Latest Contributions by KlaraSchmitt

On March 5th, we released our new version of search to improve how you, your teams, and your community search and discover relevant content. We've added more content types, private data, faster and more reliable search indexing, a new look, and new ways to refine your search, including search collections across the top of the results page. Now you have a custom header and you were styling the search page or using CSS to hide our navigation bar, you may encounter some oddities on the search results page. While we strongly recommend not hiding our navigation bar as we use it to place new navigation features, here's a few things to watch out for in your custom header CSS if you're noticing a weird layout. Styling the Search Page with CSS Unfortunately, this page is not intended to be styled. If you were able to figure out how to style it in the older version of search, you benefited from a bug that occurred in the custom header. I won’t be explaining how to work around our new version as we’re actually very close to fixing that bug and it would just undo your work all over again. So please stick to the hub site and hub page layout screens when doing CSS for webpage layout purposes. Search Icon Visible in Your Header If you were hiding our navigation by placing your custom header on top of it either through absolute positioning, negative margins, flex, and/or use of a z-index, you may need to change your z-index to an even higher number (e.g. 1200) to get the search icon to hide. However, be warned that we’re doing some updates to navigation, which will be coming out at the end of the month and should you want to use the improved navigation, you will need to change your z-index back to 900; otherwise, you may observe the autosuggest from our search bar drop behind your custom header. If you’re using negative margins like the example above, you may need to adjust them based on the size of your header to compensate for the collections' links. It can be challenging to get your custom header to look exactly as you want in our interface, but if possible, please try to avoid using negative margins and absolute positioning as both are inflexible layout methods and more likely to break your site styling when we release new features. Unfortunately, try as we do, we cannot always predict the impact of custom styling on new features. No Collections If you were hiding our navigation through use of display:none and using absolute or fixed positioning to manage your custom header, then you may not have search collections visible at all. This is because when you hide components using display:none, they do not take up any space, and as such, the beginning of your page content will start much closer to top edge of the page. If you used fixed or absolute positioning in addition to display:none, your header will cover up the top of your page content and in this case, it’s the search collections. If you change display:none to visibility:hidden, the content you are trying to hide will not show, but it will take up the same amount of space, which will result in a layout more similar to the intended experience of sites that aren't hiding navigation. The caveat for visibility:hidden is that it will not, in fact, hide the content from assistive technologies, so those using screen-readers will still be able to explore that part of your page. ... View more

Update: David Watkins from ArcMap tells me that ArcMap does allow you to author maps/basemaps and choose, colors, fonts, sizes, etc., which provides the tools needed to make a high contrast map and avoid color combinations that would be trouble for someone with color blindness. He also suggests using Color Brewer http://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=YlGnBu&n=7 to find options that are safe for audiences that are colorblind. So while it is possible to use Acrobat to solve these issues from inside the PDF, it may be easier to do it correctly from inside ArcMap before you export. A month or so ago, we got a question from a customer on how to make an exported ArcMap map PDF accessible. In this post, I am going to cover how to make a PDF accessible using Adobe Acrobat Pro. There are many tools that assist in making PDFs accessible; however, I will be focusing on Acrobat because it is the tool I have personally used the most often. Full Disclaimer: I have never used ArcMap. But I have made some 500+ PDFs accessible and a colleague has kindly provided me with a simple map PDF to use as a walk-through for purpose of this post. I will touch upon more complex map PDFs at the end. Now before I begin, I want to lay out a few idiosyncrasies with Acrobat:  1) There is no undo option - If you screw something up, your best course of action is to exit the file without saving changes and reopen it. This means that you must save frequently as you correct issues. This is especially important when you are tagging a document and setting reading order. 2) In my experience, Acrobat is likely to crash while doing Reading Order on large files. Therefore, if your document is larger than 5 pages, I'd recommend dividing it into 5 page sections, doing accessibility on each section, and then merging them all together at the end, before setting a title. Turning on Accessibility Tools Open your PDF file in Acrobat and check to see if you have the Accessibility option in your sidebar. If you don’t see it, go to Tools and search for “Accessibility," then click Add. Select Accessibility from the sidebar menu. You should now be in the Accessibility tools interface. Select Full Check from the Accessibility Tooling Pane, then select Start Checking from the modal. The Accessibility Checker will produce a list of issues that can be expanded within it’s side panel. It may be tempting to right-click an issue and select Fix, and this can be safely done for things like title or language, but should be avoided for issues involving tag structure. (If you don’t know how Acrobat “fixed” the issue behind the scenes, then don’t use the automatic option.) Fixing Document Issues Skip anything that says Tagged PDF - Failed and/or Reading Order for now and start with the Primary Language - Failed and Title - Failed issues. For Language, right-click, and select Fix. Acrobat will launch a dropdown menu that you can use to make a selection, then select OK. For Title, right-click, and select Fix. Acrobat will launch a modal, and you may need to unselect the Leave As Is checkbox in order to type a title into the title input field. Then select OK. Save For issues that say Needs manual check, you will have to apply accessibility guidelines by your own knowledge as Acrobat cannot validate them automatically. For example, if I were to check for appropriate contrast of the red symbols on my light green neighborhood map, I would do the following: Screenshot a bit of the image, open the screenshot in a browser, use a browser extension called Colorzilla to pull the colors out of the image (available for Chrome and Firefox), and then paste those two colors into WebAIM’s color contrast checker. WebAIM shows that the red used for the hospital marker is not sufficient contrast against the map background. However, the black text and purple metro lines are fine. While a bit tedious, it is possible to correct the red hospital markers from inside Acrobat. Select a marker on the map, use your cursor to highlight it, then go to Tools > Edit PDF. This will open the Format sidebar, wherein you may select a more appropriate color. Once finished, right-click the “Needs Manual Check” item and select Pass to indicate that you’ve reviewed the item and if necessary, made changes. Now Save. ...Anddd Acrobat froze. Good thing I just saved everything. (If this happens to you, you’ll have to rerun the Full Check to open up the Accessibility Checker report panel.) Fixing Page Content Issues For Tagged Content - Failed issues, you’ll need to do some manual tagging to resolve them.  If you don’t have an icon for the Content pane visible in your Accessibility Checker, then select Autotag Document from the Accessibility Tooling Pane. This will produce a report, and add the Content icon to the opposite side. Under Content, right-click an artifact and select Show in Tags option. This should add an icon for the Tags pane. Now that you have all the components you need in your workspace, I’d actually recommend you delete all the tags in the Tags pane that got added during the Autotag Document step. With the Reading Order pane open, right-click your PDF, and select Clear Page Structure. Autotagging is a bit like alphabet soup - it’s hard to comprehend and takes a longer time to fix than doing it from scratch. Once you’ve deleted your tags, you’re read to begin. Open the Reading Order tool. This will open a modal with a lot of disabled buttons. Under the Show Page Content Groups checkbox, select the Structure Types radio button. This will indicate what type you have tagged certain groups of elements. With the Reading Order modal open, draw a rectangle around the title text. Select the Text/Paragraph button. Repeat with other text elements on the PDF. For image elements, tag Figure.  Right-click a Figure tag to select Edit Alternative Text. In the dialog that opens, describe the information conveyed by the figure, and select OK. Weird Mysteries What should you do when you draw a rectangle around some element to tag, and Acrobat highlights a block of what looks like empty space? Do not tag it to make it go away. The correct action is to delete the empty artifact. Open the Content pane. Navigate through the container artifacts, until the offending one becomes highlighted. Drill down into the artifact to the root issue, in this case, a text element containing nothing. Right-click the Text element and select Delete. Save Fixing Alternative Text Issues Now honestly, you’ll have probably fixed most of these issues while doing manual tagging. Run Full Check again or right-click the Alternative Text accordion from the report and select Check Again. I have one figure left that I tagged, but forgot to add alternative text. In the Accessibility Checker report, select any errors to see them highlighted on the page. Then in Accessibility Tooling Pane, selection Set Alternative Text. Acrobat will scan the PDF for all images that it thinks need alt text. For each figure missing alt text, Acrobat will highlight it, and prompt you for a description. You can use the arrows in a dialog to move through all figures with alt text. Then Save & Close. Fixing Reading Order Issues Finally, you come to reading order. This is the least fun part of the whole process, but probably the most important. Yay you! What you want to do here is order all the artifacts in the Content Pane, top to bottom, the way you want a screen-reader to encounter them in terms of reading order - almost as if they were a numerical list. Open the Content pane. Save everything you’ve done up unto this point. Drag and Drop each element container to the correct position. Wrapping Up Do one last Full Check, delete any empty tags, and you’re done! What does deleting empty tags look like? If you click on an element under Page Content > Tagged Content - Failed, and it highlights part of the PDF that is empty, right-click the element and select Show in Content Panel. Once there, find the empty element and delete it. Then rerun Full Check.  One Last Note... If you have a PDF that is very complicated visually, uses lines instead of points, or has multiple layers of complex data, and you’re finding it difficult to tag, I attended a Section 508 panel where Rob Haverty from Adobe shared a best practice on making complex visual PDFs accessible. He recommended using the Reading Order pane to divide the map into Figures, which can then utilize Alternative Text to describe what is occurring visually at a high level. ... View more