[Athen] CommonLook PDF and CommonLook Office software

[Ken Petri]

Hope it's useful. Definitely give the axesPDF thing a whirl. It's great for
free (hope it stays that way).

k


 [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 17, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Brusnighan, Dean A. <dabrus at purdue.edu>wrote:


>  Wow. What a wealth of information! Thanks Ken. This is valuable.

>

>

>

> Dean

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:

> athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] *On Behalf Of *Ken Petri

> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 11, 2013 3:31 PM

> *To:* Access Technology Higher Education Network

> *Subject:* Re: [Athen] CommonLook PDF and CommonLook Office software

>

>

>

> 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* <petri.1 at osu.edu> *wac.osu.edu* <http://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

>

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

>

>

>

>

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