Shawn Jordison: In today's
video, we're going to learn how to make a fillable form in Adobe
Acrobat Pro DC. Welcome to The Accessibility Guy channel. My
name is Shawn Jordison. And let's jump right in. The fastest
method to make this a fillable PDF form is to select the
Prepare a form option from the all tools menu on the left hand
side. And from here, we are going to choose this document,
you could scan a document, you could start from a blank page or
create a web form. But we're just going to create from this
document and select Create Form. And voila. It shows the form
fields inside of our document. Now I can back out of the form
area. And there's a couple of things we can do to our form
fields. Like if we wanted to provide some conditional
formatting. As an example, I can go back into my prepare a form
option, we can right-click it, and then select properties. And
this will bring up the text field properties for this
specific form field. This is where we can also update
tooltips or appearance, things like font size, auto, or the
different types of font, you can even change the text color, you
can change the position of the form fields, we can put in a
default value. I could just put in first name as an example,
we could make it multi line if we wanted to. This would allow
the user to add extra content where they needed to we could
add actions on here, we can format it to like maybe a date
or a time. We could also validate it if we want it to be
something specific. And we can even set calculations. Now with
that said, our form fields are in here appropriately. But what
we need to do now is actually like tag them. Obviously, I am
The Accessibility Guy. so I'm going to make this document
accessible. Why don't we go ahead and just check out where
we are. Let's go ahead and run the accessibility checker and
see what kind of trouble we have. Tagged annotations. Okay, that's
fine. That's the signature field tag form fields, they are not
currently tagged. Perfect. Well, let's see what we can do. So
there's an option here called automatically tag form fields.
But it's kind of like disabled. So here's what we're going to
do, I'm going to create a new tag in my tags panel with a
blank p tag, I'm going to select the Accessibility Options button
and select Find. And I want to find all of my unmarked
annotations. Sometimes the form fields, they are considered
annotations, and we are going to search the page for them. And it
already begins to find them. So I'm going to select tag element,
tag element, tag, tag, tag, tag, tag, tag, like that. And now all
of these nice form fields are in the right, they're now at least
in my document. So now I actually have to go place them.
So I'm gonna take my first name object reference, and cut it.
And we're going to move it to our first name, location, like
that, we can then go take our email address, and make sure we
put it in our email address section. Let's take last name.
And we'll put it in our last name section. Signature should
be in this p tag. And then we have some checkbox items. Do you
know who Shawn Jordison is? Probably not. Phone number. Which
is pretty cool. We can put it in the phone number field. And all
I'm doing right now is just putting these objects where
they belong. Do you have experience with accessibility?
Probably not. All right, let's go ahead and I'm going to expand
my tags out. So there's a couple of things we need to do. We're
going to get additional errors if we don't put all of these
nice object references into form parent tags. So these
parentless child tags need parents. Let's give them to
them. I'm going to right-click this first name container,
select new tag and type in the word form. And we're going to do
the same thing again, I'm going to select last name, right-click
new tag form. And as you do this more and more, you will get
faster and faster. And you may find yourself doing it in a
different order than I. Normally I finish off like an entire form
section before moving on to the next one. But you know, here we
are. And now that we have our parent form tag, we need to
drag our child tag inside of it. This is an important step. And
this is going to help us maintain the accessibility
throughout our journey here. So I'm just dragging all of these
child tags into their form parent tags. Now let's go ahead
and run the accessibility checker. And look at that we
have, a mostly accessible document. Now I like to go above
and beyond. So we're going to address, we're going to check
out these tooltips. So I just want to make sure they're right.
I'm going to select my Prepare a Form button. And then I can see
the tooltips. So we got first name, phone number, last name,
I'm going to drag that up, and then move email address, your
phone number, do you have experience with accessibility? or
you know, do you know Shawn? signature? All right, this is
perfect. If I wanted to update the tooltip, I could select
properties. And we can add extra things in here. If we wanted to,
like, Hey, who is Shawn? That's not really a relevant tooltip. You
could do something like instead, on the first name, you could
say, like, please enter your first name. Now it's a little
redundant. However, the point I'm trying to make here is that
you need to check it. You need to check the tooltips to make
sure they are valid. This is a very simple document. But if I
had like 1000 more form fields, it might become problematic if I
do not check my tooltips. Additionally, like if we had the
first name field somewhere else in the document, you're gonna
get an error by having the form fields named the same or having
the same tooltips. So it's important that you spend
time reviewing this. We've already moved them to the
correct location, you know, but as I'm doing this, I'm actually
noticing something. This is like coming through poorly. So
there's a little square in here that says, Are you new to
accessibility? I think that if I launched Jaws right now it's
going to give me some trouble with how it's going to announce
that object. Let's go ahead and just see what happens. Going a
little off the script here. I normally don't launch Assistive
Technology while I'm recording because it creates problems. But
here we are. Jaws: "splitting sounds tip
for a job form sample data, Adobe Acrobat Pro lift pair and
64. One form to snap the accessibility got" Shawn: Alright, I'm
going to try to get down to this bullet so we can listen to it.
Jaws: "in level one application for The Accessibility Guy this
applicant is Gleeson email address. First name colon last
name colon, phone number colon email address colon ballot box.
Do you have experience with accessibility? Phone number?
Phone number edit? Do you have like Are you new to
accessibility checkbox?" Shawn: No, I think my reading order is off.
Jaws: "Do you know who Shawn Jordison? has said that you're left?
Please let us go to accessibility. You know, Shawn
Jordison, this checkbox not checked, checked press space." Shawn Jordison: Okay. So I was
using two different methods to navigate. At first I was using
the down arrow keys, which was kind of giving me trouble with
the navigation. But then I switched to the traditional
method for moving to different fields, which was the Tab key.
So my reading order is in fact, okay, I was just using the wrong
command using my keyboard. And what I was trying to get to is,
if that element was being read incorrectly, it's not so that's
good. But if we just pretended that it was. This is the fix for
it. I need to turn off Jaws first though. Jaws: updates, Taskbar jobs,
how many jobs context menu options, man" Shawn Jordison: it's one of the first things that you teach someone who's new to Jaws
is how to shut it up. Anyways, let's just pretend that it was
reading this incorrectly. I can Right-click the object select
properties. And in the actual text field, I can just retype
the words, Are you new to accessibility? And this is going
to force the screen reader to read the text and not that funky
bullet. Anyways, it's a good thing to do. That concludes
today's video on how to create a fillable PDF form in Adobe
Acrobat Pro DC. If you made it all the way to the end of the
video, hit that subscribe button. And as always, I can be
your personal accessibility expert. If you want to find out
how I can help you get accessible. Take a look at the
link in the description of this video. Thank you so much for
joining me today, and I'll see you next time
