Chad Chelius and Dax Castro during an Accessibility Podcast with the Chax Chat Logo between them.

Microsoft’s not-an-Artifact tag, Go-to Accessibility Tools and methods for Testing for A11y compliance

Dax Castro: 
Welcome to another episode of Chax Chat. Join Chad Chelius and me, Dax Castro, where each week we wax poetic about document accessibility topics, tips, and the struggle of remediation and compliance. So sit back, grab your favorite mug of whatever. And let’s get started.

Chad Chelius: 
Welcome, everybody. today’s podcast is sponsored by AbleDocs, makers of access PDF for Word and Access PDF Quick Fix, as well as document remediation services. So we thank them for being our sponsor for today’s podcast. My name is Chad Chelius:, and I am a trainer, author, consultant, PDF remediator, among many other things.

Dax Castro: 
And I’m Dax Castro. I am an Adobe certified PDF accessibility trainer, as well as an accessible document specialist certified by the International Association of accessibility professionals. And we are so excited today to bring to you our premiere episode of Chax Chat, which is a combination of Chad and Dax, we put it together and you know, “Chax” is what came out. So, welcome. And I hope that you’re as excited about this as we are, because we’re gonna talk about some great things. Chad, you know, the other day you and I were talking about this, and we had a long conversation, and it was, was really great. And we, you know, we both sat there and thought, Wow, we should be recording this people could get some good information, right?

Chad Chelius: 
Absolutely.

Dax Castro:
You know, and, and we thought, you know, what if we did a podcast, so that’s kind of how this whole podcast idea came about. So what we’re gonna do is we’re going to talk about some different topics that we think are important, or that have come up during the week. And right now, it’s going to be a weekly episode, we’ll see how that goes. And hopefully, it’s gonna have some good information out of it. So Chad, my first question to you is the it’s been coming up in a lot of these different PDFs that I keep seeing mostly from Office Suite documents, and it’s this artifact tag, not a designation, but an actual tag, like you would have a paragraph tag, what the heck,

Chad Chelius:
yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I can’t, I can’t speak for Microsoft, or, you know, anything like that, um, you know, I guess the first thing we should talk about, you know, just real briefly is like, what is an artifact? Right, and

Dax Castro:
good idea, good

Chad Chelius:
You know, as somebody, so like, I come very much from the design side of things. So a lot of the documents that I remediate are, you know, brochures, their catalogs, they’re very highly designed products. And, you know, we as designers often use imagery, and for lack of a better description, sometimes we use imagery simply for aesthetic reasons, right, that they’re bright, pretty pictures, you know, you oftentimes will put a picture of a girl sitting on a park bench has nothing at all to do with the content of the the product, but it’s a pretty picture nonetheless, and, you know, pleasant for us, who are sighted readers, when you’re reading the document, most of us already know that, that all figures need to have alternate text applied to them to describe the image in its context. And the challenge with those pretty pictures, if you will, is that they really have no value. Right? Right. The purpose of artifacting and object is to simply say, to the assistive technology, do not read this object. Right.

Dax Castro:
And what’s interesting, though, Chad is that some people will say, Well, you know, there’s this argument out there that well, wait a minute, if I get to see it, as a sighted person, why are we choosing to refuse to let a person see it as a blind person? And I will tell you that that is a great observation until you’re using a screen reader. And you have to hear every single piece of graphic in that document. And it goes back to not understanding what the the the experience is for that user. I just saw something on LinkedIn today. That was a post about, they’ve got this great new thing that is a backpack for blind people that acts as a guide dog. And one of the people that commented on that was actually Sam Evans from IAAP, she comments on it and said, who said that blind people don’t want guide dogs? What How did that become a thing? Right? And I thought, Wow, that’s a really good point. We assume that blind people would rather not have a guide dog and be independent on their own. But I think that’s an ablest point of view. Right. For sure. So I while I agree that there is an argument where like in a children’s story, if somebody had a lot of illustrations of the children’s story, they really are decorative. They do help, you know, kind of give a visual element to the story but they are decorative, but I can see making a point To describe all of that all text in that instance, right? Yeah, and if I have an icon, that’s the Help icon with a little, you know, question mark or whatever, I don’t need to hear that 50 times in the document.

Chad Chelius:
And, you know, like, when I teach accessibility, you know, I teach classes to companies throughout the US. And, you know, the remediation process is not black and white. You know, and that’s part of the challenge that a lot of us face, you know, I, in some ways, I wish it were very, very implicit is like, this is what you always do. But, you know, if you give a document to 10 people and say, remediate this document, you’re going to get 10 different results back, that is just the fact of the matter, you know, that there’s no getting around that. And, and so you’re right, and we are trying to, I mean, listen, I, I believe very strongly in what we do, right? I mean, the idea that I’m making a document accessible to all users, whether sighted non sighted mobility, you know, the whole list of users is really close to my heart, it’s really important to me. But as a sighted user, you know, we try to consider what, what a non sighted user would want, right? But, you know, we were just, we’re just guessing sometimes, you know, we’re trying to make educated guesses as we go along, following the standards following the requirements that we’re going for. So, so anyway,

Dax Castro:
I know.

Chad Chelius:
So back to the artifact. I mean, we know why we want to artifact things. But when you artifact something in a document, that element is now removed from the tagging structure, right? And, and because the tagging structure is what assistive technology uses to read your document. Yep. Now getting back to your point about it was a Word document. Right? Right. It’s

Dax Castro:
PowerPoint really mostly is because yeah, a lot of times you have a lot of decorative elements, right, you’ve got boxes with colors and fills and wire shapes, all this decorative elements, right, and you you open that panel, and you mark it as decorative, or you’ve got a box with text in it, you would assume that like InDesign will just remove it from the tag tree. And and just leave the text, PowerPoint, wraps it in an artifact tag, which really isn’t a tag, right?

Chad Chelius:
No, no, I mean, it’s a container, right? It’s a container. And, and the problem is, I always think of it as they only went halfway. Right? Right, that they identified that the object should be an artifact, but then they put it in the tag tree,

Dax Castro:
right?

Chad Chelius:
You’re like, Wait a second, guys, this is not helpful, because I still need to go through all of them and artifact them. Which by the way, you cannot just artifact them. Right?

Dax Castro:
You only know what do you mean? What do you mean?

Chad Chelius:
And I’m going off memory, right? If I remember correctly, you you you open up the artifact tag, click on the content object and say change add artifact.

Dax Castro:
Yep, I don’t think it does it.

Chad Chelius:
No, it doesn’t know until you rename the tag, then it finally lets you artifact

Dax Castro:
Oh, interest. Yeah, so what I was doing I was doing is I’m going okay, I mark it. And this happens sometimes with other tags, where you’ll right click on something, you’ll do change the artifact and it just blinks and nothing happens. The tag doesn’t go away, nothing, nothing changes. And I go in and look in the Content tab. Right. And it shows that it is artifact ID. So then I just delete the object out of the tags tree. Because I know in the content panel, it’s listed, it’s already designated as an artifact, that step of removing it from the street gets skipped. And I’m like, wait a minute, what the heck,

Chad Chelius:
it’s just a little dangerous though to write because I always preach in my classes do not delete things from the tag tree. Like it’s not that it’s not that simple. So right.

Dax Castro:
So yeah,

Chad Chelius:
I mean, it’s it’s a conundrum and and very challenging. And yeah,

Dax Castro:
You know, it would be great as if Adobe Acrobat… Adobe, if you’re listening to this podcast, thank you, first of all, and second of all, will you please make a way for me to select or search for tag types to set designations? You know, I can search for every artifact tag or every H1 or every H2. And maybe not h one or two is probably a bad example. But but a specific tag and give it a property be able to edit all of the properties. That would be super because I can think of lots of uses where I want to select all of a paragraph tag and turn it into a list tag because they you know, I want to be able to everywhere in the document 150 different tags or paragraph tags instead of lists, right?

Chad Chelius:
yeah. And yeah, Adobe, if you’re listening, I have a laundry list for you.

Dax Castro:
Well, that’s good podcast fodder, right? I mean, we’re gonna have You know, podcast topics for a long time. So

Chad Chelius:
it’s funny because a few versions ago in Acrobat, DC, they added the ability to rename multiple tags right out of shot.

Dax Castro:
Yep. And I love it. I use it for lists all the time.

Chad Chelius:
I love it. But I couldn’t believe I was excited about it. Like, like, that’s like a 1993 feature. You know? Like, I remember back in the early 90s, when when Pagemaker only gave you one undo. Right? And then I think it was Quark came out it gave you unlimited Undo, like. So like, when Acrobat gave us that feature? I’m like, this is cool, but I can’t believe I’m actually excited about it, you know?

Dax Castro:
Yeah. But well, I heard I heard a rumor and I can’t say where I heard it from. But I heard a rumor that possibly in PDF/UA-2, there is going to be the introduction of an artifact tag, an actual tag now. You know, one quote me, I’m just giving just scuttlebutt, this is water cooler talk, but that that office might have preemptively started adding these, which is like, Okay, great, I get that. But we’re not there yet. And the screen meters don’t understand it. No one understands it yet. So why start doing it now? And so who knows? I mean, I

Chad Chelius:
I Don’t know how I feel about that. I gotta complicate the tags tree. You know, I kind of liked it. Once I artifact it. It’s, it’s out of here. I don’t have to deal with it. But yeah, but that’s my opinion. Right?

Dax Castro:
So hey, I wanted to mention, so you know, you and I were on the the International Association of accessibility professionals, the abs, the accessible document specialists committee to develop this test. And, you know, it was so great when they tapped me to be part of that group, I want to talk to you a little bit about, you know, some of the behind the scenes of what happened, just so that, you know, our listeners can get an idea of what this test went through, before they released Tell me, you know, how did you feel about, you know, being part of that group?

Chad Chelius:
Well, I mean, it was really extensive. And I think the IDL, AP did a great job at kind of, and I’m not saying this, because they included me, but I think they did a really good sampling of a variety of remediation specialists, you know, because, I mean, there was you, there was me, there were a bunch of other great folks in there, from from different points of view, if you will, or reference industries, you know, yeah.

Dax Castro:
Well, we from EDU and, you know, education sector, and yeah, who are, you know, different focuses? Totally, so, yeah.

Chad Chelius:
And it was good, because, you know, like, and I mean, you know, people would bring up a topic, and they’d be like, Oh, you know, this is how it is. And I’m like, Well, wait a second, in InDesign, blah, blah, blah. So, right, like you and I brought, you know, we represented a different community, where, where people were affected, and variables were included in there. You know, creating the questions. Well, it was great, but it was hard, man. hard, right. Oh, my gosh, you know,

Dax Castro:
For those people listening we were we were asked to write about 10 different questions on a variety of different ways. The document, the the segment’s were kind of departmental compartmentalized. And then those questions were actually scrutinized and the and we had to come up with the answers to, and there were parameters about how the answers can be formatted and what can be said. And it was, you know, honestly, it was the best part of my, you know, my week when I knew I had one of those meetings coming up, because how many times do you be able to sit down and talk about for 15 minutes, a certain question or the validity of whether or not an LBL tag is required, or whether you know, the who’s gonna understand that, you know, why I don’t want to really talk about any of the questions, but but, you know, the different the different nuances of some of these questions was great. And it really helped me ensure that I knew the right thing. And there were a couple of questions in there that I didn’t know. And so I was happy to hear hear those answers. Um, you know, being part of the team, Duff Johnson, who is the PDF Association CEO was part of that team, you know, so it’s not like it was just a bunch of users. And not that there’s anything wrong with having users, but there were some some great minds in there. You know, that, you know, yeah. Damien Sian…

Chad Chelius:
A great guy. And it was it was really great. And I really looked forward to it. I think the test, we had to go back at the end, remember at the end, where you had to score the probability that you thought someone was gonna questions right talk about them?

Chad Chelius:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, really challenging because you had to put yourself in the position of when the parameters like a

Dax Castro:
One to two year

Chad Chelius:
So like, you look at a question, I’m like, okay, like, you know, is this kind of fundamental like, like, if you’ve done this for one or two years, you should definitely know this. Some of them, you know, we really debated on, you know, and and even the questions, you know, there were some that we debated on as well, I mean, we all we all came from different angles, and some of them. I’m just gonna put it out there, we did not all agree on, right. Like, I left the table, and I’m like, had a little bit of chip on my shoulder. That’s not right. But, you know, it’s just part of the process. And it was really, I learned a lot, personally. Well, I mean, like, even even I, you know, somebody who’s been doing this for 10 plus years, you know, I was, I was like, Oh, that’s a really, really great point, you know, and yeah, I just loved, you know, working with everybody. It was fantastic.

Dax Castro:
It was you know, and I will I will say this that, you know, the I feel like the ADS is a great litmus test. If you’ve passed that test, you really do have a good foundation of document accessibility. And as an employer, you know, you could, I would feel confident if somebody came to me with that certification, that they know how to do their job at a competent level, I really feel like it was a great test, because there really isn’t there wasn’t before this test anything out there that kind of said, and I get this question all the time from people on LinkedIn, who say, you know, Hey, Dax, I want to be you know, I want to get certifications people are telling me that they don’t believe what I’m saying, I need something to back up what I you know, what I know. And and before this, ADS, there really wasn’t anything that was comprehensive. I mean, Rob Haverty does a train the trainer, PDF accessibility trainer course. Last year, he’s did it online, I think the year before he did it at accessing higher ground, which is a conference in Colorado. And, you know, it’s great course, but that’s really the closest thing I think to from from a document standpoint. So yeah, I was trolling Twitter the other day, and you know, I want to do a segment called what’s what’s on tour? Who’s on Twitter? I feel like that’d be a good thing to do. I stumbled across this guy, right? And this guy is he does a one. So his Twitter handle is @A11yRhymes. And he does these tweets that are just funny. And this one says, I have a joke about accessibility. Don’t worry, it’s not a bore to get to the punch line, read more, read more, read more, read more and all the read more. So it’s like 100 read Moore’s all in the line, right? It’s just a funny visual. A funny little joke. He’s got some. Let’s see. It’s another one here. That he’s got a poster hung up in in a school clipart as a standard to make it cool. Yellow text wrote on white, how can anybody read this site? It’s funny love if you got a chance, man, God, they’re good. They’re dad humor. You know, a lot of them are dad humor kind of jokes, but with an accessibility bet. So I thought, yeah.

Chad Chelius:
Well, and you know, as part of what we do, you know, I now look at accessibility all the time. Right. And yeah, a quick example, I was sitting in a coffee shop last year, well, before COVID. Right. And, and there was, I noticed there was a guy standing at the front door of the coffee shop, like really close to the door. And I kind of, you know, didn’t really pay too much attention. And like, five minutes later, I looked again, and he’s in the exact same spot. And so I got up and open the door. Here. He was disabled. And he literally could not stand up on the step and open the door towards him at the same time.

Dax Castro: Oh, wow.

Chad Chelius: And it just, it makes me feel so ignorant. Sometimes, you know, like, we take all of these things for granted. And I’m like, Man, you really need a ramp here to help people you know, and another another quick example, I saw a video that somebody posted a man in a wheelchair was trying to get into his car. Car happened to be a Tesla.

Dax Castro:
Oh geez.

Chad Chelius:
He used the summon feature to back the car out of the space floods so he can get into it was I thought I said that that is an accessibility feature. You go you know, yeah, gosh,

Dax Castro:
I want that just as a non disability. No, I know. I know. I just really like beep Oh, I had I was in. I was in in heart of auto depart auto store. And I come out and this truck has parked so close and I’m a big guy. Right, you know? Yeah. And and I parked so close. I couldn’t get in. It was a giant truck. The guy was an older gentleman he had parked up from his side five enough away from the car next to him so that he could get out. But he had blocked me in and went back in asked him to move, he was really gracious about it came out and move. So, you know, it’s it is it is a thing, you know, and as accessibility advocates, you know, I really feel like it goes beyond my PDF documents, it really goes beyond, I’ve grown so much compared to when I started my journey so long ago, in an in my awareness of people’s ability to kind of, I’m more aware of how I speak I was at I did a session at CSUN, on accessible infographics, right. And this is a visual thing, I’m learning how to design more accessible infographics. And I got an email back from somebody who had attended the session and said, Hey, I want to let you know, I got a lot out of your session, I happen to be completely blind, but I was able to follow along with what you said, I took some great notes, and I’m going to give it to my team so that they can create more inclusive and more accessible infographics. And I thought, Wow, how great is that? You know, I mean, and not that I did some something amazing, but I was more conscious about how I described things, making sure that I was not just saying over here up here or you know, just being more descriptive about when you click on the object, you know, box or you know, different things so that people with different ways to digest that information would get more out of it. Right. And it’s those types of awareness that I think as you do this long enough, it just starts to become who you are. Yep.

Chad Chelius:
you’re absolutely right.

Dax Castro:
So want to ask you. So what are your favorite accessibility tools? I know I’ve got a few. But what are what are yours?

Chad Chelius:
If I so probably at the top of the list, my favorite accessibility tool is PDF, go HTML.

Dax Castro:
I am right there with you.

Chad Chelius:
I mean, it is I mean, I mean, for more reasons than I mean, I just think it’s fantastic. It reminds me It reminds me of read mode in your web browser. Yeah, you’re not talk him out. Because I use that all the time. Get all this stuff out of my way. Just show me the article, let me read the content. But PDF, go HTML is great, because it shows you the order. It shows you structure. It allows you to identify problems, like I’ve had a problem with a table before, right with merge cells, you know, and and I kept getting the error on that table. And and I’m going through, you know, unfortunately, kind of cell by cell. And I viewed it in PDF, go HTML and I was like, boom, there it is. I could identify the problem. I knew which one it was went in and fixed it. And it was great. So yeah, love love PDF, go HTML.

Dax Castro:
And that’s by callus right C A L L A S

Chad Chelius:
software. Yeah.

Dax Castro:
So if you if you guys Google that just Callas PDF go HTML, right. That’s the way it?

Chad Chelius:
Yep, it is free. It’s a free, free plug in? Is it Mac and Windows? Do you remember that?

Dax Castro:
I don’t know. I’d have to look it up. But I know I use it on my PC for sure.

Chad Chelius:
I’m trying to find it really quickly.

Dax Castro:
ml 2.0. And it is

Chad Chelius:
it okay, it is? I think it is Mac in Windows. Yeah.

Dax Castro:
You know what, you have to go into the GitHub, they send you an email, but I do believe it is Mac and Windows. And it works really well. Is it because you know what? I don’t have time to sit and inspect every single cell. You know, it’s like you said especially in tables, when your table structure inside the view when you go into view table, the table editor inside Acrobat? Yeah. Your table structures are regular in lots of different ways. Your strip, it’s all screwy, you can’t click on the right cell to get to what’s going on. So then you’re searching for the right TD and the tags tree you’re like, which one is it? All I have to do is open up PD, the callus software, figure out what cell is out of order or which extra one I’ve got, or which one I’m missing and go into the tag stream added it works really well. I agree. Um, I think you know, I would say my, my favorite accessibility tool is NVDA

Chad Chelius:
Hmm, that

Dax Castro:
you know, I will tell you that I think this is the tool most people do not use. Yeah, cuz you’re scared. They don’t understand how to use a screen reader to be able to go in and and test the document. Well, and

Chad Chelius:
here’s the reality Dax like, I think I think the misconception is it’s it’s software like any other piece of software and you need to learn how to use it, you know, everybody thinks you can just kind of open it up and start reading. And you and I know it is not that easy. You are much better at using NVDA than I am. But um, even for me, I have to kind of remember it’s all about, you know, somebody said to me One time that for for a non-sighted user, their keyboard is their eyes. Mm hmm. And that’s because they, when they’re reading a document, they’re using their keyboard to navigate it. Right. Right. You know, I think we all need to remember that. And so just like any other software, you need to actually learn how to use it.

Dax Castro:
Yeah, no, I agree. And the, the, the thing that I use it most for, is to test my tables, right to, to understand how, because I think people don’t understand that you put stuff inside a table, it doesn’t always get read the way you think. And na slash, you know, is n slash a, you put dash dash in a blank cell, jaws is gonna say dash dash, and VA is going to ignore it altogether. Right. And then understanding the differences between those is really important, especially the thing in my, in my industry, in the engineering industry, we do a lot of data with numbers. And people say at the top, in a table head, the title of a table, say dollars and billions, right? So and then the table has dollar symbols and every one of the cells, and it’ll say dollar symbol 1.2. Right, because they think it’s 1.2 billion. The problem is a screen meter is gonna say $1.20. And so they don’t get that that the screen reader doesn’t have the context. But if you take out the dollar symbol, it just says 1.2. And then you’ve already told the user that it is billions is your base, so they get a really good and even user experience. The ferret? Yeah, go ahead.

Chad Chelius:
So do you artifact all the dollar signs?

Dax Castro:
Yeah. Or Well, what we try to do in that case, we have control over the source. So we tell the, we have a week in our company, we Oh, good for how to how to make accessible tables. And so they follow that SAP, and we just deal that with that,

Chad Chelius:
which is the right approach. Right? Yeah. You know, I again, I always tell people, you got to think of accessibility at the beginning, not at the end. Yeah. Right. You just proved that point.

Dax Castro:
Exactly. Absolutely. And I tell people, accessibility is about 20%. of additional work, if you do it as you go. If you do accessibility at the end, it’s like 70% more work, because you’re having to go back and redo things individually. Imagine you’ve got a table that has 200 cells in it a 20 by 10. And you’ve got dollar symbols. And every one you’d have to artifact each one, even if it only took you a second or two. That’s a crazy amount of time. So

Chad Chelius:
you and I both know, too often companies are like, okay, we’re finished with this product. And then it’s like, oh, by the way, make this accessible?

Chad Chelius:
Yeah, of course. It’s like, Oh, my gosh, you know, that’s a podcast in and of itself.

Dax Castro:
I agree.

Chad Chelius:
But the other thing I wanted to mention you were talking about the tables, and a question that I get all the time, which is another this is another good podcast discussion. People say, how is a table read by a screen reader? And I say it’s not. What’s up? This screen reader just doesn’t read the entire table for you.

Dax Castro:
Oh, that’s true.

Chad Chelius:
The user has to navigate the table just like you and I, as a sighted user do Right,

Dax Castro:
right. Right, because it now and announces how many columns or rows that will say table, eight columns, five rows, and then stops? Well, now if you’re in, in your in read read mode, inside NVDA, or Jaws, where it’s insert Down Arrow, it’ll it will actually start reading one cell to write continuously. But here’s the thing who reads a table that way, not the table left to right as going around like you’d read text. So normally, they’ll stop the screen reader. And then they’ll get to it or they press T for table, which is a shortcut key, and then VDA and jaws, right, and then they’ll start navigating the different columns and rows. Right. So again, it goes back to understanding how a person using a screen reader natively actually uses a screen reader. Chat. This has been amazing, dude, this has been so great. I’ve been so glad we’ve been able to kind of capture this stuff. Because, you know, these are conversations you and I have had over the course of the last, you know, month and a half or so. And, you know, I really think there’s some valuable information here. Yeah,

Chad Chelius:
yeah. I mean, how many conversations have you and I had, where we just kind of wax philosophical about, you know, the, the, the challenges of PDF remediation. So I hope I hope other people are will enjoy this. And, you know, yeah, I’d love to see everybody’s feedback. And if there’s something that you’d like to hear about, or hear us talk about on the podcast, please put it in the comments, you know, on the on the site.

Dax Castro:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And anything we talked about, that’s, we’re gonna have, there’ll be should be a transcript below this podcast. So all of our text will be captured. And anytime we mentioned a piece of software or someplace to go or some website or somebody feed, we’re going to post those links in the transcript. So don’t feel like you’ve got to try to listen to them. Marie, listen to them and write them down. But feel free to listen to her podcast as many times as you want. also join our Facebook group. So we have a Facebook group called PDF accessibility. We have almost 1000 over 1000. Members, Chad, can you believe it?

Chad Chelius
It’s crazy. It’s crazy.

Dax Castro:
Yeah. And and then you and I are both going to be speaking at creative pro week, which is March April May 17, through the 21st. And I’m doing PDF accessibility or I’m doing accessibility for InDesign and PowerPoint. And then when you’re doing what do you What’s your topic?

Chad Chelius:
I’m doing Acrobat accessibility. I’m also doing InDesign HTML. I mean, these are not accessibility related, but but InDesign to other formats.

Chad Chelius:
But InDesign HTML really is about accessibility too, right? Because

Chad Chelius:
in some ways, yeah.

Dax Castro:
HTML is an accessible format. And for another podcast, definitely, we’ll talk about the validity of whether PDF should even exist at all. So stay tuned for that. And then, so that is creative pro week Comm. And then I’m, you’ve got LinkedIn learning courses, right on LinkedIn. Absolutely. Yeah.

Chad Chelius:
You know, I started doing while doing LinkedIn for quite some time. But one of the courses that, you know, that that came out of what I do is, is PDF accessibility. And so I’m on I think, my like, third edition of the PDF accessibility course. And I think I left some old, old ones up there, because for people who are using older versions of Acrobat,

Dax Castro:
right,

Chad Chelius:
and then of course, I have advanced accessibility as well. So

Chad Chelius:
and I send people to your stuff all the time for forums, because I think your videos on accessibility forums is a really good video to get people started. So you know, definitely I you know, kudos to you for that for those.

Chad Chelius:
Thanks. Dax. Yeah.

Dax Castro:
So and then I’m speaking at SMPS Build Business 2021 on accessibility. So if you’re in the architectural engineering construction world, the you know, about SMPS Build Business every year, it’s a great conference about things that relate to the engineering architectural construction world. And I will be presenting how accessibility affects your proposals and deliverables. And so I’ll be giving some good topics on how to win more proposals using accessibility as a key feature and how to, to build in accessibility into your budget, so that you can appropriately price your job.

Chad Chelius:
That sounds awesome.

Dax Castro:
Yeah. And then finally, we have I want to thank, you know, I WAP is a great organization. I know we talked about it in this podcast, but I’m a member of the International Association of accessibility professionals. Chad, you were on the committee. And you know, I really think that it’s a great organization, if you want to rub elbows with other people in the community, and get some great certifications and get some great, they have some great body of knowledge. So the companion that we that was created to go with the course for the accessible document specialists and their c pack certification. They have a body of knowledge that is, you know, 15 or 20 pages of real great accessibility references. So So I would definitely check that out. All right. Well, Chad, we did it our first podcast, what do you think?

Chad Chelius:
I think I think it was awesome. I I’d love to hear what everybody else thinks. And I’m looking forward to doing more. All

Dax Castro:
right, guys. Thank you so much. This is Chad and Dax and we are wishing you an amazing journey on your accessibility adventures, and we’ll catch you in the next podcast.