CommonLook

Allyant CommonLook Office and Common Look PDF are software plugins for preparation and remediation of PDFs for WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance.

Specific designated employees who are assigned an Allyant CommonLook licence

Microsoft Word and PowerPoint (CommonLook Office plugin) or Adobe Acrobat (CommonLook PDF Plugin).  These are both desktop-based applications, not web-based.

• The main focus of PDF remediation is tagging the PDF properly, and making sure the tags are in the correct reading order. Tags are containers of information within PDF (headings, paragraphs, figures (a.k.a. images), tables).
• CommonLook Office is a plugin for Microsoft Word and Powerpoint that helps you create accessible PDFs that do not need extra curricular remediation after the fact.
• CommonLook PDF is a plugin for Adobe Acrobat for manual PDF Remediation of existing PDFs.
• Training Schedule and Resources are outlined below.

Training Calendar:

• Allyant CommonLook Live Training Session Calendar

Training Videos:

• Introduction to CommonLook Office YouTube tutorial - (associated training materials: Document Accessibility in Higher Education.docx)
• Introduction to CommonLook PDF YouTube tutorial - (associated training materials: A Paper on Hearing Loss.PDF and A Paper on Hearing Loss Remediated.PDF)

Additional Allyant CommonLook Training Resources:

• Support and Knowledge Base
• Training Module Access

Tips:

1. Understand the basic fundamentals of digital content accessibility.
2. Ask yourself if the information really needs to be in PDF format. Web pages are preferable for web accessibility and easy to update and remediate.
3. If possible, always work with the source document, before using a CommonLook plugin.
4. CommonLook Office is meant to be used AFTER all the final edits, spell checking, grammar checking have been done to the document. But it is preferable to use BEFORE using CommonLook PDF in Acrobat. Using CommonLook Office can eliminate the need for using CommonLook PDF.
5. CommonLook PDF is meant to be used for fixing PDFs to which you do not have access to the source document. But it is a tedious manual process. It is not an "easy button" so refer to #1 and #2 above.