Chax Chat Accessibility Podcast

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.

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.

CAUTION: Highly controversial accessibility topics in this podcasts:

1. Do we need to set the reading order in my PDFs?
2. 2. Title Tag or H1?

We discuss a real-world situation where someone's barrier to information in a PDF is not vision. However, because of a traumatic event this person has dyslexia and requires audio input to fully understand the content on the page they are reading. We discuss how reading order is affected by the source document. We look at MS Word and InDesign and discuss the challenges with each when considering reading order. We also discuss designing with accessibility in mind to account for setting the reading order as the content is developed rather than addressing it in the end.

Once again we approach perspectives on using the Title tag as the title on the cover of a document even though screen readers today only announce it as a

tag which doesn't declare any structure or importance. We also discuss the potential risks and benefits of manually "fixing" the title tag or the H1.

Buckle up for this one! You will either love us or start yelling at your phone or computer! No worries. We can take it.

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.