[Athen] CommonLook PDF and CommonLook Office software

[Ken Petri]

Dean,

There are very few other options in this space, but there are some (see
last couple of paragraphs of this email). We have had a lot of difficulty
with the Commonlook software license managers, but I think we have narrowed
this down to issues with our networking set up -- in other words, it's not
a problem with Commonlook, but with our own networking (I'm pretty
sure....).

The software itself is quite good. Commonlook Office Pro is the way to go
with that tool, as  that edition has the ability to  create accessible
complex tables and it works with PowerPoint.

PDF, the plugin for Acrobat, has a learning curve. And what I mean by this
is it is an expert tool. It is not enough to be able to simply run the
plugin. The person doing the remediation must be aware of what makes a PDF
accessible, what are the semantics of PDF tags, etc. in order to produce a
truly accessible PDF. But compared to trying to edit tag structures in
Acrobat -- well, there is no comparison because editing tags, creating
artifacts, dealing with weird textruns, etc. is simply way too much work
without CL PDF. It does a lot of clean up for you, automatically (of
textruns, linebreaks, empty tags, etc) that is hugely time consuming to do
manually.

CL PDF is expensive, though. I think a few copies and only for people who
are working a lot with PDF would make sense -- library and university
communications/marketing, etc. In our case, almost all of Student Life and
University Marketing Communications are InDesign users, and if you're going
to use InDesign to produce PDF you are going to need to do after the fact
remediation. So CL PDF is a good investment for that group. You could learn
the tool and do internal training. CL does provide training and it's good
-- we did it here at OSU, funded by a grant -- but the training is
expensive, also.

CL Office Pro is very simple to use. Much simpler than anything else that
produces accessible results. You could teach a half-hour workshop to
faculty on how to use it and you'd be good. It's really straight forward.

Note that CL Pro is supposed to be able to produce accessible PDF forms. I
would say that this feature is not yet adequate. You have to use the
activex controls, only, in Word to get CL to recognize form elements and
then the visual display of the forms produced is not very good -- you'll
need to go back in in Acrobat and adjust the visual look and feel. But for
non-form PowerPoint and Word, CL Pro is a valuable tool.

I have been told by CL staff that CL products are moving toward PDF U/A
compliance. I would press them on this. CL should be producing PDF
U/A/Matterhorn Protocol compliant documents. The other thing that I always
advise creators to do with producing PDF is make sure there is a good
bookmarks structure, that the bookmarks panel is set to display when the
PDF loads in Reader or Acrobat, and that the title of the document, not its
file name, appears in the top of the reader window. These are all things
that you currently have to do manually with CL products. You have to run CL
Pro or PDF, to into Acrobat and then set up bookmarks and title to display,
etc. I personally think that there should be options (on by default) in CL
Pro and PDF to set these display characteristics for you -- and save the
hassle of doing them manually. I know most faculty will likely forget to do
those things. CL Pro should just do them for you.

On that score, there is a free (currently in beta) tool that produces
really nice, almost fully PDF U/A compliant PDF from Word -- and it
displays the title, sets the document language, and sets the bookmarks
panel to open by default. It's called axesPDF for Word. Since it's in beta,
there are parts of it that don't work yet (are turned off), but it does
have the very very useful ability to map Word styles to table headings (and
other structures), so when your PDF exports the one and two dimensional
tables in it don't require any after the fact remediation. axesPDF also
produces really clean tag structures. For example, the days of figures
floating to the top of the tag tree are gone with axesPDF. Word content
styled using blockquote and captions on figures are correctly tagged in the
PDF tag structure. And extra empty paragraphs are stripped automatically.

It's available here: http://www.axespdf.com/. All of the videos and most of
the text on the site (and some in the application itself) are in German.

axesPDF isn't wizard based like CL Pro and so it does require a bit more
training. But as far as I can tell, it is doing just as good a job as CL
Pro. Running a Word document through it and through CL Pro and then
checking with the PAC 2 checker shows that axesPDF actually right now
produces a PDF that is closer to PDF U/A compliance than is the PDF
produced by CL Pro.

In addition to PAC 2 for checking PDF, have a look at callas' pdfGoHTML.
That free Acrobat plugin makes good arguments for tagged PDF, since it can
produce accessible HTML documents from the PDF tag structure on the fly.
pdfGoHTML (and PAC 2) provide really nice visualizations of PDF tag
structures, too.

Feel free to call if you want to talk about this in more detail or need me
to clarify anything, Dean.

ken


 [image: The Ohio State University]
Ken Petri, Program Director
Web Accessibility Center, ADA Coordinator's Office and Office for
Disability Services
102D Pomerene Hall | 1760 Neil Ave. Columbus, OH 43210
614-292-1760 Office | 614-218-1499 Mobile | 614-292-4190 Fax
petri.1 at osu.edu wac.osu.edu


On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Brusnighan, Dean A. <dabrus at purdue.edu>wrote:


>  Hi All,

>

>

>

> Several Purdue campuses are planning to evaluate CommonLook PDF and

> CommonLook Office software by NetCentric.

>

>

>

> I have two questions:

>

>

>

> 1) have you had good or challenging experiences with either of these

> tools? Feel free to share offline if you prefer.

>

> 2) do you know of any alternatives to these tools? I have been asked to

> provide a list of alternatives to ensure due diligence.

>

>

>

> As a reminder:

>

> * CommonLook Office is used to save Microsoft Word and Powerpoint files as

> accessible PDF documents.

>

> * CommonLook PDF is used to modify existing PDF documents to make them

> accessible.

>

>

>

> Thanks in advance for sharing your insights!

>

>

>

> Dean

>

>

>

> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

>

> Dean Brusnighan

>

> Assistive Technology Specialist

>

> Purdue University, Young Hall

>

> 155 S. Grant Street

>

> West Lafayette, IN 47907-2108

>

> Phone: 765-494-9082

>

> dabrus at purdue.edu

>

> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

>

>

>

> _______________________________________________

> athen-list mailing list

> athen-list at mailman1.u.washington.edu

> http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list

>

>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20131211/7b128c4e/attachment.html>