Grackle Docs and Google Docs Accessibility

This is a descriptive transcript of the video Using Grackle Docs to make accessible PDF from Google Docs.

(The presenter is sitting at his desk, wearing fairly fashionable workclothes, addresses the camera directly.)

DAVID BERMAN: Hi, everyone. I’m David Berman. And I’m going to show you today something awesome for creating accessible documents. For those of you who know me, you know I travel the world looking for the latest, greatest technologies that will help us all create more accessible documents, more accessible websites.

And this one may be the best thing I’ve found all year. You know, for those of you who work with my team at David Berman Communications, you know we’re crazy nerd for Google Docs. We’re creating Google Docs every day. And so, for example, all our proposals start life as a Google Doc.

And as you can imagine it means we’re very often creating accessible PDF files from those Google Docs to share with everyone. Now, we’ve known how to make an accessible PDF from a Google Doc for a long time. We use our classic approach exported as Word.

And then, if you’ve been to one of my courses, you’ve learned we have a whole process for creating the most accessible Word file possible. And then, we have our recipe for going from .docx to export to PDF. Then open that PDF in Acrobat Pro.

And then in Acrobat Pro, a few minutes work, or sometimes a lot more work, depending on how complex the file is, we get ourselves to an accessible PDF file. Perhaps even a PDF/UA file, that is a PDF file that conforms to the international standard for accessible PDF.

And then, but the client comes back, and wants to change a sentence, or a image, and we potentially have to start the whole process again. And– or we did, until now. But now, I have found this product called Grackle Docs. And Grackle Docs is an add-on to Chrome. And I’m going to show it to you now.

Here I am in Chrome. And I have opened up a typical Google Doc. If I go to the add-ons menu, I can get add-ons. And if I type the word Grackle, like the bird, the first match is Grackle Docs. Now, I’ve already installed Grackle Docs. So if I go to my add-ons menu, there’s Grackle Docs.

And if I choose launch, up pops a panel on the right-hand side, the Grackle Docs panel. It’s already chewing away, running a series of checks on my document to discover if it can find anything inaccessible about it. And my document’s 16 pages, so it’s taking a few moments. Actually, it’s done now. So it found 13 of 15 checks passed.

So it found some failures, and a lot of passes. So let’s take a look at some of the failures. The first failure was the check for document title is required. Now, as you may know, every PDF file, in order to be accessible, needs to have a document title in its metadata.

We’re not talking about the title of the document up here, the name of the Google Doc. We’re talking about the one in the metadata, the description field in the metadata. Now, if I open up this check, Grackle Docs gives me more information, including access where I can pop up a Grackle Docs dialog box, which allows me to fix the problem.

And indeed, this document title field, it’s proposing the name of the Google Doc as my document title, which is helpful, except it’s not quite what I’d eventually want to call it. I think I’ll take out the word draft. And there’s other metadata fields which are optional for accessibility. But I could choose to modify them while I’m here.

I think I’ll put my name in, for instance, here as the author. And I choose Update. And that should take care of the document properties issue. And in fact, if I chose recheck right now, it’s seeing if it passed. And indeed, it’s checked off.

So now, we have one other issue to look for. And here we are under images. The check is that images should have alternative text, or be marked as artifact. And again, if I open it up, I can get some more information. Now it’s– Grackle Docs is telling me there’s 10 images in my document.

And indeed, I know that there’s one of them that doesn’t pass. And it’s this badge right here, this image of a badge. So this image of a badge passes because I’m going to the Alt text command that’s built into Google Docs. And indeed, there’s my description, my alternative text certified accessible badge for WCAG 2.0 AA.

So I’m going to copy that. I’m just pressing Copy on my keyboard. Because I’m going to need it in a moment. I go to the other badge, and if I go to it, and choose Alt Text, indeed it’s empty, which is why Grackle Docs failed it. So I’m going to paste the text from the first one in. And modify– this is the badge for PDF/UA compliance.

So I want to change that to for PDF/UA, and click OK. And now I will recheck again. And we’ll see if we pass. And by the way, you don’t have to run a full recheck. Grackle Docs has this advanced feature on every check, where you can just recheck the one thing you solved. But I wanted to see if we passed everything.

And indeed, we do. So we passed it all. So I could now export my PDF. But first, I wanted to just show you a few more things that are awesome about Grackle Docs. One of them is this document structure pane. If I choose Document Structure, it shows me all the objects in my document in the order they appear.

But sometimes you don’t want them to be in that order. For example, in our proposals, we’ve got this paragraph about the accessibility of the document, which I would prefer to come earlier in the reading order. If someone were using an assistive technology, like a screen reader. And so what I can do is I locate that paragraph in the document structure pane.

And if I highlight it, I can now drag and drop it, so it’s right after heading one. So now in the reading order, first, an assistive technology, like a screen reader, would announce out loud, the heading, proposal blah blah blah. And then, the next thing it will announce is this paragraph. And then it will go on to announce everything else.

Grackle Docs has lots of other advanced features. There’s a pop up menu here with all sorts of things. But let’s finish off with exporting our PDF. Now, what you don’t want to do is go to the File menu and do what you normally do in Google Docs, which could be tempting to go to Download As, and choose PDF.

You’d get a PDF file, but it wouldn’t be the PDF file that has the tagging in it that Grackle Docs is going to provide. Instead, we want to use a button that’s built into Grackle Docs. Remember, on our accessibility check panel in Grackle Docs, there’s an Export Tag PDF button.

So I choose the Export Tag PDF button. And I start to export my file. And what it’s doing is it’s taking my 16 pages, and generating a tagged PDF. And then once I have that tagged PDF, I can open it in Google Docs. But what I’m really going to want to do is I’m going to want to download it, and then open it in Acrobat Pro, or even in the pack 2.0 checker for PDF/UA accessibility.

Hey, look, there’s a lot of other nerd details we could go on with but I’ve got to get back to getting my proposal out. And I’m eager to share with you more about Grackle Docs. This is what I think I’m going to do. I think I’m going to do more videos about Grackle Docs.

In fact, I think I may do a video on nothing but how awesome they are at dealing with tables. Because making accessible tables can take a long time in a Google Doc or even a Word document. But with Grackle Docs, it can take just a matter of a minute. You’ve got all your tables accessible.

So that I’m going to create. I’m going to put a page on a website called davidberman.com/grackledocs. And there, I’ll put in links explaining things like PDF/UA. I’ll explain how you can get the best deal possible on Grackle Docs itself.

I’ll also have a place where we can have discussions about what we can do to make this product better, because we’re working with the Grackle Docs people to make this product the best it can be. And so I really want to encourage you to work hard to create documents and websites that include everyone.