From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

The JAWS PDF reader experience

From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

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The JAWS PDF reader experience

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- [Instructor] I'm going to state this again. There's no better way to ensure that a document is compliant than to actually test it using assistive technology. In my previous video, I showed you testing a document using NVDA, and in this video I'd like to show you JAWS. Now both programs are great for reading and testing documents and ensuring a good user experience. And NVDA and JAWS are definitely the two primary screen readers in use today. Now the Mac platform does have its own screen reader called VoiceOver, and although it does work, it's a bit more complicated to use than NVDA and JAWS is. So I'm going to start this video with my Two Trees Olive Oil document already open. And I'm going to go ahead and start by launching JAWS on my computer. - [Voiceover] JAWS accessible PDF 2025 scripts-group. - [Instructor] Now I'm going to tell JAWS to be quiet for a second. And by the way, I do that by pressing the Ctrl key on my keyboard. Pressing the Ctrl key will just temporarily tell JAWS to be quiet, I don't want to hear you right now. And it just tells it to be quiet so that you can kind of focus on other things. So I'm going to press the H key on my keyboard. - [Voiceover] Employee manual C called Contents heading level two. - [Instructor] And I actually pressed it twice, so it jumped to the next heading. So using JAWS, the H key is going to read the headings in your document. And again, everybody's got their own personal preference regarding how they prefer to read a document. I mean, so do sighted users. Every user you talk to is going to have a different approach to how they prefer to read a document. But reading the headings is a very common method that people like to use to kind of figure out what the different sections of the document are. Now in addition to the H key, let me do it one more time. - [Voiceover] Section one colon, Introduction, heading level two link. - [Instructor] So in this case, the heading is also a link. So that's why you heard the word link at the very end because if I wanted to follow that link, I certainly could do that. Now in addition to the H key, the H key is just going to read all headings, like it's going to consider every different heading level to be ambiguous. And it's just going to read the next heading, but I can also use the numbers on my keyboard. Now in a PDF file, we can tag our headings from anything from H1 to H6. So if I press the number one on my keyboard. - [Voiceover] No more headings at level one. - [Instructor] I have no more headings at level one. But if I hit the number two. - [Voiceover] Section two colon, Definitions of Employee Status, heading level two link. - [Instructor] So now it'll go to the next H2. If I press the number three. - [Voiceover] Section one colon, Introduction, heading level two. 1.1, Changes in Policy, heading level three. - [Instructor] Now, it'll jump to the next heading level three. Let's do that again. - [Voiceover] Section two colon, Definitions of Employee Status, heading level two. Left quote, Employees, right quote, Defined, heading level three. - [Instructor] It's going to read the next heading level three. Now you probably heard it also voiced the heading two that belonged to it, and that's just a behavior of JAWS. Now, in addition to your headings, I can use the G key to read the next graphic. - [Voiceover] Harvested oil stored in burlap bags until they are ready for processing, graphic. - [Instructor] So graphics are required to have alternate text to describe what that graphic is about. And when we read a graphic using JAWS, it's going to read the alternate text and then announce that it's a graphic. Let's do that one more time. - [Voiceover] Frantoio, Sevillano, and Kalamata olives grown at Two Trees Olive Oil Orchard, dash Santa Rosa, California, graphic. - [Instructor] Now we can do the same thing with tables. If I press the T key. - [Voiceover] Wrapping the top, table with three columns and 14 rows. Column one, row one, Health Insurance spans three columns. - [Instructor] So JAWS is going to read the next table. Now it's up to the user to navigate through that table. And I do that by holding down the Ctrl + Opt keys on my keyboard and using the arrow keys. - [Voiceover] Blank row two, Office Visit Copay, row three. - [Instructor] Now I can move to the right. - [Voiceover] PPO dollar 15.00, column two. - [Instructor] Notice how it voiced PPO before it voiced the $15. That's because PPO is identified as a header cell for the table. Watch when I move to the right again. - [Voiceover] HMO dollar 10.00, column three. - [Instructor] And again, because the table's tagged correctly, it's reading the header cell that belongs to that data cell. We can also do that for lists if I press the L key. - [Voiceover] List of three items. - [Instructor] It will tell me it's a list of a certain number of items. Let's do that again. - [Voiceover] List of 10 items. - [Instructor] There we go. And now I can use the down arrow key on my keyboard. - [Voiceover] Bullet, New Year's Day. Bullet, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Bullet, President's apostrophe Day. Bullet, Memorial Day. - [Instructor] So again, using the keyboard, and this is a key thing to understand, users of assistive technology use the keyboard to navigate a document. They do not use a mouse. So they've got to navigate the document through a keyboard. So all of these shortcuts used together help users to navigate to different pieces of that document and help them to understand what that document is about.

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