Hello, and welcome back to the accessible PDF video series. This is the final video in the basics section, and focuses on tags and reading order. So, what are tags? Tags are metadata, they are data that define the structure of the document. When you create documents for presentations, it's not just regular paragraph text the whole way down, you have headings you have media, figures, you might have bullet points or numbered lists, you have all kinds of content, and tags will tell assistive technologies what type of content the user is consuming. And it's not visible on the page, so it won't mess up the visual presentation of your document. The best way to create tags is to use a well-structured source document. So if you authored your content in Microsoft word before exporting it to a PDF, and you use Word's built-in heading elements if you use words built-in bullet lists, versus just, like, typing hyphens to indicate a bullet list, those tags will get exported to the PDF, and it'll already be pretty good. Now, Acrobat does have an automated tag tool, it's not going to be as accurate as what you would export from Word, but it is useful if you have something like a scanned document, if you have an image of a journal article, first you run the optical character recognition tool, it identifies the text on the document, and then you can use the automated tagging tool to create tags from this content. In either case, tagging isn't perfect, so I'll show you a couple ways of manually editing tags. Most importantly, all content on the document must be tagged, so let's get started. OK, so here we are back at our example document. If you look at the left-hand toolbar you'll see some icons and on the very bottom is an icon that looks like a shopping tag, a tag you might see on a piece of clothing at a store. That's the tags tab. Open it up, and you'll see the current tag structure of this document. If you work with websites, with html, this probably looks very familiar. The syntax isn't exactly the same, but you should have a good idea of what's going on. What you need to do is click through all the tags, verify that the tags are accurate for the content they identify, and that they're in a logical reading order. Now, I've used that term a few times - logical reading orderĀ - and it's exactly what it sounds like. Just go through the document, make sure the elements get highlighted in an order that, reasonably, you'd actually read this document. Generally that's top to bottom. If you have a multi-column layout, you'll go top to bottom through the left column, then top to bottom to the right column. There's no hard and fast rules, just use your judgment on, "hey is this logical?" First, I'll show you how to change a tag. Actually, first I'll show you how to auto tag documents, and show you the difference in quality between what Microsoft word exports, and what Acrobat creates. So I have two versions of of the same document open, and you'll see that they have the same tag tree. To auto tag a document, open up the the accessibility tool, and auto tag document is right at the top. Open it up, it'll give you a warning it's already tagged, you want to retag it, let's say "yes", and I don't care about what that is, let's go back to the tags, and okay, and it's different. So let me open these up and check out the difference. Right, so here's the auto-generated tags, and as I expected, it's not so good. The the page header for example is an h3, it should be an h1, since it's the main header of the page. As I go through this, it looks like all the secondary headers are just generic p tags, for paragraph, tags for regular content, and that's not right. The list looks good, the image is correctly flagged, and also it thinks this random white space at the bottom is a figure, that's weird. Yeah, so not so good. It's an okay starting point if you have no tags at all on your document, like if you scanned a journal article then did OCR on it, but don't use auto tag if you exported your PDF from some other authoring software. OK, so now back to the main working document. The first thing I want to show you is how to change a tag how to re-tag a tag. Going through this list, I see that the Oregon duck, this picture is incorrectly tagged as a paragraph, not as a figure, so let's change that. Here's the figure itself. let's see right click or control click if you're on a mac, on the incorrect tag, and choose "properties". So let's see, in the type drop down, I see that it is flagged as a paragraph. It is not a paragraph, it is a figure, so I have a long list of options to choose from. I believe there's 37 options in total, but in practice, you mostly use the same ones over and over again. Headings one through six, you'll use those a lot, you'll use the paragraph tag, you'll use lists and list items, and you'll use figures. This is a figure, so I'm just going to go ahead and select it from the drop down. I also need that alternate text here, because paragraphs don't have alternate text but figures do. There we go, and that's all I need to do now, and you'll see in the sidebar, this has been re-tagged as a figure, so we're good to go. Next up, I want to show you how to delete a tag. Deleting a tag is easy. I'll go ahead and take some content that's actually correct, and delete the tag. Let's say this paragraph text beneath the main header, I'm going to go ahead and delete it. So, right click, and delete tag, and now it's gone. So I jump straight from this main title, h1, to the secondary title, h2. In general, you don't want to delete tags unless content erroneously gets tagged twice, and I'll show you how to create brand new tags. First, in the tag tree, right click and select new tag. You have the option of what type of tag to create, it's already on paragraph, that's convenient. Let's click ok, and there's our new tag in the list. The tag doesn't have any content associated with it, so we need to associate the tag with some content in our document. To do this, make sure your tag is highlighted, make sure it's selected using your cursor, highlight the content that you want to tag, right click on the correct tag once your content is highlighted, and then choose create tag from selection. And that's all it takes. You'll now see that the content is correctly tagged, however it's not in the correct order, so a screen reader would read this intro blurb at the very end of the document, and that doesn't make any sense, so we need to reorder your tags. There's two ways of reordering tags. The straightforward way is to cut and paste, so simply right click on the tag that you want to move, and choose cut. Then you choose the tag that you want the pasted tag to go after, I want the paragraph tag to go after the main heading, so I'm going to choose that h1, and then I have to right click, and then I have two options, paste and paste child. Paste will put the tag directly beneath the selected tag, at the same hierarchy in the tag tree, and paste child will move the tag so that it's a child of the selected tag. I'm going to do a standard paste, and there we go, it's exactly where it should be. You have h1, the next item is the paragraph, beneath the following item is the subsequent h2,.The concept of tags, hierarchy, and parent-child relationships they can be a little bit confusing. I think the best example to illustrate this is with lists. We have a list, the list is the parent element, it's a container that includes multiple child elements, so if I open up this accordion, this carrot icon, I can see that it has three LI tags, three list item tags. In this relationship, the list is the parent, and the three list items are our children, and actually all of these items are all children of the parent sect, the section element. If you have a really long document like a report with multiple sections, it might make sense to have multiple sect tags, sort of like chapters in a book, but for a short document like this it's not necessary. Sorry for that brief digression, but back to reordering tags. You can right click, cut, and then right click paste, to put the tag where you want it to go. There's another way of reordering tags which is by dragging and dropping them. This is easier, it takes fewer clicks, but it's actually a little bit finicky. Here's how to do that. You take the tag that you want to move, I'm actually going to just go ahead and drag this back down to where it was before, so now it's now out of order again. Grab the tag you want to move, and hold it over top of the tag you want it to go after, and when I do that, I'm moving it around, and you'll see you might be able to see, this thin white line beneath the h1 and as I move it up and down. It gets longer and it gets shorter. When it's a longer line it will place a tag directly following the tag you're hovering over. And when it's a shorter line, it will place a tag as a child of the current tag. So here I accidentally let go of it, and I placed it as a child of the current tag but I actually don't want that, so i'm going to move it so that it follows the highlighted tag. It's it's the same thing conceptually as paste versus paste child, and I'll be honest, it's not intuitive. I did it wrong 100 times before I figured this out, and it's a little bit frustrating as you're trying to figure it out. It does save you a couple clicks, if you do this a lot it might be a little bit more efficient, but if you don't do it a lot, I recommend just using the the cut and paste method. Everything is back now in the correct order in the correct hierarchy. Oh, and when you create new tags it will create them beneath the tag that you select, so it doesn't always create them at the bottom of the tree. I just did that to demonstrate how to move them. If I wanted to create a new piece of content beneath this h2, I could just select this h2, and then choose new tag, and create a paragraph, and then it will show up immediately beneath that h2. The very last thing to review is the reading order. Under the accessibility toolbar, choose reading order at the very bottom, and you'll see that your content is grouped together in these boxes with numbers on them, and it also pops up a window with some extra controls. Reading Order is actually a little bit of a misnomer. All advanced screen readers, that is JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, they don't use this, they don't actually look at the numbers, and read this in this order, they look at the tags in the document to determine the reading order. The best use of the reading order tool is that it allows you to flag some content as artifacts. Artifacts are basically stray syntax, decorative images, any white space that you'd use for formatting that you want the PDF to ignore. It's not the same as deleting tags, if you straight-up delete tags, Acrobat will know, "hey, there's some content here that isn't tagged, this pdf isn't accessible", whereas if you mark certain sections as artifacts, or background, Acrobat knows, "OK, this should purposefully be ignored". To flag content as artifacts, simply drag your mouse cursor around the the relevant content, so here let's see, let me just grab a lot of stuff... that might be too much. Here I have this stray little box, it looks like maybe I hit enter, changed the formatting, and so Acrobat thinks there's separate content right here, but there's not, it's just stray syntax. I want to flag it as an artifact. So there we go, highlight it, once it's highlighted in the purple box, click background artifact, and then it is effectively invisible to the tag tree. Scroll through here, make sure nothing else looks weird, I see this other random tag, I'm going to flag that as an artifact, and I think on the next page, yeah this...I don't really know what that's supposed to be, so that's also an artifact. And now we've tidied up, now we've cleaned up our tag tree a little bit. I'm going to close this out, and now when I go through the tags again, I should actually re-tag this as a figure, because it's not an h1, but you'll see that little carriage return which was here previously is gone, and you'll see that the carriage return that was here is also gone, and that miscellaneous content on the following page was gone. So, that's it! Now the tags have been cleaned up, they are correct, they are correctly structured, all the artifacts are removed, and we verify that everything is in a logical reading order. Working with tags, I know it can be a little bit overwhelming, but once you've got this figured out, these are all the basics you need to know to make your PDF accessible. If you work with more advanced content, there are additional videos that go into these subjects in more depth. Otherwise, that's all you need to know, so thanks for sticking with me, and thanks for making your content accessible. If you have any questions, if anything is unclear, I do appreciate your feedback, please email me at ictaccess@uoregon.edu with your feedback. Alright, thanks again.