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 PDF. This is a little bit more complicated than other videos in this series, so if you haven't already watched the previous videos, go do that first.

Ok, so if you're still with me, let's get going.

I have here a file that I created in Microsoft Word, I exported it to a PDF, and it's not a real form, it's a fake form, a demo, that I made for someone to hypothetically sign up for some U of O athletics marketing emails. It has all the standard contact information, these are all regular text input fields. It has radio buttons, and then it has a few checkboxes. It's supposed to represent the normal stuff you'd see in most forms. It does not currently have any interactive fields. Now, you can create interactive forms fields in Word, but I didn't because, first, Word forms are inaccessible, don't use them, and second, when you export these files to PDF, that interactive Word form data, it doesn't get exported anyway. You can, and should, use Word to lay out 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 show you anything different, it would just be more tedious, having you do 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 watched the other videos on accessible PDFs, you recall me saying that tags are the foundation of an accessible document. However, when you create form fields, you need to then retag your whole document, which will mess up any tags that you already have, so if you went through all the work of making your tags perfect, then added form fields, it would just override all that work. So I, and most people, think it makes sense to just delete all the tags, start with a clean slate, then we can add tags after the form is already set up.

To do that, here I am in the Tags pane, right click on the root node, and then select "Delete Tag". And, boom, 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 for the Search Tools search bar for "Prepare Form".

Click on this, and it asks you which file you want to work on it, it defaults to the currently open file, so that's good. Pro tip: don't ever check "This document requires signatures", even if your document does require signatures, there is a known bug in Acrobat where, if this is checked, it disables certain form field properties that you will need to use, so leave this unchecked.

You do want to leave form field autodetection on, and let's click "Start" to run this tool.

Oh, I deleted the tags, that's 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, you can work on something for like an hour when Acrobat crashes, and you lose your work.

OK, so the tool ran, and we see our form fields. So we see all these blue boxes, these are the form fields that Acrobat created for us. Like any automated tool, Acrobat's form field 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 are no extra fields that shouldn't be there.

Starting at the top, on my Contact Information, these look like regular text input fields, which is good, look like my radio buttons are good, and...actually the check boxes, I have no idea what's going on here. I see the checkboxes, but I see all these other fields were added, and these are not correct.

Actually, I do know what is going on here. Acrobat, it looks at specific things to guess where form fields should go, and one of the things it looks for is, "Hey, is there a text label on the left, then a big blank spot on the right", that probably means there is a text input field here, so that's what it's doing here. So I get it, I don't know why it thought it applied to all these lines and not men's basketball, but who knows? To delete this, just select it then hit the delete key with your keyboard, or you can right-click, control-click, to open up these options, then choose "Delete".

Delete these two as well.

Oh, and here's the other confirmation button, which is also a checkbox, and which also looks good.

So, it looks actually like Acrobat correctly identified all the form fields, it didn't miss any that should be there, so I'm going to delete one that is correct, to show you how to manually add form items. When you have the Prepare Form tool open, it adds this toolbar at the top, and this is where you can choose form fields to manually add. The ones that you will use most often are standard text input, checkboxes, and radios, radio buttons.

"Name" should be a text input, so select that one, and then you just drop it wherever it should go. OK, 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. To do that, you can either double-click on your field, or right-click select Properties. Actually, I'm going to do a different one first, I'm going to choose Street Address first. The two fields that you will need to verify for every form input are the Name and the Tooltip. The Name field, this is not visible on the screen, it's not read by screen readers, this is how Acrobat refers to this form input internally. If you look here on the sidebar, you'll see all these different form fields. This shows the form field Name. So this can be anything you want, just make sure you give it something logical so that if you're looking at a layout like this, you know which form field is being referenced. Street address, that makes sense. Tooltip, this is what actually gets read by screen readers. Both name and tooltip, Acrobat will just grab whatever the adjacent visible label is, and make that both the name and the tooltip. That might be fine, and it might need a little bit more clarification. I think Street Address, yeah, that's probably clear to someone who is using a screen reader. If they heard that this is a form field with their screen reader, they would 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 then double-click or right-click, properties, or if you leave this dialogue 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 pre-fill these values. It gave it a default value of Text16. This is a little bit confusing, I apologize, but because this is the field for someone to enter in their name, the value for the name field is "Name".

Tooltip, 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, say you had a reference list for a job application, it might ask for the name of Reference 1, Reference 2, Reference 3, so just having the value "Name" wouldn't be sufficiently descriptive. Here I'll say "Enter your full name" so you know to enter both your first and last name, because some forms will have 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, UO 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 type out 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. 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 in their date of birth in a thousand different formats, so the format tab you have formatting options. Select Format Category in this dropdown, this is a date, so let's choose Date, and then you have a variety of options. I partial to month-month-day-day-year-year-year-year, so I'm going to choose that, and actually now that I choose that, I'm going to go back to the tooltip, and include that in the tooltip. Because especially if you rely on assistive technologies, fixing errors can be a bigger pain, so it's always good to prevent errors rather than...preventing errors is better than popping up error messages so people know to fix them. Phone, I don't think that requires any additional formatting. City, also good. State, in the tooltip I might specify they should add the 2 letter abbreviation. I can visually see that this is a very small field, so I can infer that they do not want the full state name, but if you don't see that visually, having that spelled out specifically would be helpful. "2 letter state abbreviation". Zip code, I think that will be fine. Email address, that's fine. No it's not, it's required, so add the word "required" in here and check that box. So 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, so I can recreate them all manually. Radio buttons are a little bit more complicated than standard text input fields. Choose the radio button, the icon that looks like a bullseye, and like a text field, just drag it and drop it wherever 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 standard input, except it will apply, it will 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 so long as it is 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 the choice. This is "I am a current or former student, staff, or faculty member at UO". OK, 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 am a parent of a current or former student at UO". And, I'm going to intentionally click away. Just in case you miss adding a radio button for all your options, you can always go ahead and add additional options manually. Now, it won't add the Group Name automatically, so you'll...it did add the group name automatically. If you have multiple groups on this document, it won't automatically add the group name, but because there is only one group so far, it does default to that. There we go. If it wasn't, you could just choose it from this dropdown. "I am unaffiliated with UO". There we go, 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 tooltip. The tooltip is directly tied to the name, and because we only have one name for all three of these items, they all have the same group name, it will have the same tooltip for each of them. And the tooltip will be the question, which is "Select UO Affiliation". And let's say Required. And if 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 it 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.

OK, very good. That does it for radio buttons.

The last items that I want to go over are check boxes. Check boxes are kind of between the text input fields and radio buttons in how they behave. They do not belong to a group, so the most important thing to remember when working with checkboxes is the tooltip needs to define both the question and the value of that particular checkbox. So I'll call this Football, and then the tooltip will say, let's see, "I want to receive updates for Football". So it refers to both the question and the value of this particular checkbox.

You may recall when I stated this video, I said the reason I only have four sports here is because it would get redundant, and you probably understand that better now.

OK, very good, so that is it for the checkboxes. Actually, no it's not, there's also the Confirm option. So I will call this "Confirm", and then, this isn't like a legally binding thing, but because when you submit this form, you are consenting to have UO Athletics send you emails, I think it's probably best practice to have the tooltip, what the screen reader reads, be verbatim with what's actually visible on 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, OK, very good. And we're done, and that's all that I wanted to show you about creating form fields. Well, that's all for creating the initial form fields. The next step is to verify the Tab order of these form fields, and if you've watched the previous videos and learned about logical reading order, tab order is almost exactly the same thing. When you work on forms, many people use the Tab key to jump from one form field to the next, and we want 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 correctly. And that's because when Acrobat's prepare form tool runs, it sets it up for you, in the order it finds these on the document, 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. I deleted and then recreated the Name field, so it's not in order, it's all the way down here, so let's 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 see, this is first, this is second, this is third. So that's an easier visualization. 4-5-6-7-8-...oh. 14, 9-10-11-12-13. I forgot that I recreated these, so these are out of order. It would actually go from email then down to the individual sports, then you confirm, that it jumps back up to 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 as updated. That looks correct.

The only other item that I might want to change for tab order is Phone Number. In general, I said it's left to right, top to bottom, and 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 going by a screen reader reading it out. I wouldn't expect to see phone number in here, it might make more sense 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 it's own nuances, so I will upload an additional short video showing you how to manage the tags for these forms. Thank you for watching, and I will see you in the next video.