Speaker 1: Creating Accessible PDF Forms. Chapter 2, The Auditory Form. This training video is produced by the Accessibility and Policy Unit of the California Department of Social Services. As discussed in Chapter 1, an essential part of an accessible form is ensuring the auditory portion of the form is accessible. The auditory portion of a form means the elements that will be read aloud to persons who use screen readers or other assistive technologies. Since the auditory form is for persons who are not able to see the visual form, it must include things like instructions, descriptions of visual clues and information about text located between form fields. The auditory portion of a form consists primarily of information which the form's creator includes in the tooltips. To access the tooltip of a form field, select Tools, then choose Prepare Form. Right-click on the form field and select Properties.

Speaker 2: Enter text into the tooltip. The tooltip should provide, at minimum, the information needed to answer the question.

Speaker 1: When a screen reader user is navigating through form fields, they will hear the text inserted into the tooltip, followed by the word, Edit. For this form, when a user navigates to the first form field after Sitting, they will hear, Number of hours per day employee spent sitting, Edit, indicating a fillable field requiring input. Ensuring each form field has a tooltip is a basic minimum in ensuring accessibility. Form fields with no tooltip will produce a field description's failed accessibility check failure. Ensuring a basic tooltip for all form fields is not always enough to ensure form accessibility. Many times, important pieces of information are not included in a form question.

Speaker 2: Let's look at a few examples on this form.

Speaker 1: Remember, a screen reader user navigates a form by tabbing from form field to form field, hearing the tooltip for each field. In this form, a user would tab from Supervisor's class, Edit. To, Designated under conflict of interest code, checkbox unchecked. If our tooltips only include the bare minimum of the question, we will miss important information necessary to complete this form, such as in this instance the instruction, Special requirements of position, Check all that apply. To address this issue, it is important that all visual text is included in a tooltip. We will discuss a few ways to complete this. For short sections of text, it is appropriate to add text into the tooltip of the adjacent field. This tooltip now includes all of the missed textual information, important instructions, and provides an auditory alert to a purely visual clue. The text information that would have been missed, special requirements of the position, and that you can check as many that apply is necessary to complete the section. The visual clue that there are a total of six choices is also given up front. This is the same information that a visual person would have, which has now been provided in the auditory form. Finally, the text related to the first checkbox is included in the tooltip. Designated under conflict of interest code. Let's look at another example, including additional text and visual clues into a tooltip. In this form, a visual user would enter only their street address information in the form field for address. They would not enter city, state and zip code, even though these elements are all part of their address. The visual person would not enter all these other elements, because they can see form fields coming up for those elements. These are visual clues that are not available to non-visual people. To address this, the tooltip should read, street address, to ensure the user is only entering their street address information, and not the entire address including the city, state and zip code. Often times, there are form fields with identical labels, but slightly different information is being requested. In this example, we have multiple form fields for date. A tooltip of date would not be sufficient to distinguish between both date entries. Instead, the tooltip distinguishes the date the supervisor signed the document, and the date the employee signed the document. Now that we have covered missed information, and visual clues that can easily be included into a tooltip, let's look at some examples where it might not be as easy to include the text in a tooltip. This form has a form field at the end of page 3, then a large amount of text on page 4, followed by some additional form fields. If we were navigating in forms mode and tabbing from form field to form field, we might easily miss all of the important information in section 7. If we can't see the text, we may not know what we are missing. Before we continue, let's review the modes of a screen reader. When a screen reader first opens a PDF form, it is in browse mode. It will read everything on the form from top to bottom, left to right. In browse mode both the text you can see, and the tooltips will be read. Once the user realizes they are in a form, they hit the tab button and this changes the screen reader to forms mode. In forms mode, only the tooltips will be read. After supplying the requested information into the form field, the user will hit tab and advance to the next form field. In forms mode, text that is between fields may therefore be missed. It is easy to go back and forth from forms mode to browse mode, a simple keystroke of insert plus space bar will switch the user between modes. Instructing a screen reader user to switch back to browse mode or exit forms mode, either wording is correct, will alert them to additional text on the page that would be missed if they remained in forms mode. Re-entering forms mode is as easy as hitting the tab button once more or insert plus space bar again. Ensuring users of screen readers do not miss any important text between form fields can be accomplished one of two ways. The first is to add some text, like return to browse mode to the end of the tooltip which is prior to the text. In this example, the tooltip is supervisor's phone number. Return to browse mode. Another way to instruct someone to exit forms mode is through the use of a read-only form field.

Speaker 2: First, select prepare form from the Acrobat tools. Then select a new text field. Insert a new text field box between the final form field and the text.

Speaker 1: Provide instruction in the tooltip. In this instance the tooltip reads, return to browse mode to hear instructions.

Speaker 2: Check, read only and then close. Read-only form fields are invisible when you leave prepare form.

Speaker 1: It is up to you, as the forms creator, to decide if you will add extra text to tooltips, include instructions like return to browse mode, or create a read-only text field. No matter which way you choose, it is important to stay consistent throughout the form. Remember you must ensure all text on forms will be available to persons using Acrobat. All forms will be available to persons using assistive technology, and you have recognized all visual clues in the form and translated them into text in a tooltip. You must put as much effort into creating an accessible audio form as you always have in making visual forms. The only way to check the effectiveness of the auditory form is by using a screen reader and listening to the form. While listening, ask yourself, If I could not see this form, could I successfully fill it out from what I am hearing? If you do not yet have a screen reader installed on your computer, please contact the support desk and request when to be installed. NVD is an open source, free screen reader that is used by many people in CDSS. Ensuring the auditory form is accessible enables a screen reader user to accurately complete a form. Without tooltips, a screen reader user would only hear at it each time they encounter a form field, making it extremely difficult to fill in the form. Ensuring all form content is included in the auditory form increases the user's experience and decreases the chance of important content being missed. For more information about this topic, or any of the topics in our series, contact the Accessibility and Policy Unit at accessibilitypolicyunit at dss.ca.gov.