Accessibility Quickstart with Dax and Chad

Well, welcome everybody. We are recording. Welcome to the CreativePro podcast. We’re recording live today at CreativePro Week 2026. I’m saying that because podcasts live on and on and on. CreativePro Week 2026 in Nashville and I’m here today with Dax Castro and Chad Chelius from ChaxChat, and we’re going to have a conversation about accessibility. If you’re new to the CreativePro podcast, you can find us in all the places that you find your favorite podcasts, including YouTube. You can watch us on YouTube. They’re recording us, guys. So sit up straight. Smile. Yeah. For those of you that are here in person, thank you for coming to our event. If you’re listening to this and wishing that you had been here live, for listening to the podcast, you can use the code podcast for $100 off the next CreativePro event. Podcast. Easy to remember. All right. We really appreciate all of you being part of our community, and we’re so glad you’re here, whether you’re in person or whether you’re listening to us online. We appreciate you being here, and let’s get this thing started. I’m going to start by asking Dax and Chad a couple questions, but I really am hoping that each of you in the audience have a question that you want to ask. We have a microphone here in the front of the room. Come up to the microphone, and I’ll give you an opportunity to ask your questions. I’m hoping that you make my job really easy today and you ask all the questions, and I can just enjoy listening to their answers. But to start things off, let me introduce both Dax Castro and Chad Chelius. They are part of Chax Chat, and they provide accessibility training, and you also provide accessibility services to people. They are document accessibility specialists. Wizards. Yes. Accessibility wizards. I have here in my notes that Dax is a accessibility trainer, consultant, and speaker with deep expertise in PDF accessibility for Adobe workflows and also assistive technology. Dax, you have a gift for making accessibility feel practical and doable. I try to make it easy. I try to make it relatable and easier to understand. It’s a complex topic, and it’s like saying I want to be a car mechanic, right? Okay, transmission, engine, electrical. So I try to break it apart and make it easy. A few fun facts about Dax. This is his eighth time speaking at CreativePro Week, and maybe lesser known about Dax, he’s also an astrophotographer and captures amazing images. So follow him on Instagram to see his incredible work. Oh, and you’re a farmer too. Do you still have a farm? Yeah, we have alpaca and chickens and rabbits. We have koi that I flew to Japan and was able to get. We’ve got a desert tortoise. My wife’s getting a bearded dragon coming up. So that’s our newest adventure. That’s so cool. Do you ever sleep, Dax? For about four hours is about all I get in a day. Many of you may already know Chad Chelius. He has been part of the CreativePro community probably longer than I have, as long as I can remember. You have spoken at all 10 CreativePro Weeks, I believe, right, Chad? I think so. I think so. That’s something exciting. Ten. Ten of them. That’s incredible. Chad also has training on LinkedIn Learning, and he has a lot of videos on the CreativePro YouTube channel as well. He spent many years helping people work smarter with InDesign, Acrobat, and publishing workflows, and when Chad’s not teaching us about accessibility, he’s probably out riding his bike, right? All right. I wanted to start by asking each of you, we’ll start with Dax and then go to Chad because you’re sitting here on my left, Dax. Can you share your journey into accessibility? You’re both like the experts. You’re the two that we turn to for our answers, but you didn’t start off an accessibility expert. How did you end up at the place that you’re at now? Where did that begin for you? So it began probably most like many people in this room. Someone walked in my office, knocked on the door, said, hey, we need to start making our stuff accessible. Anybody know what that is? No, but let me find out. And I’ve been using InDesign since it was all this page maker. I mean, I learned WordPerfect for DOS. I mean, I’ve been using computers for a long time, and I was a graphic design specialist. So it was already partially in my wheelhouse, and so I started learning, and Bevy Shagnon was my mentor, and she’s great and has been a pillar in the community for a long time, and it just fed my ADHD. As a person with ADHD, I love solving puzzles, I love connecting dots, I love finding patterns, and I love solving things. That dopamine hit of made it, it was just so great, and I have a lot of hobbies and interests, but only a few stick, and accessibility was one of those ones that stuck, and I just deep dove and started really deep diving, and then I met Chad at CreativePro Week in Seattle. Wow. Yeah, my first CreativePro Week, and that’s, you know, kind of, yeah, how I jumped into it. That’s fantastic. You just accidentally found your way into accessibility, and loved it, and just became the expert. Well, and then at the place I was in, accessibility wasn’t the focus, but was the focus for the client, and then I moved to another position where I started an accessibility department, and then I moved into another position where I thought it was a good opportunity, turned out not, and Chad and I were actually at that same company together, and we both left at the same time, and Chad looked at me, and I looked at him, and said, what are you going to do, and we kind of went, well, we’re doing the podcast already. Do you want to plant a flag, and we planted a flag, and that’s how Chax, Chad, and Dax, Chax Training and Consulting was born. Fantastic. Chad, we’ve known each other long time. Long time. I think maybe before you were the accessibility guy, I think we’ve known each other that long. Yeah, for sure. So how did you become the accessibility expert that you are today? What was that journey like for you? Yeah, so I’ve told this story before, and so I’ve been speaking at conferences for a long time. I mean, I think I started in the early, a long time ago. I think late 90s, I started speaking at conferences. You’re not that old, am I? No, I’m not that old. Anyway, I was speaking at a conference in Orlando, Florida. I think it was called the Create Conference, CRE, the number eight, I think is what it was called. Anyway, I was speaking at this conference in Orlando, Florida, and we don’t always get to pick the topics that we want to speak about, right, and so I think I was given this topic. Somebody wanted me to talk about the PDF format, and at the time, for some of you, this might be hard to believe, but at the time, Adobe Flash was built into the PDF format, right? You remember this, right? And so I was doing a presentation at this conference about all the cool stuff you could do with a PDF file, and it involved video, animations, 3D modeling, like you could do all this crazy stuff in a PDF, which Adobe later just completely killed, right? And I’m talking about, you know, all this great stuff, and this woman in the back of the room raised her hand, and I was like, yes, what’s your question? And she said, this is all great, but is it accessible, right? Now, every speaker’s worst nightmare is to be asked a question that you know nothing about, right? And she mentioned this term accessibility, and I’m like, I have no idea what you’re talking about, right? And somehow I talked my way out of it, and I kept rolling, you know, moving forward, right? But when my talk was over, she came up to me and introduced herself, and she worked for the Social Security Administration in Washington, D.C., which is why accessibility was so important to her, and her and I became fast friends. We’re still good friends to this day. Her name’s Victoria Richards. I hope I’m allowed to say that, but too late. But she’s a really sweet lady. She’s retired now, but she kind of introduced me to this concept of accessibility, and I’m just kind of a geek, you know, when it comes to technology and stuff like that, and to, like, learn that there was this underlying tag structure in a PDF file that could be utilized to help people with disabilities consume that content was fascinating to me, right? I was like, that is crazy. That’s amazing, right? And so she kind of taught me some stuff back then, and you guys can be thankful about this. At that point in time, the way we made PDF files accessible in InDesign was to tag them using XML tags. So you’re welcome, everybody. You can thank me now. And it was tough. Like, you think it’s hard now? It was really tough using XML tags. But, again, I’m just kind of a bit of a geek, and I geeked out about it, and I started learning, and I just ran with it. And over time, all of a sudden, I started getting phone calls because my primary business was training, typically on graphic design applications, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, all that great stuff, and people started saying, hey, can you teach me how to create accessible PDFs? And I was like, huh, maybe there’s something here, you know? And so, again, I started building up my knowledge. I started learning more and more, and I started going out and doing training, you know, on this topic. And from there, you know, and at that time, I was independent. I was self-employed. And, again, so that kind of goes into when Dax and I met at one of the CreativePro Conferences, the one in Seattle, and it was so cool to meet another person that was into this topic, right? You know what I mean? Like, he and I became super fast friends because, like, oh, my God, now I can talk about accessibility with somebody else. And Dax kind of alluded to our path along the way. You know, he and I went to work for a company that was, in hindsight, it was a poor choice, but also, without that experience, we never would have started our own company. And so, for that, I need to be thankful that it happened to us, right? I need to be thankful that it was a rough year, wasn’t it, buddy? You know, they say in all things opposition, this was definitely the dark side. So, it really was. And I don’t want to go into too much detail. The one thing I will share with you is that in a year of employment, Dax and I did not get paid on payday 15 times, right? So, you guys can kind of understand, like, how challenging that became for us and, you know, the conundrum that it became. But as Dax had described, you know, we found ourselves on the opposite sides of the proverbial table. And he’s like, well, what are you going to do? And I’m like, I don’t know. I’m going to go back to doing what I was. I said, what are you going to do? And he’s like, well, you know, I don’t know, because Dax’s experience was primarily corporate America, where, like, mine was more, you know, independent. And so, when we decided to start our own company, it was a gamble, wasn’t it, right? There was a month where I’m like, hey, Chad, I got to pay my mortgage. Do you think you could help a brother out? And so, but a year later, we were half a million dollars in the positive and doing well. You know, it’s funny you mentioned InDesign and XML. If you go into InDesign right now, and occasionally this happens, somebody’s like, oh, I know accessibility. I go into InDesign and I go to tags and this little window pops up and I start doing all this stuff. That’s XML. And it marks up your document with all these colors around certain pieces of text, and you think that you’re in the right place, but it’s XML. All right. I’m going to slow you down, Dax, because we are titling this podcast the Accessibility Quick Start, and I feel like you just went from, yeah, we opened InDesign, and now we’re talking about XML, and you’ve already gone way over my head. So, I also want to remind all of you that are in the audience that please come up and ask questions so that I don’t have to think of them all myself. I know you have questions you’re thinking of, so please just make your way up there and you can ask him anything. I am going to start with Chad, and Chad, I know you love InDesign, and I mean, you were teaching InDesign before you became an accessibility expert. So, if I’m creating a new document in InDesign and I know I’m supposed to be thinking about accessibility, what’s the first thing I should do? Turn off auto-generate alt text. I love that. Yeah, that’s a good point. Disable auto-generate alt text. I don’t know. I find the alt text in InDesign to be like 50-50. For basic photos, it does an okay job. I mean, that’s a hard question, Theresa, because the process of accessibility is really a sequence of tasks, right? And so, I could list any one of those tasks, and I think it would be appropriate. So, the order doesn’t matter? No. They’re just important that they all, now, I’ve heard you talk about going into the, it’s not XML, the metadata, and you put a title in the metadata. I never even opened that panel before hearing you talk about that. So, yeah, explain that better for the audience, because I probably didn’t. So, I mean, and again, if you attended my session yesterday, the first session about, you know, accessibility and InDesign, it’s one of the first things I showed you, and it’s because I consider it a very low-hanging fruit, right? WCAG and the PDF UA standard indicates that every document needs to have a descriptive title, and the fundamental reason behind that is that if we relied on our file names to accurately describe what our document is about, we would all fail miserably, right? You know, I know in a previous life at our job, every job, every file we created was named the job number. So, certainly, that means nothing to everybody but our company. I have a lot of files named T.J. T.J.? Theresa Jackson. Oh, got it, got it, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the document title, like, as simple and as easy as it sounds, it’s quite important, right? What happens when you put the document title in there? Where does that end up? So, when you do that, when you export to the PDF format, all of the metadata that you put in, not all, but most of the metadata you put in that file info gets passed on to the PDF, and there is an additional setting that you need to choose, but when you export the PDF format, you can tell it that when the PDF file opens, display that document title instead of the file name, and when that title is displayed, all somebody has to do is open that document, even for a sighted user, when they open that document, they’re going to see the title up there instead of the file name, and for somebody using assistive technology, when they read that document using assistive technology, it’s going to read the title describing what the document’s about. So, I understand how to do that now in InDesign, because I learned it from you. I reviewed all of the handouts for the CreativePro Week for this conference, and some of the handouts were created in PowerPoint by the speakers, and some of them were created in InDesign, and I noticed that every handout PDF that I opened that had been exported from PowerPoint, the title said PowerPoint presentation, not the title of the file. So, Dax, can you tell us how to, I found the info panel and fixed it there, but how can you do that in PowerPoint? Is there a way to do that? Well, I’ll go one better for you. Every one of the one, the handouts that were created that were done in PowerPoint also say that Nolan Haymes was the author. That’s right, they do, because he, because Nolan Haymes created the template, the original template, so it shows that. Yeah, so in just like in InDesign, if you go to file and info or options if you’re on a Mac, then you’ll go into the file properties, and you’ll see there’s a title there, and if you ever use ChatGPT and you download a document like in Word, that type, that title is always Python something or other as the title, because that’s just the way it’s exported, but the title is there, and then the author is there. So, as an organization, you should get used to removing the author and putting your company name as the author, because as Chad mentioned, the title, that’s searchable by Google, it’s indexed by Google, but also the author is indexed by Google, and I have looked online to try to hunt down the author of certain documents, and I’ll find them on LinkedIn and be like, hey, you presented this report two weeks ago, and it’s not accessible, can I help you make it more accessible? I’m like, well, first of all, who are you, and why are you contacting me? And second of all, I haven’t worked for that company for like nine years, so, and it’s because they used a document where that person’s author name was in it. Well, and it’s worth mentioning, like the Microsoft 365 apps, right? So, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, you personally become the author of every document you create, right? So, like, if you ever do the thing where you Google your name, there’s a good chance that your company documents are going to pop up because your name was carried over to that metadata when the PDF file was created. So, I think it’s a good habit, even accessibility out of the picture, it’s a good habit to remember that and go in to the file info and change the author for all of those documents. Is the author name read by assistive technology? No. No. Okay. But it is discoverable by search engine, so it is definitely out there. So, well, you know, it was, we were talking about the steps, and Chad and I are a different in that way, and I have a very specific thing, the way that I go. But that’s the way your brain works. You’re going to have, you’re going to follow things in an order. You had a fantastic post on LinkedIn yesterday. Oh, thanks. Everybody should follow Dax on LinkedIn, and he took a picture of his table out there and described, like, all what that all said about you. Anyway, I got you off. Finish what you were saying. No, that’s okay. So, my LinkedIn article actually was on, I’m a person with ADHD, and I noticed as I came back from my session, I had three different types of drinks open on my table, and that’s very much how I just roll. I got to have all my stuff. But in InDesign, I typically either set up my color palette first or my heading structure first. I do one of those two things. So, I make sure my color palette that I’m going to start with is color contrast compliant. Of course, it shifts as you develop, and, you know, but you’ve got to start somewhere. And then I make sure that my heading structure is set, and then I map that heading structure to accessible heading levels inside InDesign so that it’s exported to the PDF. Can you describe to the audience that, because we’re not showing any visuals for this, can you just walk us through where you apply the tag for a heading? Sure. So, if you create a style, a paragraph style, you can’t do it to a character style. Adobe, if you’re listening, that’s a bad thing. Make it so we can attach an accessibility tag to a character style. Anyway, double click on your paragraph style, and when that dialog box pops open, at the very bottom, there’s an export field, an export tags, and it’s a dropdown menu, and in that dropdown menu, it says H, H1, H2, H3. Never pick H. There’s a long story. If you want to know about it, come find me on social media or send me a message, but never pick H. H is not a valid tag that’s going to work for you. H1 through 6 is your tag structure. They’ve now included artifact as a tag. So, if you’re one of those people that says this page intentionally left blank, that artifact tag is for you. So, make a paragraph style called intentionally left blank or blank, and apply artifact to that, so we don’t have to hear it using assistive technology, because who cares if the page is blank? It’s the whole point. How does this tag, say I have a header that I’ve created, and I give it an H1 tag, how is that consumed by somebody who’s using a screen reader to read that content? Yeah. So, when we’re looking at a magazine, you might look at the table of contents. I look at the pictures and find one that I like. Chad might look at the headings and look for one that resonates with him. So, when you have structure in your document like headings, I, as an assistive technology user, can say, hey, tell me all the headings in my document, or tell me all the heading level ones in my document, and I can get a very quick picture of what my content is and then choose to launch to any one of those areas and just read that point. So, it’s the same way that somebody with vision would look at a magazine and look at the titles of the magazine and then stop on that one and go, okay, this is when I read. Exactly. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. What about the body text or the paragraph text? Chad, do you have to add a tag to that? You really don’t. I mean, in InDesign, any style you create by default is mapped to automatic, and I would say nine times out of ten, what that means is it’s going to map to a P tag, right? The exception to that is any text that you’ve applied a bulleted or numbered list to, then it’ll map to a list. But in that situation, it’s really, really important that you leave it set to automatic so that you can let InDesign do its job and map it to a list appropriately. A lot of people that I work with, their files, they, for whatever reason, want to map a bulleted or numbered list to a P tag, and that breaks it. So you heard me talk about this in my session. It fundamentally violates a WCAG principle called info and relationships, and info and relationships simply says tag content as what it is. If it’s a heading, tag it as a heading. If it’s a list, tag it as a list. If it’s a figure, tag it as a figure. And so by tagging it as a P, all those list items are going to output as a P tag, and then the user doesn’t realize they’re reading a list of items. What does it sound like when they’re hearing the screen reader? So when they encounter a list, it’ll say list with 12 items, and then the user knows what they’re getting into, and they could choose to either proceed and read all 12 items, or they could say skip over it and read the next thing that comes after it. But if you tag it as a P tag, it doesn’t say that, and you just hear bullet, John, bullet, Mary, bullet, and you’re like, okay, how many of these are there? So that’s why it’s really beneficial to use the list tools inside the programs you’re using, Word, PowerPoint, InDesign, because they do encode the content correctly and give the user options. So I’ll give you guys a quick example. One of my clients, they’re famous for, at the end of their document, they’ll put a list of all the zip codes that they service, right? And it’s somewhere around 200 zip codes, right? So like if I would tag them as P tags, I got to go through them one by one, right? Having no idea where it ends. Exactly. And so what I do is I do a little bit of trickery. I create what I call a micro bullet that is 0.1 points big, and it’s white. And I apply all those bullets to the zip codes. You never see it, but now when they hit those zip codes, it says list with 200 items. And now the user has an opportunity to choose, you know, do I want to read 200 items, or do I just want to move on to the next thing? 200 zip codes. Yes. What’s interesting about that is Chad brought up a very good point. He left the bullet there and didn’t artifact the bullet. Well, first of all, you can’t artifact the bullet inside InDesign, but you can do it inside a PDF. And often we run across documents where there’s no bullet because they don’t want to see it or hear it. They just artifact or mark it as decorative. The problem with that is that we encountered that JAWS and NVDA will not pause in between the list items and allow the user to click the down arrow to move to the next one. It just reads and it just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. 200 zip codes, like all at one shot. Yeah. And you don’t hear, you don’t have the ability to stop. And if you press the up arrow to try to jog it to stop, it just keeps going. So that label, that bullet item is an important feature for longer, if you have a longer list. So you can hide it for the print version or the… Yes, the visual. Yeah. So what are some other, you like to say, low hanging fruit items for accessibility? If I’m brand new, I know that accessibility is important. I’m aware of that. I’m not really sure where to start. And I know, I’m not sure, what are the most important things that I know, with the skills I have right now, what can I be doing to my documents to make them more accessible than they were yesterday? Jed, you want to talk about parent pages and the use of parent pages? I think that’s a really important one. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, in InDesign, when you leverage parent pages, and it’s very standard practice, from an accessibility standpoint, that all of your running headers and running footers, we artifact that content. Because otherwise, it becomes a bit of a disruptive experience, right? So, like, you’re reading a page, and you get to the bottom of the page, and then when you go to the next page, it says, CreativePro Week handout 2026, page seven, you know, just like at a random location in your document. So it’s very standard practice to artifact those items. And so, in InDesign, when you leverage the parent page, anything you put on the parent page will automatically get artifacted. Now, I’ll give you guys a little warning, if you will. Oftentimes, on those parent pages, we like to put a URL, www.creativepro.com, you know, whatever it might be. If you make that URL a hyperlink, you are going to get an error on every page of your document. Because what happens is, that link has nothing to attach itself to, because the content on every parent page is being artifacted. And so, now you’re going to get an error. Do you remember what the error is? Untagged annotation error. Yeah. There’s the two parts of a link. There’s the visual text you see that you can touch and click on, and then there’s the action that happens behind the scenes that takes you somewhere. And you have to have both parts for that link to be correct. And the untagged annotation says, I’ve got instructions, but there’s nothing on the page that tells me where to go, you know, what to do, or that I can click on. And so, what Chad was saying earlier, you can have the URL in there, just don’t make it a hyperlink. The benefit or the, I don’t know which way you want to go with it, whether it’s a benefit or a drawback, Acrobat will automatically detect hyperlinks in URLs. So, you’ll still get the benefit of sighted users, mouse users, to be able to click on that URL and go there. The drawback is that as a non-sighted person using assistive technology, it’s invisible. So, listening to you, it just occurred to me that we may have listeners, we may have people in the room that are really brand new. Yep. What’s an artifact? Marking something is decorative. So, you have to ask yourself, if this item weren’t here, would it, would the user be missing something, right? And so, the little triangle-y parts at the tops of our handouts, I don’t need to hear graphic, triangle accents for the CreativePro Conference, a little warning symbol that says pro tip, or, you know, like where the pro tip is, a little triangle with an exclamation point. I don’t need to hear triangle with an exclamation point. But if I’ve created a circle with a number one in it to annotate something on a picture, that’s important to know that that’s there. So, I’d want to mark that as content. So, if there’s something visual on the page that is a design that isn’t really providing more information about the content, then you would tag it as an artifact so the screen reader doesn’t describe it? Yes. Okay. And these designers do that, you know, I mean, we all do that, you know, sometimes we have a page of content and you’re like, oh man, I only have a half a page of text. So, let’s drop a photo in there to kind of take up some of the space and make it balanced. White space can make us a little uncomfortable, like, you know, maybe we’re not, you know, we’re charging too much and we’re not filling the page. Or especially a lot of white space, right? So, we as designers inherently tend to do that, and we’ll add, it’s a pretty picture, it’s nice to look at, but there’s really no value, right? The one I can think of, there’s that photo everybody uses of the kids running through a field with a dandelion and, you know, the flowers are blowing in the air, right? So, like, you know, we use that because it’s a pretty picture, it adds balance to the page, it looks good, but fundamentally there’s no value in it, right? And so, whenever you have elements like that, you know, and it’s a really good point that Dax is making, it’s like the first question you want to ask yourself with any graphic element is does it have value, right? And if the answer is no, well, then we can artifact it. But if the answer is yes, then we get into a whole other discussion of we or somebody needs to describe it, right? And that sounds, on paper that sounds super easy, right? Like, as we sit here and talk about it, it’s like, oh, just describe all your images. Until you’re sitting in front of your computer staring at your document trying to describe a bar graph with 20 data points and, you know, now we’re like, we have this paralysis, right? We’re like, oh, my gosh, I don’t know what to say. So, well, if they would have taken my session that was just before, right after lunch, they would feel a little bit more comfortable with that. But, yeah, you know, there’s actually a really cool pro tip for marking something as decorative. So, you can create an object style that only has the there is a way in the object’s properties at the very bottom to do export tagging and you can set that as artifact. And then I set up a shortcut key of control alt zero or command alt zero, command option or command option zero to apply that object style. So, as you’re designing and you want to mark something as decorative, you select it, command option zero, boom, it’s artifacted. Otherwise, you’ve got to right click on it, go to object export options, and then set it to an artifact. So, it’s a really quick way to just iterate through. That’s a great tip. Or you could just not include it in the articles panel. The problem with that, though, is you create untagged content unless you’re using a plugin. So, it doesn’t get marked as an artifact. It just doesn’t get tagged. And so, for us, we comply with not just the Acrobat Checker, but there’s a checker called the Pack Checker, which checks to a higher standard. And that higher standard says, look, everything has to have a designation. Either it’s an artifact or it’s tagged content and it’s got it. Let’s slow you down again, Dax. Yep. Because you just know so much. You’re like, I can break it down. Let’s talk about the checker inside of Acrobat. What does that do for us? And is it good enough? And is it, I don’t know, maybe better than nothing? Or what if I go in there and I run the accessibility checker inside of Acrobat, what’s it telling me? And what can I do about it? If this is nothing, the Acrobat Checker is there. Okay. For those that are listening, it was a very small incremental step above. Yes. If the Acrobat level is, if zero, nothing is the concrete street, passing the Acrobat Checker is like stepping up onto the curb. It does check for some certain things, but it doesn’t ensure that your document is readable for the majority of people who use assistive technology. So, Chad, instead of the Pack Checker or as an addition to the Pack Checker, we like to use the Pack Checker, right? Yes. And the Pack Checker is a paid tool? No. The Pack Checker is free. So we have no excuses. Well, the downside to this situation is that it’s currently Windows only. Did you hear that? It was like a collective sigh back there. It’s currently Windows only. Between all of us here, they’ve been promising a Mac version for years. And I’ve heard that resurface recently where supposedly they’re actually working on a Mac version. They also have an online version of the Pack Checker that is browser based. It is not as robust as the true Pack Checker. It will check your document for compliance, but it won’t really show you what the problems are. I’m going to go out on a limb here. There is another checker that has recently surfaced. It is called WCAG4PDF. And they have both a Windows and a Mac version of that product. Literally, they just LinkedIn messaged me today. Today. Today. Today, yeah. So this is breaking news. Yeah. A couple weeks. Yeah, a couple weeks, maybe a couple of months. But it’s a new product. It’s also free, I believe. Yeah. And it’s an alternative, right, to the Pack Checker. And there’s other ways, too, guys, like you’ve heard Dax and I also recommend third-party products in the past. Common Look has a built-in validator. Common Look’s Windows only. Common Look is Windows only. Grackle PDF has a built-in checker. It is also Windows only. PDFix has a built-in validator. And PDFix is the only one that is both Mac, Windows, and Linux, actually. So, you know, if you’re looking for a way to validate your PDFs, that’s an option, but it is a paid option, right? So I know we’re throwing a lot of things out there to people, but… Do you have conversations with Adobe about this? Is there any hope that… Have we ever? I’m going to stop it right there. I’m going to throw down the flag and I’m going to say, yes, conversations have been had, full stop. I wish there was something more we could say. Go ahead and ask the question. Yeah. I think it’s directly related to that. So you’ve just stumbled upon a genie that exclusively grants a single wish for any change to an Adobe application of your choosing. What is your wish? That they would listen to us like they haven’t for the past five years. That we have given them our heart and soul and all the things that we’d fix. I think the biggest thing for me, the biggest fix is fix tables. Allow me to export a table accessibly from InDesign. I think that’s a key basic feature that is unfathomable to me that we have not solved yet. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think he was asking, were you saying like a feature in Acrobat? Oh, in anything. Anything. So Brad, thank you for asking a question, Brad. It was hard for us to hear it. Yeah, it was. But Brad asked if you could give Adobe, I think if I heard this right, if you could ask Adobe for one thing, if they grant you one wish, what would your wish be? I think it’s just hard to pick one, right? I mean, I’ll tell you the one that I’ve been asking for, again, like five years, five years running, I would love them to give me the ability to map a character style to a tag. And also in that character style properties or whatever, give me the ability to add actual text or expansion text to things applied with a character style. And it would allow me to do a lot of really powerful things. You guys out there who create table of contents, you know that the standard table of contents has a dot leader going across, right? And that dot leader is for those of us with sight. It’s there to benefit us, to make it easy for us to kind of go across to what the page number is for that reference. The reality is for screen reader users, it reads those dots. So like What would that sound like? Well, so like there was a time when it, and actually I’ve encountered this recently where it read all of them. It read every dot. So it’ll say chapter 1 dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, 12. NVDA does this weird thing where it counts the dots. So it’ll say, chapter 1, 47.7, which gets really confusing because after it says the number of dots, it’s reading the page number, which is another number. So again, it says chapter 1, 47.7. And you’re like, what does 47.7 mean? And it’s really confusing for the user. So you can’t artifact those? They aren’t artifacted by default? Seems like they should be by default. So by default, they’re not. And it’s because most people, when they do that, they’ll create a tab stop. And they’ll put a period in the leader field. Well, that’s a character. So what InDesign does, or what Word does the same thing, is it just fills that tab space with all those dots. What I do is I create a character style with an underlined property of dotted. And then I apply that using a grep style in InDesign. And when you do it that way, it automatically artifacts the leader. Because it’s an underline at that point, not dots. Not a character. They’re not really characters. It’s a formatting property instead of a character. That’s brilliant. Do you have that documented somewhere? I think I do. CreativePro. I thought you did a video on CreativePro’s YouTube channel showing that tip last year. I think we have an accessibility playlist. And it should be in there. Yeah, awesome. Super. We were talking earlier about the easy things that you can do. And I think the easiest thing you can do. Well, actually, we were talking about the checkers. And we’re talking about the Pack Checker and Acrobat Checker. And you’ve got the Microsoft Checker and all these different checkers. The ultimate test is listening to your document with assistive technology. Yes, I wanted to ask that. Talk about the screen readers. How important is that to your testing of documents? It’s like throwing a pass to someone and they catch it on the 90-yard line. That’s good enough. I don’t need the touchdown. It’s right there. I know it’s right there, right? No. Score. Go across. So testing your document with a screen reader. I will tell you that I have to pass a checker because that’s part of my job. But I really don’t care one way or the other. I want the user experience to be a good user experience. Bounding boxes is one of those really complex errors that we get when we use these complex checkers. It’s trying to figure out where does this box sit on the page? Does it matter for JAWS? Does it matter for NVDA? Does it matter for Apple VoiceOver? Literally no assistive technology cares where the B-box is. So why would you spend an hour fixing B-box levels manually by re-tagging them all? So wait, I’m back up again. The B-box shows up as an error when you run a checker? Yes. But you’re saying, so what? I don’t care about that error because it’s irrelevant to the screen reader? Yeah, so the deal is if I’m going to be perfect for my clients, I am absolutely going to fix that. In Common Look, it is literally one click. You check a box and say, calculate the new B-box. PDFix, you can say, fix it, and you click the little plus. There are definitely ways to fix it. But in a pinch, if I’m listening to my document and I check my document, it says 112 B-box missing errors, and I need that document out, I know that that document’s going to be a good user experience because I’ve tested it. I’ve heard that document. Where it would fall apart, just to be super clear, if your document was going to be put into reflow, every one of those images is going to be full screen. They’re going to be as big as it can fit in that reflow area. That’s what the B-box kind of controls. I’m not so worried about that as a user experience. So I think testing with the point I was trying to make with all that is testing your document with a screen reader will tell you whether or not using an M-dash in between 11 to 15 is a bad user experience or a blank cell inside a table is a bad user experience. You get to hear that and then make that decision because then the extra work either doesn’t need to be done or does. So I have a Mac on my lap here. What are my options for screen readers? Apple VoiceOver, Chad. Yeah, Apple VoiceOver. It’s free. Dax and I kind of agree on this. VoiceOver is maybe not quite as good as JAWS and NVDA. But for overall testing, it’s still perfectly legit, perfectly decent. I think it’s a little harder to use than JAWS and NVDA. VoiceOver, it’s just a little bit weird because VoiceOver sees a lot more levels of the document than JAWS and NVDA does. So if you try using VoiceOver, I encourage you to watch a video where they kind of show you how to do it because, for example, if you’re reading a document and you come upon a list, it’s going to say list. To interact with the list, press Control-Option-Shift-Down arrow to dive into the list to read the elements. So you find yourself continually having to dive in and then dive back out of these objects. So it’s a little trickier to use. VoiceOver on an iPhone is amazing. Very, very powerful, very legitimate way of testing your document. Much easier to use, I think. That’s a great tip. I didn’t realize that. You just put your PDF document on your phone and we have another question. Oh, cool. So let’s say, in theory, you have a 200-page annual report that was designed by an incredible designer, but he or she does not use paragraph styles. And these are reports that date back the last six years. And they are terribly not accessible. I know it’s complicated because you don’t know what the annual reports look like. They’re data-intensive annual reports with a lot of written content. How would you go about fixing that? I’m going to stop you for just a sec. Could you just come up here and say that? There’s someone in the microphone. They’re all pointing that direction. Yeah. Jack’s IQ. So do you have the source documents? Could everybody hear what he was saying? No, repeat the question. For the podcast. So he was saying, at his organization, they’ve got these annual reports that are like 200 pages. And they were built by somebody who didn’t have accessibility in mind. And his question was, how would you approach that? And my question to him was, do you have the source documents? You do. So I mean, if you have the InDesign files, all you really got to do is build the functionality into those documents. I mean, that would be my approach. That would be the fastest way, in my opinion. Conversely, people in your situation are often saying, I’ve got this 200-page annual report that’s from six years ago. I don’t have the source documents anymore. Our company, Chax, has created a solution that we call Chax IQ, that you can upload your PDFs, and it will automatically tag those PDF files. And then you can download the tagged version of those documents. And we came up, like, Dax and I never wanted to be in the remediation business, right? Like, that wasn’t at all what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to be sitting in a cave for 12 hours a day banging out documents. Chad, they’re the ones sitting in the cave. I know, I’m sorry, guys, I’m sorry. But so what we did realize was that a lot of our clients are in that situation. Usually people identify when they have inaccessible documents is during the web testing phase, where they’re evaluating their website, and they’re testing all these things. And they get to the bottom of the list, and it’s like, oh, by the way, you’ve got 600 PDFs on your website that are not accessible, right? I see her shaking her head. I see some of you guys. And so we were like, we need a way to help these people, right? Like, we want a way to help these people, because handing somebody 600 PDFs is going to cost you a fortune, right? Even if you go overseas, it’s going to be expensive. And so we put a lot of time and development into coming up with a way you can literally bulk upload all 600 PDFs. It’ll tag them all, and then you can just download them, and they will be automatically tagged. The disclaimer there, just to peel back, is that it improves the accessibility of those documents. It doesn’t make them perfect. Acrobat has AutoTag as well. We feel our methodology is a little better than AutoTag, but there’s still work to be done. And in fact, we just released another tool for forms that allows you to quickly tag a form. And it is 100% accurate, because you’re the one kind of just matching the form field to the label, and then it does the rest. It’s outstanding. So bulk is a huge thing. And I would even go a little step further and say, I probably wouldn’t go back to the source file if I was never going to use that document again. But if I’m going to use that document as my base for the next year, I absolutely want to go back and make those styles correct. But if the cake’s already baked, yeah, I’m probably just going to tag the PDF and move on. Great answer. I was wondering the same thing. You always want to go back to the source file if you’re going to continue to do more work with it, or start with a fresh new template. Yeah, we call that born accessibility. Fantastic. Well, does anybody else have any questions from the audience? We really appreciate you being here. It’s a lot more fun to have a conversation in front of people and not talking to ourselves on a screen. We can wrap this up. I want to thank you for being here. And everybody that’s listening to the recording, thanks for tuning in to the CreativePro Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we have lots more. We continue to publish podcasts. Chad and Dax have their own podcast, Chax Chat. We’ll be publishing this out and sharing it on YouTube with both channels. Be sure to follow us, the CreativePro Podcast, and share it with your fellow designers if you liked what you heard. And don’t forget, podcasts is the code to get $100 off any future event. We have a couple events, couple more events coming up this year. We have Design and Marketing, and Design and AI in September. We have Design and Accessibility. Four days of accessibility training in October. And then we have the InDesign Conference in December. You can go to creativepro.com events and get the whole lineup of dates because I wasn’t prepared enough to have them in front of me right now. Sorry about that. So we’ll wrap it up with that. And until the next time, just keep learning, keep improving, and what else do I need to say, guys? Thank you. Thank you for being here. Some accessibility is better than no accessibility. There’s your closing thought, right? Start small and you’ll get there. Thank you.