7 Remediation Shortcuts for Faster Accessibility Workflows

Alright guys, I’m Dax Castro and it’s that time again. Where I help you tackle the tags tree and lead you down the road of remediation. Today I have 7 time-saving shortcuts guaranteed to speed up your remediation workflow.

I know these might seem a little strange at first, but If you force yourself to start using these shortcuts, I guarantee you will see an increase in your remediation speed over time.

So lets dive right in

We’re going to start with an easy one that most people should already know. But we are going to cover it anyway because I am always suprised when I look over the shoulder of other remediations as they click endlessly to drill into their tags tree.

All you have to do is hold down the control key while clicking on the expansion arrow. Then it will expand every tag underneath the parent.

This next shortcut is something we deal with in just about every document.

Typically we find the object we want to artifact, we right click and then choose Change tag to Artifact. Then we wait for the pop up dialog asking us what type of artifact we want to create and what side of the page we want to attach it to. Right? From a screen reader perspective none of these options mean anything. We just need to set the tag to artifact.

So lets make this a lot faster. Simply Right click on the object in the tags tree and press the letter E and then Press enter. And in less than one second we have created an artifact and can move on. Let’s do that again. Right-click, letter E, enter, done. It’s that easy. Moving on to the next one. This is another one that can save more times than you think.

When spot checking the tags tree in a 200 page document this is another one that saves more time than you think. We all know that you can highlight text on the page and then click the tags dropdown and select Find tag from Selection. But it is much faster when your left hand works together with your right. So as soon as you click on the tags dropdown, press the letter I on your keyboard and the game of hide and seek is over in an instant.

The time wasted moving your mouse to find the right line item in the dropdown eats up valuable seconds that turn into minutes when your day is spent tackling that tags tree. Using your left hand to press the shortcut key is faster and removes the need to coordinate your mouse and brain to click.

Speaking of forgotten elements, manually creating structures like lists and table cells can be a repetitive pain in the neck. This next shortcut works best when you need to create multiple copies of a tag like a series of TDs for a table row, or several LI tags for a list. We start like aways by selecting the tag ABOVE where we want the new ones to appear. Right click, press N for new and we don’t want to waste time hunting down items from the dropdown so we simply type the letters LI for List Item and press enter.

There is nothing terrible new or fast about this yet. But the beauty is that now it is set, we can go back to our tags tree, right click again and just press N and then enter without even pausing and our duplicate tag is created. Simply repeat this for as many duplicate tags as you need and you are ready to repair your list in seconds.

These tips might seem cumbersome at first. Anything new takes time to learn. I have remediated thousands of pdf pages and spent hours if not days tangled up in the tags tree. Have patience. Keep forcing yourself to use these shortcuts and before you know it they will become second nature and you will find yourself flying through that tags tree, taming those tables and artifacting with ease.

This is Dax Castro from Section508.com and if you enjoyed these tips leave a comment below, share this with your fellow remediators Or better yet, joing my PDF remediation group on Facebook where we share tips and troubles while journeying down the road of remediation.

Until next time. Happy tagging.