What is Data Entry Costing You?
There are lots of things in life that we’ve simply come to accept – paper forms that we download as a PDF, print, complete by hand, mail/fax for processing and wait (days…often weeks) for an answer.
If we’re the organisation on the receiving end of these forms – we’ve come to accept that our mailroom will be busy processing these paper documents, handwriting resembles what a spider produces after falling in an ink-well and despite our best efforts to explain what information is mandatory, a high percentage of forms will be missing required information or the phone number will have 9 digits, the date of birth is the date the form was completed ARGHHHH!!!!
It’s a bad experience for the form filler and form processor. But do you know what it’s really costing you? I hope this article will help you calculate that cost…
Assumptions:
- We don’t account for the cost of customers completing forms as we don’t pay their salaries – cost are counted when the mailed/faxed item hits the office for processing;
- We’ll ignore postage costs for the purposes of this calculation;
- We’ll allow $40 per hour as a cost for staff processing mail, performing data entry, etc (allowing for on-costs above salary such as IT, Real Estate, Payroll Tax etc.);
- 38% of forms received will require re-work due to missing or incorrect information*
- Forms will be scanned to make the data entry and paper-pushing more efficient – scanning will be at a rate of 1,500 page per hour per scanner;²
- Mail (envelopes) will be opened and prepared for processing (staples removed etc.) at a rate of 180 items per hour per operator; ²
- Data Entry on alpha-numeric values will be at a rate of 8,000 keystrokes per hour per operator. Given the accuracy rate of 98.5% on single-pass-data-entry, all fields will be blind-double-keyed to ensure accuracy even though this is more costly (data entered a second time by an operator without visibility of the first operators data with an automatic comparison to the first pass to ensure accuracy); ²
- Exceptions will be processed at a rate of 10 per hour per operator (6 minutes per item) – based on an expectation that exception processing will involve putting the item back in an envelope and returning it to the client. If the call centre is involved in contacting the client to correct the form, this would be a similar cost allowing 4 minutes per successful call and 1 minute for each of 2 unsuccessful call attempts; ²
- A Standard Application form such as a credit card application will average 250 to 450 characters for data entry purposes;
- Data Entry fields are based on the following standard field lengths (numbers of characters, allowing for spaces);
- Title & Full Name: 20 Keystrokes
- Address & Suburb & State & Postcode: 35 Keystrokes
- Mobile or Landline: 11 Keystrokes
- Occupation: 16 Keystrokes
- Employer Name: 17 Keystrokes
- Employer Address (2 fields allowed on form): 22 Keystrokes
- Drivers License: 9 Keystrokes
- Email Address: 26 Keystrokes.
So let’s do the numbers using the Avoka Data Entry Calculator assuming we get 100 of these forms every day…
(FTE = full time employee)
So this would give us a conservative average cost of processing paper application forms of $5.78 per item at the low-end of the range for credit card applications (250 characters). At the high-end (500 characters) its just over $9.00 – and that’s just mail handling, data entry and simple exception processing by returned mail or phone and excludes postage and printing costs. IT ALL ADDS UP.
There are a number of things you can do to address this – document imaging with intelligent character recognition (ICR) can greatly reduce costs, but can introduce errors when the handwriting is interpreted.
The real solution to this is to stop the problem at the source – make the data collection electronic. Instead of customers hand-writing forms, why not get them to enter the information electronically. Online forms such as HTML web forms and Flash Based web forms are great for online only forms – and PDF SmartForms are fantastic for longer more complex forms that could be completed in multiple sittings (save and come back to it) and those forms requiring signatures or where a PDF receipt of the submitted form is required.
But this is just the data capture cost – when you extend this to a process such as on-boarding a new customer (e.g. Credit Card Application) – costs grow exponentially as you ‘do more’ with the data on the form and these costs as exacerbated by errors and delays associated with moving paper around an organisation. In fact, according to a Forrester report (Le Clair, Craig. In Good Times and Bad, Document-Centric Web Transactions Lower Costs and Improve Experience – Forrester – December 2008), the cost of acquiring a new customer through the 3 primary channels breaks down like this:
- In-Store – $182
- Call Centre – $177
- Online – $51
Avoka have dealt with clients that process over 1,000 mortgage applications forms per day and a client that received 202,000 time critical forms in a 10 day period! The data entry challenge is often a multi-million dollar problem. The solution doesn’t have to be!
You can download a copy of this data entry calculator here which will allow you to change these assumptions and performs the calculations based on your situation.
* These figures were based on an analysis of the data collected on 11,000 paper application forms for financial services products and are used as a typical form example with Names, Addresses, etc. These values are based on Australian population – so each geography will have its own benchmarks for length of a name, length of a residential address, etc.
² Industry standards based on a commercial business process outsourcing offerings for document processing.
Higher Education – Now & Future: Callista Community Event 2010
Callista & Callista Users Shaping the Future of Student Management Systems
I had the pleasure last week of attending the Callista Community Event (CCE) for 2010 in Melbourne – apart from making me feel old (by hearing how much has changed in how universities manage their student relationships since I left university), it was a real eye opener regarding how much effort is going in to ensuring the relationship between a University and its Students is as rewarding for both parties as possible and how technology is playing an important part in achieving that.
Let me back up…Callista are one of the leading Student Management Systems in Australia. They’re kind of like an ERP for Universities. There are 13 universities in Australia using Callista and Avoka were invited to attend and sponsor because a project we’ve been involved with was the integration of Adobe LiveCycle for eForms and Workflow with Callista at the University of Western Sydney (there’s a little blurb on that project below) and UWS presented to the group on the challenges and results delivered by that project.
So what did I learn about IT and Universities? Well…
- Students are Customers: Universities are treating their students as customers – to the extent that they are looking at ensuring the student experience before joining the university, whilst studying, after leaving the university are all exceptional experiences. Hence the UWS project for eForms and Workflow to ensure administrative processes for students are easy to access, complete and track online and provide minimal overhead for lecturers.
- Lecturers and Administration Staff need to be attracted and retained: Talented staff are just as valued in the university sector as they are in any other industry. So mechanisms that allow the university to simplify the job of staff are a hot topic. Lecturers will have contact with hundreds of students (customers) every week.
- CRM and Analytics: Universities are using Student Management Systems, Student Information Systems and CRM systems to manage and improve the relationship with their students. In fact, Deloitte presented on the use of data analytics to identify things like the propensity of a student to leave the university before completing their studies (this has a financial and reputation impact on the university). This wasn’t theory – Deloitte have done this predictive analytical work.
- Education is Global: Not only are universities marketing to attract students from overseas, but with the use of eLearning technologies, they’re educating students globally and in some cases have established Campus(es) in far reaching corners of the world. So IT is helping the universities take their teaching to the world.
- Universities are Businesses: Universities face the same financial challenges as every organisation – do more with less. The GFC impacted enrolments, particularly from overseas students, so retention of existing students became an even bigger priority. IT systems that streamline labour intensive processes mean staff and financial resources can be directed to attracting and retaining students. Marketing in the university sector in Australia is a multi-million dollar business, for each university.
- Social Networking: Social Networks are changing the way universities work – students are collaborating online. Asking questions online. Sharing thoughts online. This is obviously an area the universities can leverage – work is going in to determining how the value of social networks can be harnessed to improve the student experience.
- Green is on the Agenda: As thought leaders in so many areas (most areas of everything!) the university sector feels an obligation to lead the way on sustainability. A historically paper focused sector is trying to move away from paper to electronic documents and communication methods (web conferencing) without compromising a student’s ability to take notes, collaborate with class mates, etc.
- TLA’s: I learnt a few new 3 letter acronyms (I.T. is probably the only acronym in I.T. that isn’t a TLA!!!)
- SMS – Student Management System
- SIS – Student Information System
- LMS – Learning Management System
Universities are preparing themselves now for a world where:
- Courses are dynamically assembled from modules;
- iPad and other mobile devices chance the way students (and lecturers) work;
- Virtual Classrooms – anywhere in the world with real-time and recorded audio/visual materials;
- Study Groups on Facebook – why not!
- Intellectual Property – As you move to electronic distribution of lecture notes, how do you protect this valuable asset that takes significant time to develop and maintain?
Adobe LiveCycle and Callista at UWS
In a world of consolidation (we’re heading towards having 2 airlines, 2 banks and 2 IT companies…Microsoft and Google…globally with all the consolidation going on!) it shows a real maturity in a company like Callista to not only support the integration of Adobe LiveCycle for eForms and Workflow at UWS but to invite UWS and Avoka to speak at their Community Event to other universities. The open architecture of Callista means Callista doesn’t have to be all things to all people – allowing for integration allows for flexibility without compromising the core source code of the product by creating customised versions for every client.
UWS capitalised on this and used Adobe LiveCycle for eForms (SmartForms) and Workflow Management to create electronic processes where paper reigned previously on ‘exception processes’ such as obtaining credits for previous studies in respect to the requirements on a current course of study. Where these transactions were paper forms completed by students, hand delivered to lecturers for approval and processing and manually entered in to Callista…they are now
- accessed online as interactive PDF’s by students,
- completed in the free Adobe Reader,
- submitted to an automated workflow for routing to lecturers (with reminders, escalations, etc.)
- and then approved transactions are automatically updated to the Callista database and TRIM document management system.
Setting a User Task Deadline – Based on Form Data: LiveCycle Tips and Tricks
LiveCycle User Assign Tasks have a neat User Interface for settings deadlines. Setting it up with a timeout and a route to follow after the deadline has elapsed is all done graphically. It is well documented and pretty easy to follow.
Recently a customer came to me, asking to deadline a User Assign Task – based on a date in the form. I said yes I can do it. I knew that LiveCycle supports Literal (read Graphical) and Variable (read code) configuration for every component and there were over 80 data types in LCES 8.2.
Setting a deadline for an Assign Task during process runtime is not obvious. The Deadline section can take an XPath expression (see below) to something but the magic question is what XPath expression?
It’s not well documented but there is a built-in LiveCycle type made exactly for this purpose – called TaskDeadline.
Once you declare a variable of that type you can basically set it to do anything you want. Here are the XPath settings I used in a Set Value task for configuring the Task Deadline dynamically.
| /process_data/deadlineVar/object/@selectedRoute | ‘Deadlined’ |
| /process_data/@deadlineDate | /process_data/xfaForm/object/data/xdp/datasets/data/myform/deadlinedate |
| /process_data/@iDays | get-days-from-date-difference( /process_data/@deadlineDate , format-dateTime-withFormat( current-date() , ‘yyyy-MM-dd’ ) ) |
| /process_data/deadlineVar/object/dateObj/@days | /process_data/@iDays + 1 |
| /process_data/deadlineVar/object/@omitDeadlineRouteFromUser | 1 |
Note that the Selected Route is configurable, and a button showing that route can be omitted from the Workspace chrome with the expression in the last assignment.
What’s new in LiveCycle Designer ES2?
Adobe has recently released LiveCycle ES2 – the second major update to their enterpise suite. This blog takes a look at what is new for PDF form developers and designers.
What is LiveCycle Designer?
LiveCycle Designer is the Adobe tool for building PDF forms.
Hang on a minute, can’t you do that with Acrobat? Yes, you can create simple forms by over-laying fields onto a PDF with Acrobat. You use Designer when you get serious about forms and want to provide your users with the best experience possible. Designer provides enhanced form functionality, including:
- Streamlined workflow; create content and form elements in a single tool. Content changes can be performed without having to re-apply form elements, such as accessibility tags
- Dynamic content; forms that personalise their content to the user and guide them through the data capture process. This is implemented with content show/hide and repeating sections
- Data connections; bind fields to external data sources for easier integration with other systems. Data structures are protected from changes to form layout
- Reuse; fragments, common objects and templates allow content to be reused across multiple forms
LiveCycle Designer is a Windows application that can be purchased on its own or comes bundled with Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle Workbench. The bundled version is automatically opened by its parent application when needed or can be opened stand-alone by running FormDesigner.exe
New features in Designer ES2
The most significant change to Designer is the removal of the Form Guide Builder. LiveCycle Guides are now built in Workbench and no longer require a base XDP file. There will be more on this in upcoming blogs.
There is minimal over-head in migrating to Designer ES2 due to very little change in the workflow of building PDF forms. What Adobe have given us in this release is additional features for making it easier to produce high quality forms. Form designers and developers can now be more productive than ever.
Please note that the minimum versions of Reader/Acrobat that you must support will determine which of these features are available to you. Contact Avoka if you need further information.
Action Builder
A common theme in my training courses and client engagements has been that form designers want to realise the benefits from the smart features of PDF forms without having to get too deep into coding.
Designer ES2 introduces Action Builder – a simple wizard interface for building useful, common behaviours with no coding, including showing/hiding an object, attaching a file, displaying a message box and perhaps the most useful of all – adding and removing repeating sections and table rows.
Clearly, a lot of thought has gone into Action Builder. It is surprisingly forgiving. It manages the code so that it continues to work even when you move and rename fields and works happily alongside custom code. It even handles the case when its generated code is changed.
Early indications are that this will be useful for experienced developers as well as designers and novice developers. It provides a useful starting point for advanced features, such as clearing the fields in the last row to be deleted in a dynamic table.
Error Messaging
A common requirement from clients is to enhance the default error messaging provided by Acrobat/Reader. In fact, it is so common that Avoka has invested a significant amount of time in building a sophisticated errors framework for our clients’ forms.
Designer ES2 enhances the default behaviour by providing additional messaging handling options. Without coding, the form designer can configure:
- The behaviour of error message boxes
- How to highlight fields that fail validation
- How to highlight mandatory fields that are left empty
- Whether to set focus to the first field that fails validation
An interesting feature of this, is that it provides real-time validation. For instance, if you have configured the background colour of fields to turn red on failed validation, this will occur as soon as you exit an invalid field. Historically, this was difficult to achieve as it meant putting code on every field. This has been made simple in ES2 by the introduction of the next feature – event propogation.
Event Propogation
It is common to want a group of fields in a form to exhibit the same behaviour. For instance, you may want to strip leading and trailing spaces from text as it is entered into your form.
Designer provides several ways to do this when you are first building a form, including using pre-coded common objects. However, it was difficult to maintain as any change would typically require changing code on multiple objects.
Event propogation makes this much easier by allowing code on an a container to be inherited by every object within that container. I could write my space stripping code in the exit event of a top level subform, turn on event propogation and have all text fields immediately start stripping text.
A nice feature of this is that it is accumulative; an object will execute the code it inherits from every one of its containers that propogate events in addition to any code that is written directly on its events.
Data Connection to Adobe Data Model
LiveCycle ES2 introduced the Adobe Data Model to make it easier to share data resources across applications, including LiveCycle guides and processes. Data from an ES2 Data Model can be displayed in a static form by using the new Adobe Data Model data connection. Form fields are bound to data fields in the Designer data view pallet in the usual way.
Localisation
To create forms in multiple languages using XLIFF it is necessary to configure Designer to create a unique identifier for each text string. This can now be configured using the ‘Create Translation IDs when Saving’ property on the Document Handling section of the Options dialog box.
Three new locales have been added to Designer ES2: Catalan, Basque and Tagalog.
Usability Improvements
Based on community feedback, Adobe have made various usability improvements, including:
- Filtering data views. Makes it easier to handle large data connections by filtering for the sections that you are working on
- Integration with Workbench ES2. Workbench now opens forms for editing in Designer stand-alone which provides the full set of features and makes better use of screen real-estate. The two work well together – seamlessly opening and saving forms between the two
- Default scripting language. Rather than set the language to JavaScript every time you create a new form, you can now set it once in the Options dialog box
- Pasting into drop-downs and list boxes. Rather than enter each value of a list separately, you can now copy the entire list from a text editor and paste it into Designer
- Enhanced scripting assistance. The script pallet feature that suggests methods and properties as you type now provides additional information including input and output parameters
- Snap to Object. Makes it easier to layout objects in a positioned layout
- Metadata properties. You can now add custom properties to a form, such as copyright URLs, in the Info tab of the Document Properties dialog box
Find out more…
Resolve a specific LiveCycle Designer issue or have general questions answered by one of our experienced consultants by contacting Avoka.
Learn more by attending our certified LiveCycle Designer training course.
Explore what is possible with LiveCycle Designer on our website.
All Avoka Components for Adobe LiveCycle now ES2 compatible
We have updated all of our Adobe LiveCycle Components and they are now ES2 compatible. Please visit the Components page of the Avoka website for an overview of available Components. You can download our Components free of charge for evaluation and development purposes. or buy a subscription that will give you a year-long production licence to all Components. Existing users of our components are eligible for a free upgrade as long as your subscription is current – licence keys remain the same.
What are Avoka Components for Adobe LiveCycle ES2?
Adobe LiveCycle ES derives much of its power and ease of use by enabling complex human, integration or computation tasks to be built into reusable modules known as LiveCycle ES2 Components. These components are the building blocks of Adobe LiveCycle ES2 and enable process designers to visually assemble workflows without requiring any programming skills.
These components are developed in Java and can therefore provide a diverse range of services to your application. They include:
- Integration with existing business applications
- Integration with third party applications
- Interacting with databases and other data storage systems
- Performing complex calculations
- Converting and transforming data and information
PDF Accessibility – part 3 of 3 (reading text)
This blog is the third in a series that explores PDF accessibility. This installment describes how to implement PDFs using Adobe LiveCycle Designer so that form text is accessible to users of assistive technologies.
In this series:
PDF Accessibility – part 1 (introduction) – an introduction to accessibility standards and technologies
PDF Accessibility – part 2 (reading fields) – a step-by-step guide on making form fields accessible
WCAG 2.0 Guidelines
1.3.1 Info and Relationships: Information, structure and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programatically determined or are aviable in text 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence: When the sequence in which content is presented affects its meaning, a correct reading sequence can be programatically determined 2.4.1 Bypass Blocks: A mechanism is available to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on multiple Web pages 2.4.5 Multiple Ways: More than one way is available to locate a Web page within a set of Web pages except where the Web Page is the result of, or a step in, a process 2.4.6 Headings and Labels: Headings and labels describe topic or purpose 2.4.10 Section Headings: Section headings are used to organize the content 3.2.3 Consistent Navigation: Navigational mechanisms that are repeated on multiple Web pages within a set of Web pages occur in the same relative order each time they are repeated, unless a change is initiated by the user
These guidelines are all about making it easier for assistive technology users to find text.
This is important due to the way that assistive technology users interact with a form. Unimpaired users can rapidly identify form text. They have the benefit of being able to scan a form by eye in any direction that they choose and rapidly absorb large amounts of text. Assistive technology users can access the same information, but at a slower pace. Mechanisms are required to present form structure so that assistive technology users can navigate directly to areas of interest.
Tags
You add structure to your PDF by tagging text. Similar to the table of contents in a document, tags are used by assistive technology to provide the user with a summary of a form’s content and the ability to quickly navigate to an area of interest without having to take the time to read the entire form.
To make your tags available to assistive technology, you have to check the ‘Generate Accessibility Information (Tags) for Acrobat’ in the ‘Form Properties’ dialog window.
Headings
Add structure to your PDF by tagging the headings. Set the ‘Role’ property to ‘Heading Level X’ for text objects in the accessibility pallet.
Headings can be tagged in a hierarchy up to 6 levels deep. Use the same rules that you would in a document – tag heading level 3’s under heading level 2’s etc. Heading tags can only be applied to an entire text object – you cannot tag part of the text.
When an assistive technology user runs the commands to navigate headings, they will be given the ability to quickly browse the form’s structure and navigate quickly to the area of interest. For instance, JAWS10 can display the dialog window below and will read all headings or only those at a specified level and the ability to ‘Move To Heading’.
Lists
Add structure to your PDF by tagging lists. This is appropriate for simple text lists. Do not tag nested lists or lists that contain fields.
Set the ‘Role’ property to ‘List’ and ‘List Item’ on subforms in the accessibility pallet. The ‘List’ subform should contain at least one ‘List Item’ subform, but not necessarily at the top level.
When an assistive technology user runs the commands to read lists, they will be given the ability to quickly navigate to any list in the form. For instance, JAWS10 can display the dialog window below and will read the content of each list. Each item in the dialog represents a ‘List’ with all its ‘List Items’. The screen reader reads any text that it can find within the tagged subforms.
LiveCycle @ MAX
Last week I had the privilege of attending MAX, Adobe’s annual conference, and being part of the buzz and excitement around Adobe’s strategy and direction.
There is always a lot going on at MAX, and it’s always difficult to decide what to attend, and what to blog about – so I thought I’d focus on LiveCycle, and leave Flex and Flash and Creative Suite to others.
Some of the highlights for me were:
- Walking in to the LiveCycle pre-conference tutorial on Sunday (yes, people gave up their weekends to attend technical training) and seeing an entire roomful of people (at a rough count, about 70 workstations) banging away building applications using the LiveCycle ES2 beta. Apparently, LiveCycle was the only one tutorial that was completely sold out, as were several LiveCycle sessions during MAX.
- Two new products added to the LiveCycle platform: LiveCycle Mosaic (http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/mosaic/) and LiveCycle Collaboration Services (http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/collaborationservice/ )
- LiveCycle WorkSpace approvals via mobile devices.
- Seeing LiveCycle and Enterprise Development being showcased at the opening keynote by Ben Forta and Rob Tarkoff . http://max.adobe.com/online/keynote_monday/ – About 62 minutes in for Rob and 71 minutes for Ben. Both talks includes a few sample enterprise applications, as well as demos of Mosaic, approvals via mobile devices, and more.
- The new version of Form Guides, or just Guides, as they now seem to be known. We’ve been playing with the early versions of the new Guide Builder for a little while now, and we think Adobe have done an awesome job on this release – Guides are now very powerful and very easy – we’re very very happy.
- The Adobe Data Model. In the Enterprise, everything usually starts and stops with data in a database somewhere. Data model driven development is part of LiveCycle Data Services, but is also used as the basis for the data storage in the new Guides. We’re very excited about this.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/modeldriven-development-using-flash-builder-4-and-livecycle-data-services-es/
You can view many of the Adobe sessions on Adobe TV here:
http://tv.adobe.com/show/max-2009-develop/
including this one, on What’s New in LiveCycle ES2
http://max.adobe.com/online/session/46
This is Jayan’s pick of the sessions:
http://blogs.adobe.com/livecycle/2009/10/max_2009_sessions_about_livecy.html
One other amusing note: The mythical John Jacobs, who is a “sample” user that appears in many of LiveCycle’s samples and demos, actually exists. He was at the MAX conference, and attended the pre-conference tutorials. Hello John!
Form Design for the Rest of Us – Avoka SmartForm Composer
There are some people who have an instinctive feel for design – color, balance, typefaces, effective use of whitespace – and who can create beautiful looking forms. I can’t. My forms generally look like they were designed by a six-year-old with a box of crayons. I usually rely on someone else with creative design skills to help me to come up with a good looking form.
On the other hand, I can build forms with great functionality, because I’ve got a programming background, I’ve been building forms using LiveCycle Designer for 5 years, and I’ve read large portions of the 3000+ pages of API documentation that Adobe provide (yes, really). Plus I have a team of very experienced LiveCycle developers around me who I can call on to help me if I get stuck.
Composer Design Window
You may be a bit of a geek like me, or perhaps the thought of programming bores you to tears. You may have some of the creative talents that I lack, or perhaps you’re “creatively-challenged” like me. Or maybe you’re a pragmatist who doesn’t care about style or programming, all you’re really concerned about is the business problem of collecting the data that you need, and making it as easy and intuitive for your users to interact with your form.
Whichever category you fit into, it’s unlikely that you have the complete set of skills and experience to build a SmartForm from beginning to end.
This is exactly why we built Avoka SmartForm Composer – for you!
We’ve taken all of the knowledge that our Form Design Team have gained in dozens of person-years of experience in building forms, and we’ve encapsulated all that knowledge in Composer. We’ve wrapped that knowledge up into a web-based Flex application that makes it really easy to build forms.
Smart Templates
With Composer, you simply select one of our pre-defined Smart Templates, and you’ll end up with a form that looks great, no matter what your design skills. Add business logic easily using our intuitive rules editors – no programing required. Or choose from our specially designed pre-fabricated “blocks” that embed professionally coded business logic into your form. Click the “Publish” button, and Composer will generate an Adobe XFA compliant PDF SmartForm, and optionally publish to the LiveCycle Repository or Avoka FormCenter. Need to change something across all your forms? Simply tweak the master Style Sheet to change colors, fonts, margins, logos and other visual aspects of your form.
I’m biased, of course, but I’m very excited about Composer. I think it will enable all of us to build intelligent, interactive PDF SmartForms easily, quickly and reliably, and ultimately help to streamline our business processes.
For more information about Composer (including demos), or to stay informed or sign up for our beta program, please visit: http://www.avoka.com/composer
PDF Accessibility – part 2 of 3 (reading fields)
This blog is the second in a series that explores PDF accessibility. This installment describes how to implement PDFs using Adobe LiveCycle Designer so that form fields are accessible to users of assistive technologies.
In this series:
PDF Accessibility – part 1 of 3 (introduction) – an introduction to accessibility standards and technologies
PDF Accessibility – part 3 of 3 (reading text) – a step-by-step guide on making text accessible
WCAG 2.0 Guidelines
1.1.1 Non-text Content: All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose 2.4.6 Headings and Labels: Headings and labels describe topic or purpose 3.2.4 Consistent Identification: Components that have the same functionality within a set of Web pages are identified consistently 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions: Labels or instructions are provided when content requires user input 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value: For all user interface components (including but not limited to: form elements, links and components generated by scripts), the name and role can be programmatically determined; states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set; and notification of changes to these items is available to user agents, including assistive technologies
These guidelines are all about making it easier for assistive technology users to use form fields.
This is important due to the way that assistive technology users interact with a form. Although, fields are typically represented by un-informative shapes such as a rectangle, unimpaired users can rapidly determind its purpose. They have the benefit of being able to scan a form by eye in any direction that they choose and see fields in context; location, label and surrounding content. Assistive technology users can access the same information, but at a slower pace. Mechanisms are required to enable the user to navigate directly through the fields, ignoring other content, and for alternate text to be read which describes the fields’ purpose without relying on context.
Using the field’s caption for alternate text
Whenever possible you should use the field’s caption for alternate text. Set the ‘Screen Reader Precendence’ property to ‘Caption’ in the accessibility pallet.
When a user tabs into this field, the screen reader JAWS V10 with default configuration reads the following:
Your country of citizenship… edit… type in text
The alternate text is read first to identify the field. This is followed by additional information to help the assistive technology user. In this case, it tells the user what type of field this is and how to use it. Although, this approach is common, the text read is specific to screen reader.
Setting custom text for alternate text
There are occasions when it is not appropriate to use the field’s caption, including:
- The field has no caption
- The caption is too verbose
- The caption is not meaningful out of context
Set the ‘Screen Reader Precendence’ property to ‘Custom Text’ and enter the custom text in the ‘Custom Screen Reader Text’ property in the accessibility pallet.
The field has no caption
It is sometimes necessary to implement a field’s label as a separate text object, for instance to implement multi-line labels:
In this case, it is common to use the text from the label object as custom text.
The caption is too verbose
It is important that the alternate text for a field is concise. Verbose captions that are provided to assist a sighted user may be frustrating for a user of assistive technology.
In this case, it is common to paraphrase the caption text.
The caption is not meaningful out of context
Field captions can depend on context to make sense. A common example is radio button lists. Typically, a separate text object is implemented to ask a question and a radio button is provided for each answer.
For instance, when a user tabs into a yes/no radio button list that uses the caption for alternate text, the screen reader JAWS V10 with default configuration would read the following:
Yes… radio button not checked… one of two
To resolve this, it is common to provide custom text that combines the question with the response for that radio button.
A closer look at how alternate text works
How alternate text is read is dependent on the assistive technology used. You can use the attached AltText-TestForm to test. The two most popular screen readers were used for this article:
- JAWS V10
- Window-Eyes V7.1
Screen Reader Precedence
The ‘Screen Reader Precedence’ property on the accessibility pallet has the following values:
- Custom Text
- Tooltip
- Caption
- Name
- None
The screen reader uses this property to determine what text to read. If no text is found, then the screen reader searches for text in the precendence order, starting from Custom Text.
When ‘None’ is selected Window-Eyes performs a search through the precedence order. JAWS does not search through the precedence order, but tries to find a caption, including looking for a text object that may be the label for this field. As a last resort, both screen readers read nothing for the field description, resulting in:
edit… type in text
Using tooltips
Tooltips are used to provide sighted users assistance with completing fields. The text is displayed in a box when the user hovers the cursor over a field.
Typically, tooltips are too verbose to be used as alternate text. To make important tooltip information accessible, it should also be displayed in the form content.
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Tour de LiveCycle Launched
Over the past several months we have been working with the Adobe Evangelist Team to create Tour de LiveCycle, a desktop application designed to explore the capabilities of Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite.
After the success of Tour de Flex it was felt that a similar style AIR application would be an ideal way to allow users to explore the wide range of features and services provided by the LiveCycle ES Platform. There are over 2,000 pages of content, videos and sample applications. Whether you plan to spend 10 minutes getting a feel for what LiveCycle ES is all about or you need to build a full application with LiveCycle ES, Tour de LiveCycle can help.
Tour de LiveCycle is built on Adobe AIR and will run on Windows, Mac and, Linux. All of the content is hosted and downloaded on demand – the installer is only about 1.5MB.