Welcome to the Accessibility Guy
channel. Today we're going to make a PDF form accessible. But
before we get to that, please take a moment to hit that like
and subscribe button. Now back to the video. This document is a
continuation from a previous video where I designed a form in
Microsoft Word. Now that I have this document over in Adobe
Acrobat, the first thing I want to do is make it accessible. And
then we're going to add all of our form content. So let's begin
by opening up the tags panel. And the first thing I'm going to
do is change the section tag to a document tag, then we're going
to delete out some of the blank tags. Let's ensure our image has
some alternate text, I'm going to right click the figure tag,
select properties and add alternate text. And this will be
the accessibility guy logo. Then we have our h1 and then we have
some of our content ready to go. I want to clean this up a little
bit. So I'm going to launch the reading order tool. And I'm
going to select first name and select text paragraph. And do
the same on these other areas where we're going to add our
form field. There was some extra information in there because I
use a certain technique to add the underlines in Microsoft
Word. So what we can do now is actually artifacts, these blank
spaces, I'm simply going to hold the Ctrl key from within the
tags panel, select all of those blank spaces, right click, and
select Change tag to artifact and then select okay. Now just
for fun, let's go ahead and run the accessibility checker to
determine where we're at. And the document looks pretty good.
Let's go ahead and fix the title right now. I'm simply going to
add form sample and select okay. All right, let's begin adding
our form accessibility, there's a couple of different methods we
can use to add form fields to this document. Let's go ahead
and first go to our tools menu and ensure that we have prepare
form added to our quick Tools menu. And under forms and
signatures, we simply will select add if it's not already
there, and we can select Open. And this is where Adobe Acrobat
can actually apply these form fields automatically for us.
Let's go ahead and do this for this particular step. I'm going
to select Start, and we get a popup window saying the document
needs to be saved. So let's go ahead and save this document.
And it automatically placed these form fields. Because of
that work that I did in Microsoft Word. By adding the
underlines and the checkbox areas, it was able to accurately
apply these form fields to my document. So that's really just
the first step of adding form fields. Now if there are
sections that were not added properly, like let's just
pretend we had an A section over here that did not have a form
field. In the Prepare form window, we have the ability to
add a text field checkbox, radio button, submit button, Date
button and signature field. And you would simply select one of
those items and add it to your page. You can add as many as you
want. And there's also some advanced features you can do for
alignment. For example, if we wanted all of these checkboxes
aligned, we could select all of them right click, and under the
Align distribute or center section, we could align them to
the left to the right to the top or the bottom. And that will
make them a little easier to see. Now there's another method
for aligning form fields. For example, if these form fields
were all out of whack, we can go to View, Show Hide rulers and
grids and add grid. And this will help you align your content
when designing a form. All right, let's keep going with the
accessibility here. I'm going to close the Prepare form option.
And then let's run the accessibility checker just to
get a snapshot to where we are. Now there's certain there's a
few areas that are missing. For example, we have tagged
annotation failed on this signature field. And then we
have tagged form fields failed and field descriptions are
missing from these checkboxes we have so the first thing I'm
going to do is come in and actually delete those extra
checkboxes I added. And then let's take a brief look at the
tags panel once again. And right now, I want to tag these form
fields. Now there's a few different ways we can do this.
We can use the reading order tool to simply drag a box around
our form field and it can be a little touchy in that you only
want to select the form field itself. Now I don't love this
method because it's It's really hard to grab just
the form field. So another thing that we can do is, I'm going to
create a new blank tag, a p tag in the tags panel, I'm going to
select the Options button, and then select the Find button.
From here, I'm going to change the drop down menu to unmarked
annotations. And then I'm going to select Search document and
select fine. This will begin to find all the PErforM fields that
aren't currently tagged in the document. So once I find the
first one, I'm going to select tag element. And then it
automatically takes you to the next one. And I'm going to
select tag element again, and keep going through all of the
form fields in this document. And then select OK. Now the
benefit of creating that blank p tag is I now have all of these
form fields in one spot. And now I can begin to place them into
the correct location. So the first thing I want to do is, I'm
just going to start Control X and CTRL V these things into the
right location. So let's take first name first, I'm going to
Ctrl X the object out, and let's move it into our first name
fields, and then going to create a new tag called form and drag
first name into it. And then we're just going to rinse and
repeat. Let's take email address, move it to the right
location, create a new tag called form and move the content
into it. This can become a little tedious, but it is a very
important step. And I'm simply placing all of these into the
right location. One more phone number. All right, now let's go
ahead and run the accessibility checker once more, we now have
all of our form fields in the right location. So I'm going to
select the accessibility button. And then select accessibility
check, and then start checking. Now from here, it looks like
everything has been applied. But I want to validate my form
descriptions. So if I select prepare form, and I right click
one of the field names and select Properties. This is where
I want to adjust my tooltip. Now depending on how you adjust and
create your form, sometimes the tooltips are not accurate, or
sometimes they're missing completely. It all depends on
how the form fields are entered into the document. But I like to
adjust my tooltips to be more accurate anyways. So I'm going
to say enter your first name, and select Close. Let's go ahead
and open up the properties for the last name. And I'm going to
say enter your last name. And let's select phone number. And
then let's say enter your email address. What's nice about the
checkboxes is that they already are set up. Are you new to
accessibility, we could add a question mark, if we wanted to.
Just to add a little bit better experience here. We can say
please sign this document. Actually, I'm going to delete
these and just say sign sign your name and select. All right
now let's save this file. And let's turn off our gridlines
by View, Show Hide rulers and grids, grids. All right, a
really quick test we can do to ensure our reading order is
proper is by clicking in the first area, I'm going to say my
first name is Shawn. And then I'm going to hit the Tab key on
my keyboard. And I just want to make sure that all of our fields
are set up properly, and that they go in the right order. So
so far, everything looks great. Now if we wanted to, we could
add some conditional formatting to our fields, I'm going to
delete out the entries I made first. And then let's open up
prepare form. And let's open up phone number and select
properties. So if I go to the Format tab, and change the
format category to special, I have the ability to select phone
number, and then select Close. And then when we test the phone
number, if I tried to enter any letters, it doesn't work. But it
does work. If I add in our digits for the phone number and
then it formats it properly. All right, let's take this into a
couple more steps. I'm going to launch the PDF accessibility
checker, and we're going to test this file for PDF uA. And
there's a couple of elements we need to address. First, there's
a content failed. Let's open up the results in detail and I'm
going to expand this menu. Okay. Earlier when I had deleted those
p tags, it's now telling me the text object is not tagged. So
this is an interesting thing to fix. What we can do is in the
tags panel, I'm going to create a new tag to just house some of My content. And I'm going to
select the Options button, select Find. And let's see if we
can do unmarked content search document. And let's start with
find. And I'm going to start tagging all of this content. Alright, that didn't seem to
find the right spacing. So another thing we can do is go to
the Content panel and find these blank spaces in the container
tags. Now this is this can be a little advanced sometimes. But
I'm just going to walk through the tags panel and expand all of
these areas that has the blank text, I'm then going to select
the text containers in the Content panel, and right click
and say create artifacts. And then I'll just leave it as part
of the page and select OK. Let's go ahead and go back to our tags
panel. And earlier, we had selected these other lines and
content, I'm going to select all of them from this one p tag,
right click and change tag to artifact, and then delete that p
tag out. Now let's save our file and launch the PDF accessibility
checker once again to test. Alright, that did get rid of the
content issues. So that's great. So that was two methods to get
rid of some of the artifacts on the file. And then last but not
least, we need to add our PDF UA identifier, that's what's
missing. Now to do that we need to open up are pre flight menu.
So to do that, I'm going to select the Optimize PDF button
in my tools panel. If you don't have it here, you would select
Tools and then optimize PDF. And then I'm going to select pre
flight. This brings up a very special window. Now there's tons
of options in here, so just bear with me. The first thing I'm
going to do is select this little wrench icon. And this
looks for individual fixes. And then I'm going to do a search
for UA. And under the document info and metadata area, there is
an option called Set PDF UA one entry. When I select that, I
then have this option on the bottom right corner of the
window to select fix. It's going to prompt me to save my file
again. And then we can launch the PDF accessibility checker or
the PAC tool once again. And let's drag our file into the
tester. And we now have a fully compliant PDF UA and with CAG
accessible form. Thank you for watching this video on how to
create accessible forms. Something that you should know
is that I'm working in a somewhat controlled environment.
I had the ability to add the form fields in Microsoft Word,
and it was easy to sort of adjust those form fields in
Adobe Acrobat. Occasionally, when you're creating forms from
scratch or adding form fields in Adobe Acrobat, it can be a
little more challenging than what this video cover. The plan
is to release additional videos in the future to create more
complex accessible forms. But I hope you enjoyed today's video.
And if you haven't done so already, please take a moment to
hit that subscribe button and I will see you next time.
