Hello, and welcome back to the accessible PDF forms video series. This is the second video in this series, in the previous video, I showed you how to create a fillable form in Adobe Acrobat using the Prepare Form tool. I left that video off with the form all set up, except it still needed to be tagged, so that's what I am going to cover in this video.

Now, I'm not going to cover everything about tagging, I talk about tagging in general terms elsewhere, I'm going to focus specifically about adding tags to forms, because there's a couple nuances regarding tags and PDF forms.

So, to start off, let's look at our tags. We don't have any, which isn't a surprise, because in the previous video, I deleted all of them. So, to add tags, we are going to use the accessibility tool, if you don't have accessibility in your sidebar, you can search for it, in the search tools box. Under accessibility, choose Autotag Document. It runs in just a second, and it spits out a record, which honestly I never read, all I'm interested in is the tag tree. Right, so, this is autotagging, and any kind of automated tool is going to be imperfect, there will be a lot of things that we need to revise, yeah, for example I can see right off the bat, the document title is an H3, which doesn't make sense. it is the primary title of this document, so it should be an H1, but I'm not going to worry about that right now, I'm only focusing on forms.

Ok, and I think the easiest way to demonstrate how this should look is to point you to the already fixed document. So here I have the same PDF form that I have already corrected, and you can see what the tag structure is supposed to look like. So for each input field on this form, the tag structure should look exactly the same. Each input field that is, it's visible label, and the input field itself, should be wrapped in a P tag, a Paragraph tag. The very first child of that P tag should be the visible text label, the next tag under that, at the same level of hierarchy, the sibling tag, should be a Form tag, and then a child of the form tag is a special type of tag called an Object Reference, an OBJR. And that is just a reference to the fillable field.

So, again, each set of both visible label and fillable field should be wrapped in it's own P paragraph tag, first child is the visible text label, as a sibling of the visible text label is a form tag, as a child of the form tag is the object reference that corresponds to the visible label.

And this applies to all of the form fields on this document, text fields, radios, they all behave exactly the same, so Name, Date of Birth, Street, Phone Number...

Even if you look at specific options under these radio lists, still paragraph tag, visible text label, form, object reference.

So, with that in mind, let's go ahead and do the same thing for our working document, and I'm actually not going to do it for every single field, because it is exactly the same for every single field, I'm just going to do it for a handful of them so you get an idea for how it's supposed to work.

The first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to create a bunch of P tags. Let's do it for all these plain text fields. So let me count here, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. I have 8 plaintext fields, so I'll create 8 new paragraph tags. And if you recall how tagging works, it will add tags immediately beneath the item that you currently have highlighted, so I want them to appear here, in the Tag tree, so I'm going to select this paragraph, right click, choose New Tag, and I want to add a Paragraph.

1, 2, I already forgot how many I said I was going to add. 8? I'm going to go with 8. It's always easy to create and delete later. So that's 4 7, and 8. Ok, and the next step is going to be, to add the visible text label to each P tag, so to do that, select one of the P tags, and you should do this in order, right, I'm going to choose one of the P tags, select the visible label, highlight it with your mouse, and then on the P tag, right click, and create tag from selection. There we go, and so now how we have the visible text label under the P tag, and we're going to do that for all of them. Again, highlight the P tag with your cursor, select the visible text, right click on the P tag, create tag from selection.

I am a strong advocate for using webforms instead of PDF forms whenever possible, and once you do this 100 times, I bet you will be, too.

And then we're going to create a tag for email address.

Ok, so the next thing if you refer back to this document, we want to have form tags, as a sibling, as a child of the P tag, and as a sibling, at the same level of hierarchy as our visible text label. So, this is even easier. Choosing the visible label tag, because you want it to be a sibling, and beneath it, new tag, and...form.

And I'll be the first to acknowledge that tagging in PDF, there's a lot of kind of silly, arbitrary rules that you're just going to have to do a whole bunch of times to get the hang of it, so frustration, unfortunately, is part of the process.

Now we need to hunt down all of these object reference, object references. OK, so you can click on the different elements in the tree, and it will highlight what is contained within that tag, right, so that can be an easy way to find the object references. Here they are for name and date of birth. Name is going to be a child of the form tag which is a sibling of the visible name field. Date of Birth is going under this form tag, and if you recall from an earlier video on tagging, if you are dragging and dropping, there is a wider white line that puts it beneath the selected element, if it's a shorter white line, it's going to be a child of the selected element, and we want the object references to be children of the form tags.

I don't think there are any more object references up here, and they are probably all further down the tree.

If you ever see "Path" in the tag tree, that's just something that Acrobat doesn't really know how to handle.

Street address.

Phone.

Zip.

State

City, I think the only one left is email.

Which I bet is here, and there it is.

Ok, so now, all of these text input fields have correct tag structure, they have the parent P, they have the visible text label, they have the sibling Form tag, and then each child of form is the associated object reference tag. Now we have some empty tags, which we can just go ahead and delete. And you might be wondering, what is going on with these lines. So, if you recall before I added these interactive form fields, there were just placeholder lines, a lot of underscores so a user would know where they are supposed to fill out a form if they were writing it on printed document. But when I actually selected the text to tag it, I only selected the actual letters, not the underscores, so now this is actually broken out into two separate tags. Street address is a tag, and the underscores associated with the street address is one of these things. So I can actually just go ahead and tag these as artifacts. I talk about artifacts in another video, that's just something that Acrobat is told to ignore, and the reason we want to flag these artifacts is so it doesn't clutter up our tag tree. If we simply deleted this, then the next time we run the accessibility check, Acrobat would say, "Hey wait a minute, you have untagged stuff!" and that's not really important, but I like the accessibility check to come back clean, plus if you've got a bunch of noise in your accessibility check, it can distract you from real errors, so if you have stuff like this, go ahead and flag it as an artifact, and then it will essentially go away.

So that's all you have to do. You handle radio buttons, you handle check boxes, with the exact same format as any other text input. And, when you're done, you need to make sure the other content is tagged correctly, right? So you need to make sure your headings are correct, make sure any figures are correct, and when you're done with all that, you can run the accessibility check tool, make sure things like document title is set, language is set, if you have any figures, that they're not missing any alt text, so it is a multi-step process, but it is a requirement, so thank you so much for watching this video, for slogging through it, I know this is a bit trickier of a topic. If you have any questions, I am glad to walk through any of this in more detail. Please email me, my email address is ictaccess@uoregon.edu. And again, thank you for watching, I will see you in other tutorials.