chax

In this episode Chad Chelius and Dax Castro discuss what it means to understand the user experience of a screen reader as well as accessibility technology at large. Creating documents and digital media has its challenges, but what if your product does not respond the way you expect it to? Learn about how to adapt your understanding to the end user experience in today's episode. We are also excited to share two new A11y terms just for you! Introducing Chax-ified and Chax-essible! Other topics we cover today include our new partnership with Tamman, Inc, the experience of being an accessibility specialist on the Mac series of M1, M2, and M3 computers, our upcoming classes, CSUN, and more!

In this episode, Chad and Dax discuss the merits of having form fields inside tables. When is it okay? When should you avoid tables as a means of laying out accessible form-based documents? Listen in and you will learn what to ask and how to determine if it is okay to put your form in a table. We also take a quick look at the new PAC 2024 interface and our thoughts on the new release.

Skip koi pond chat @3:42
How to approach gaining accessibility knowlege @5:43 
How long does it take to implement an accessibility workflow into an organization @7:36
What is the best way to implement accessibility in an organization @8:56
The struggles of content creators in PowerPoint @9:58
Setting the Reading Order (Tag Order) in Venngage @10:59
How to convince the decision-maker to give designers the right tools @12:21
Venngage model of a discoverable learning experience @17:13
How to start down the road of accessibility knowledge  @19:23
Venngage leverages AI for generative Alt-text @20:50
How Venngage teaches you about accessibility as you design @26:43
Go vote to fix the latest bug in Acrobat @29:16
How do you balance the workload and accessibility implementation? @33:33 
How much is enough accessibility to not get sued? @37:03  

You have heard us mention Venngage a few times and have featured it on our podcast. Now we thought it would be great to invite Venngage CEO, Eugene Woo on the program to talk about is journey in creating this accessible online design tool. We talk about the struggles and costs of going down the road of accessibility but more importantly, the cost of NOT going down that path. Eugene also discusses how they took the opportunity to teach unfamiliar users about accessibility as they create their documents with the hope of getting more people thinking about accessibility from the start. Definitely great to hear Eugene talk about how they made a comittment to make their design tool accessible and able to produce accessible PDFs.

Chad and Dax take this session to talk about the possibility of having too much accessibility in the form of multiple patterns in pie charts. They discuss the merits of several approaches to making pie charts visually more accessible. Stick around to hear them give out some secret sauce for troubleshooting tables that just don't seem to want to pass accessibility. Their tip might just save you hours of needlessly hunting for the mislabeled property.

Oh, and if you want to skip the koi pond banter, skip ahead 7 minutes. Watch this podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-F1VtJyMW34

Are you using accessible color contrast and colorblind-friendly designs? Chad answers the question: "Does it really Matter if I make my designs colorblind compliant?"
Learn some important colorblind statistics and find out who needs to make their designs accessible?

We share some things you can do to make your graphic colors accessible and review the WCAG success criteria 1.4.1 Use of Color. Dax gives you some easy ways to make your maps more accessible and Chad shares the color contrast ratio for Graphics and his preferences for making line graphs more accessible. 

Senior UX Researcher, Inclusive Designer and Accessibility Design Lead Sonya Lewis agrees to be our guest this week to talk about how the Reading Order in PDFs impacts her ability to apply for heathcare enrollement, participate in her workplace and overall online presence. Chad and I loved her response when we asked the question "What do you say to people who think the Reading Order in PDFs doesn't really matter?" Be sure to listen in to hear Chad ask an important question about Snoop Dogg and his role in accessibility. This episode is one of the best we've had this year! Don't you dare miss it!

We stumbled on to an online design tool that is giving Canva a run for their money. We show you our first impressions about the product and the accessibility features it has and a few ways we might suggest improving it. We also reveal the new EASY way to set the PDF/UA Identifier in Adobe Acrobat. Dax mentions the upcoming guest and their struggles with reading order in PDF documents. Finally, Chad reveals some insights on Form Tags: Before or after the text label?

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 reduce our cognitive load and share the PDF for the Do No Harm Guide on Design Visualization found at https://bit.ly/a11yDNHG

Chad explains "Reading through a rectangle" and Dax discusses at what point is the level of effort too much or enough? We end with balancing "no significant barrier" and level of effort in documents. Definitely an information-packed episode.

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:

1. What do we want the user experience to be?
2. What is the most important information?
3. Does Content order matter?
4. Does color or line weight indicate additional information?
5. What is the volume of data? (Do I need an alternate presentation?)
6. Can I support the graphic with additional body text?
7. Can I test the user experience?

Stay tuned toward the end, where we talk about how certain bullets are voiced by JAWS and the info on how to download the PDF that lists a ton of them. I bet you will be surprised at more than a few.

I hope you find this podcast useful because it is definitely one of my new favorites we have recorded this year!

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 around to learn more about how Decks MoveIn can even convert Keynote, Canva and Google Slides to InDesign as well. 

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!

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 even more.

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 tool I never knew existed in Adobe InDesign. He tells how the "Break Link to Style" tool works and when and why you should use it.

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! 

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. What is the correct size for accessible text?
2. My content disappeared!
3. Reading Order messed up my Tags Tree!
4. Links in my header/footer are not being tagged!
5. My hyperlink descriptions are not being voiced!
6. Why do I keep getting irregular table errors?
7. What program should I use to remediate my content?

If you want to know how to fix or address any of these errors ake sure you listen to this episode on your favorite streaming platform or watch us now on YouTube!

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 to identify the control as interactive. 1.4.12 Text Spacing - people think this applies to PDF but it does not. Listen to the podcast to learn why. 2.5.8 Pointer Target Spacing (AA) - The size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 44 CSS pixels 3.2.6 Consistent Findable Help (A) - Contact info in footer consistently 3.3.7 Redundant Entry (A) - Fillable forms with repeat entries should have the same Field Name. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/VZoQmerCwmo