Accessible PDF Forms Part 1 - Prepare Forms

hello and welcome back to the accessible pdf video series my name is josh seifert i am the information and communication technology accessibility program manager here at the university of oregon this video discusses how to make accessible forms within your pdfs this is a little bit more complicated than the other videos in this series so if you haven't already watched the previous videos go do that first okay so if you're still with me let's get going i have here a file i created it in microsoft word and then i exported it to a pdf and it's not a real form it's just a fake format demo that i made for someone to hypothetically sign up for some ufo athletics marketing emails it has all the standard contact information these are all regular text input fields it has some radio buttons and then it has a few check boxes it's supposed to represent the normal stuff you'd see in most forms it does not currently have any interactive form fields now you can create interactive form fields in microsoft word but i didn't because first word forms are inaccessible don't use them and second when you export these files to pdfs that interactive word form data it doesn't get exported anyway you can and should use word to layout your form so this has i think a pretty good visual layout i'm not a graphic designer but i think it looks pretty good in a real form you'd probably have more than four different sports but i'm trying to keep it brief because having a longer form it wouldn't train anything different it would just be more tedious doing the same step more times so let's talk about how to make the form accessible the first thing i'm going to do is delete the tags now this might be a surprise to you if you've watched the other videos on accessible pdfs you recalled me saying the tags are the the foundation of an accessible document however when you create form fields you need to then re-tag your whole document which will mess up any tags that you already have already have here so if you went through all the work of making your tags perfect then added form fields it would just overwrite all that work so i and most people think it makes sense to just delete all the tags start with a clean slate and then we can add tags after the form is already set up so to do that here i am in the tags pane whoops that has closed it right click on the root node and then select delete tag and boom we have we have no more tags close that and then on the right hand toolbar choose the prepare form option if you do not have prepare form available just search in the search tools search bar for prepare form click on this and it asks you which file you want to work on it defaults to the currently open file so that's good uh pro tip don't ever check this document requires signatures even if your document does require signatures there is a known a bug in acrobat where if this is checked it disables certain form-filled properties that you will need to use so leave this unchecked you do want to leave form fill auto detection on and let's click start to run this tool oh yeah i deleted the tags that was a change to my document so it's going to ask that i save it first which is a good idea you should save this document frequently when you work on it because acrobat is notoriously unstable when you're working with forms and it's super frustrating if you work on something for like an hour it crashes and you lose your work okay so uh the tool ran and now we see our form fields so we see all these blue boxes this is these are the form fields that acrobat created for us like any automated tool acrobat's form fill tool is imperfect so the first thing we need to do is go through this whole form and make sure that the fields are correct that all the fields that need to be there are there and that there's no extra fields that shouldn't be there so starting on the top all my contact information these look like regular text input fields which is good it looks like my my radio buttons are good and actually the check boxes i have no idea what's going on here i see the check boxes and i see all these other fields were added and these are not correct actually i do know what's going on here so acrobat it you know it looks at specific things to guess where form field should go and one of the things it looks for is hey is there a text label on the left and then a big blank spot to the right that probably means at the text input field here and so that's what it's doing here so i kind of get it i don't know why i thought it applied to all these lines and not men's basketball but who knows so to delete this just uh select it then hit the delete key on your keyboard or you can right click control click to open up these options then choose delete delete these two as well okay oh and here's the other confirmation button that's also a checkbox that also looks correct so uh it looks actually like acrobat correctly identified all the form fields it didn't it didn't miss any that should be there so i'm going to delete one that is correct just to show you how to manually add form items when you have the prepare tool open it adds this this toolbar at the top and this is where you can choose form fields to manually add the ones that you'll use most often are standard text input check boxes and radios radio buttons so name should be a text input so i'm going to select that one and then you just drop it wherever it should go okay you can resize it i'm going to resize it so it fits the full visual text field and that's all we have to do to add fields now we need to verify that they are accurate so to do that you can either double click on your field or right click and select properties i'm actually going to do a different one first i'm going to choose street address first the two fields that you will need the two fields you'll need to verify for every form input are the name and the tool tip the name field this is it's not visible on the screen it's not read by screen readers this is just how acrobat refers to this form input internally if you look here on the sidebar you'll see all these different form fields this is the this shows the form field name so this can be anything you want just make sure it's something logical so if you're looking at a layout like this you know which form field is being referenced street address that makes sense now tool tip this is what actually gets read by screen readers and both the name and the tool tip acrobat will just grab whatever the adjacent visual label is and and make that both the name and the and the tooltip and that might be fine and it might need a little bit more clarification i think street address yeah that that's probably clear to someone who was using a screen reader if they heard that this is a form field for screen reader they they'd know what to do so i'm not going to change anything here if you want to revise a different field you can either close this window and then double click or right click properties or if you leave this this dialog box open you can just click on another field and it will automatically jump to it not crucial just saves you a few clicks now i'm back on the name field and because i created this manually because i didn't use acrobat's built-in tool it didn't uh it didn't pre-fill these values it gave this a default name of text 16. um is a little bit confusing i apologize but because the uh this is the field for someone entering their name the value for the name field is name um tool tip i would be a little bit more verbose than just name especially if you had a form where you had more than one person's name right like say it's a reference list for a job application it might ask for you know the name of reference one reference to reference three so just having the value name wouldn't be uh sufficiently descriptive uh here i'll say enter your full name so you know to enter both your first and last name because some forms will have you know first name and last name in separate fields i'm also going to say required because because it is required you see it has that red asterisk here name email address you are affiliation these are all flagged as required i have my little legend here saying red asterisk indicates a required field and i'm going to uh yeah so typeout required in the tooltip so the screen reader reads it out now there is a required checkbox here and you should check it this is what actually mandates the field being required in acrobat unfortunately some screen readers don't actually read this out so that's why it's good to be redundant and explicitly state this is required in the tooltip okay that's all i need to do for name oh and it also changes it to red when you flag it as required date of birth this is also a standard text input but date of birth it might have some specific data formatting requirements right you don't want people to enter their date of birth in a thousand different formats so in the format tab you have formatting options select format category in this drop-down this is a date so let's choose date and then you have a variety of options i am partial to month month day day year year year so i'm going to choose that and actually now that i choose that i'm going to go back to my tool tip and include that in in the tooltip because especially if you rely on assistive technologies fixing errors can be a bigger pain so it's always good to uh prevent errors rather than you know preventing errors is better than you know popping up error messages so people know to fix it phone oops i move that box a little bit phone i don't think that requires any additional formatting city also good state in the tooltip i might uh specify they should add the two letter abbreviation i can visually see that this is a very small field so i would infer that you don't want the full state name but if you don't see that visually having that spelled out specifically would be helpful say two letter state abbreviation zip code i think that'll be fine yeah email address that's fine no it's not it's required so add the word required in here and check that box and that's all we need to do for the standard text input fields for the radio buttons actually i'm going to go ahead and delete these just so i can create them all manually because radio buttons are a little bit more complicated than standard text input fields choose the radio buttons the icon that looks like a bullseye and like the text field just drag it and drop it where it should go radio buttons are different because they are grouped the idea of a radio button is you have multiple options and you need to choose exactly one of them so these questions have the concept of a group name the group name is the same as the name of a of a standard input except it'll apply it'll be exactly the same for all members in the group so this group name is only referred to internally by acrobat so it can be whatever you want as long as it's logical i will call this uo affiliation and flag it as required because it is required then the radio button choice is the actual value for that choice so this one will be i am a current or former student staff or faculty member at uo okay it says we need more buttons so let's go ahead and add a radio button for the second option it automatically populates with the group name i'm a parent of a current or former student at uo and i'm going to intentionally click away just in case you miss adding radio buttons for all your options you can always go ahead and add the add additional ones manually now it won't add the the group name automatically so you'll did add the group name automatically okay so if you have multiple groups on this document it won't automatically add the group name but because there's only one group so far it does default to that so there we go but if it wasn't you could just choose it from this drop down i am unaffiliated with you okay very good so now we have recreated those radio buttons and there will be a couple additional options to set so let's double click on them and open it up specifically it doesn't have a tool tip the tooltip is directly tied to the name and because we only have one name for all three of these items they're all the same group name it'll have the same tool tip for each of them and the tool tip will be the question which is select uo affiliation and say required and if i click between them i'll see that the tooltip is automatically added to all of these oh and if you wanted to actually edit the value for this particular option that is under the options tab under the radio button choice and you can also change the style i think originally was a square and it defaults to a circle when you create new ones i kind of like the square better so i'll go ahead and change that okay very good that does it for uh radio buttons so the last items that i want to go over are check boxes check boxes they're kind of between the text input fields and radio buttons and how they behave they do not belong to a group so the most important thing to remember when working with check boxes is that the tool tip it needs to define both the question and the value of that particular checkbox so i'll call this football and then the tooltip will need to say let's see i want to receive updates for football so it refers to both the question and and the value of this particular checkbox you may recall when i started this video i said the reason i only had four sports here was because it would get redundant and you probably understand that better now okay very good so that is it for the check boxes actually no it's not there's also the other confirm option so i will call this confirm and then this isn't like a legally binding thing right but because when you submit this form you are consenting to have your athletics send you emails i think it's probably uh best practice to make sure the tool tip what the screen reader reads be verbatim with what's actually visible on the screen i confirm that i want to receive promotional emails from uo athletics i understand that i can unsubscribe at any time and then say required and then flag it as required okay very good and we're done that's all i wanted to show you about creating form fields well no it's not that's all for for creating the initial form fields the next step is to verify the the tab order of of these form fields and if you've watched the previous videos and learned about logical reading order tab water is almost exactly the same thing when you work on forms many people use the tab key to just jump from one form field to the next and we need to make sure it's in a logical reading order generally that's left to right top to bottom and you can see the tab order in this sidebar here so you'll see it reads date of birth street address phone city state zip and if you follow along on the form date of birth street address phone city state zip that looks mostly correct and that's because when acrobats prepare form tool runs it it sets it up for you in the order that if it finds these on the document so it does a pretty good job however if you delete and then create new fields it will automatically stick it at the very bottom of this list so i deleted and recreated the name field so it's not an order it's all the way down here so let's just go ahead and drag it to where it belongs in the tree which is actually at the very top and now it's in order a perhaps easier way of visualizing this is if you open up the hamburger menu the three horizontal lines and choose show tab numbers it will add these little numbers in the corner so you can actually see this is first there's a second this is third so that's an either visualization four five six seven eight oh 14 9 10 11 12 13. so i forgot that i recreated these so these are out of order so it would actually go from email then down to the individual sports then you confirm and then jumps back up with the radio buttons that's not right so let's go ahead and move this uo affiliation is between email address and football and now we see it is updated so that that looks correct the only other item um that i might want to change for tab order is phone number so in general i said it's left to right top to bottom and that's that's correct but most addresses you'll fill them out as street address then city state zip so adding phone number in here i think it could be a little bit confusing especially if you can't actually see this form you're you're going by you know a screen reader reading it out i wouldn't expect to see phone number in here it might make more sense a phone number was grouped next to email address so i will move phone number down after zip code and before email so now it reads street address city state zip then phone then email so logical reading order not hard and fast rules just make sure it's logical and that is all that i want to show you for this video the only other major component of accessible forms in pdfs is tagging i'm not going to tag this entire document in a recorded video because a lot of it is redundant with what you've seen elsewhere but tagging pdfs does have its own nuances so i will upload an additional short video showing you how to manage the tags for these forms so thank you for watching and i will see you in that next video

Channel: University of Oregon ICT

Views: 5,968

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Id: -DwzNfgwLFs

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020