Apr 25, 2023•44 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Chad and Dax jump in front of the camera for this episode. You can find the video on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@a11y . In this eposide we cover the steps to making sure your document is compliant and usable. Many people do not understand what it means to be accessible and think that passing the PDF checker is all that is needed to "be accessible." You do not want to miss the key steps we cover that you need to make sure your document is actually usable for people using assistiv...
Apr 18, 2023•42 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Accessibility Podcast: How to use the FREE ISO-32000 PDF/UA Standard PDF Standard ISO 32000-2 is available for free! Chad and Dax peel back the cover of the 1003 page PDF/UA standard. They focus on Chapter 14 and key areas you might find useful. Download the standard at PDFA.org/sponsored-standards and follow along with us. Make sure you are using MS Edge because we found the cart has some compatibility challenges. Chax hits 25,000 podcast downloads Pave the Way to Global Accessibility Awareness...
Apr 11, 2023•38 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Guests Jeremy Seda IT Accessibility Coordinator and Jacalyn Stallings Vocational Rehab Counselor tell us all about the upcoming Pave the Way for Global Accessibility Awareness Day at North Idaho College April 19th. We talk about creating a culture of change and a few teaching moments related to unintended microagressions. It was great to hear Jeremy's approach to keeping momentum and building a culture of intentional accessibility at North Idaho College. Jacalyn brought up an amazing benefit for...
Apr 04, 2023•40 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Should certifications be hard? Chad and I discuss Karl Groves' recent article that discusses the question and why we agree. Chad and I discuss another great question: "Do links always need alt-text?" We take a look at what WCAG 2.4.4 Link Purpose says and whether it supports, or doesn't support the idea that hyperlinks always need alt-text. You have to listen to Dax's analogy as he compares an insole and a shoe to an annotation and the link text. Listen to the What do you think? Did you know tha...
Mar 28, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Special guest Harpaul Chadha (Paul) from Recosoft Corporation , joins us to talk about solutions for creating InDesign files from Accessible PowerPoint and PDF documents! WHAT??!?! Yep. PowerPoint to InDesign is a thing and DecksMoveIn makes it happen, accessibly! Paul talks about how DecksMovein considers accessibility when importing your content. This plugin transfers your reading order, alt-text and creates styles to properly import your PowerPoint content into InDesign. Chad and I mention th...
Mar 13, 2023•36 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Chad and Dax talk about the journey of accessibility for the online design platform, CANVA. You may be surprised to know that just a few months ago there were no tags available for any CANVA document. While they have made some improvements and documents are now saving with some semblance of tags, there is still a long way to go to meet the WCAG Success Criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships. If you are using CANVA as a design platform you do not want to miss this episode. Share this post with you...
Mar 07, 2023•28 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Accessible Tables Podcast Chad and Dax jump feet first into dispelling some myths about accessible tables and have a change in thinking about another common table practice. Be sure to listen how Dax's opinion on the A1 cell has changed. Chad makes a great arguement for maintaining the best practice of adding a meaningful label in the A1 cell. Make sure to say tuned to hear our plea to Adobe to allow us access to a key area of a table from the tags tree and Dax's super secret tip for troubleshoot...
Feb 23, 2023•31 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Join Chad Chelius and Dax Castro as they welcome Jason Taylor Chief Innovations Officer at UsableNet to discuss the ADA Digital Accessibility Lawsuits and Trends Report. Learn how they collect the data for the report. Find out what happened in 2017 that sparked the report. Chad brings up the topic of Overlays and the ensuing discussion may shock you. Dax has a suprising point of view on them. Find out the answer to the question of "Who is checking anyway?" Chad brings up the different legal poin...
Feb 14, 2023•36 min
Join our guests Christine Foushi and John Foliot of Content Industries as they talk about accessible epubs. We explore the different versions, how they are structured. Did you know that epubs are basically HTML 5 documents? Stay tuned to listen to us talk about the importance of metadata at the book-level rather than the data-level. We reveal the secret of converting a zip to an epub and how to reverse engineer a word doc to get to the hidden zip contents! Christine and I also have a great discu...
Jan 31, 2023•45 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Listen to Chad and and Dax talk about the accessibility problems that are created when typed hyperlinks span multiple lines. We give you the reasons why it happens and some workarounds to fixing it or planning for them. Make sure you listen until the end learn how to set alt-text using Adobe Bridge and our thoughts on captions and alt-text uses. You will learn when to use either. Are you using them correctly?
Jan 17, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Guest David Herr, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Allyant joins us to talk about accessibility checkers and discuss the answer to"Are they enough?" Do you know what the standards are they are checking for? David talks about the difference between CommonLook Validator and CommonLook PDF and announces CommonLook Online. We take a moment to lament about fixing errors manually and with power tools. Make sure you stick around to hear the announcement of PAC for MAC! It is here (online)! We wrap up by t...
Jan 10, 2023•46 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Join Chad Chelius, ADS and Dax Castro, ADS for a special podcast featuring the benefits of using Axaio's MadeToTag plugin for Adobe InDesign. Do not forget to listen to the end for the special Adobe MAX giveaway! • Setting Row Headers in InDesign • Layout Tables? No problem • Fixing Complex Table • The 7 steps for accessibility using MadeToTag • Extended Style mapping • Easily edit alt-text in one place • New features releasing at Adobe MAX • Set the Initial View preset • The End notes paradox •...
Oct 18, 2022•38 min•Season 2Ep. 36
Our guest Caroline Desrosiers of Scribely joins us to talk about her role in the upcoming Adobe Bridge update for accessible meta data. She also discusses why alt-text can be so challenging and even reveals some of the questions her team uses to create meaningful descriptions.
Oct 12, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 35
The question of when to edit the source versus the PDF document almost seems obvious to answer. But our discussion might surprise you. We also talk about the Content Key for Alt-text in Adobe InDesign and why (for now) filling it out might just be time NOT well spent. Do not miss this episode if you are an InDesign user. We promise there are some great nuggets of wisdom in this show.
Sep 27, 2022•35 min•Season 2Ep. 33
Accessibility Podcast #32 : Understanding the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Word. There is so much packed into this podcast that I can hardly believe it myself. Chad and I walk through some of the handouts for our upcoming MS Word Accessibility class on Sept. 29th and we also talk about several key features and steps for making your Word docs accessible. We also discuss the most common Checker errors you will encounter: 1. Missing Alt-text 2. Image or Object Inline 3. Merged or Split Cells ...
Sep 20, 2022•38 min•Season 2Ep. 32
Chad talks about his recent discovery of solving the Acrobat error that pops up when you have an Lbl (Label) as a footnote tag without an accompanying L (List) tag structure. We also review what the ISO standard has to say about it and why. Stick around to listen to us review the three most common problems people run into when trying to test documents with a screen reader. I am betting you are doing at least one of them.
Sep 13, 2022•39 min•Season 2Ep. 31
Chad and Dax talk about the "Last Mile" approach to creating accessible documents. They discuss the tools to help you get your documents passed that last mile and what to do when you simply don't have time. Have you ever heard of the H tag? We know about H1 through H6 but the seldom talked about H tag has been long forgotten because NVDA and JAWS simply voice this tag as a paragraph rather than voicing "Heading." Listen in as Chad and Dax talk about what they discovered regarding this tag and ho...
Sep 07, 2022•37 min•Season 2Ep. 30
