Let's Get Accessible! Document Accessibility and Design

Thanks so much for joining this SWAAAC spring  training, today: "Let's get accessible!" Today, we're going to be talking about document  accessibility and design. My name is Claire Simpson. I work on the SWAAAC Central  Office Team, and I'm joined by two colleagues, today, Liz Coughanour—um, who is an  instructional designer on our team, here at the Center for Inclusive Design and  Eng... Engineering—as well as Jim Sandstrum, who is our director of Industry Services. Jim is  monitoring the chat

for any questions that may come up. Um, if everyone could please sign in,  Brenda is going to drop a form in the chat, um, and if you could fill that out, quickly,  to sign in, let us know you're here, that helps us a lot with tracking attendance  and getting you a certificate for your time. Um, here are links to the slides, as well as the  Google handout—and we can share these links in the chat, as well—but I'll give everybody a minute  to, um, get the slides pulled up... pulled up, if you'd li

ke, and the Google handout, if  you plan to use, um, Google Docs. Okay, so, the learning objectives for this presentation are  that: Participants will be able to describe the characteristics of accessible digital content,  identify at least three ways to improve the overall design usability and accessibility of a  document, and then fix at least four accessibility errors in a Word document or a Google doc—as well  as three accessibility errors in an Adobe PDF, if that is something that you have

access  to—just... I just want to say thanks to those who filled out the pre-training survey, that  helped us a lot in determining the scope and the content for this presentation. We will go  over those details in just a minute, um... um, but here's our agenda: We're going to try to  get through as much of this content as we can, um, we're going to talk about document  accessibility—what does that term mean, why is it important—we'll talk about steps and  best practices for creating accessible d

ocuments, and demonstrate each of these concepts in both  a Word document and a Google Document, and then, um, you, yourself, will get a little bit of  practice, um, doing each of these things using one of the handouts that we, uh, will provide as  time allows. Um, we can talk about accessibility in Adobe Acrobat Pro and, potentially, um, talk  a little bit about remediating inaccessible PDFs, um, if we have time for that, in this  training. We will not be covering, um, several different things.

We will not be talking  much about presentation accessibility—like, working in PowerPoint or Google slides—we won't be  talking about web accessibility, specifically. Um, we aren't talking about documents that involve  much in the way of graphic design—like, things that you might create in Canva or Indesign. Uh,  we won't touch social media and, um, like I said, we probably won't have too much time to get  really in-depth with PDF remediation. However, everything that we will talk about, today,

will  still be applicable and useful for each of these content types. So, for example, um, we're  going to talk a lot about heading structure, and heading structure... in your document heading  structure is also super... super important, if you are building a website. How you'll go about  creating that heading structure—it's going to look slightly different depending what program you're  using, or what content management system—and, um, different types of content are going to  have slightly dif

ferent considerations. Like, for example, if you're creating a presentation,  or if you're creating a website, there are just a few more things that you might think about. Um,  but here, we're going to be focused on... on that specific type of content—which is documents—um,  but just keep in mind that all of these concepts will apply more broadly. If you are looking for  training on some of those other content types, specifically, that we aren't covering today, here  are just a few online resour

ces, um, and trainings that I, personally, have felt are helpful in...  in learning more about accessibility of different content types. So, those are linked on this slide,  and check those out, at a later time, if you're interested. The majority of this presentation  is going to be very interactive, so, just want to talk for a minute about what you'll need. Um,  basically, what we're going to do is, we're going to take a... an inaccessible document—it'll either  be a Google doc, or a Microsoft

Word document—and we're going to make it more accessible, as we move  throughout the training, by applying some of the principles of document accessibility that we will  talk through. Some of us, then, will convert that document, um, into an accessible PDF. So, here's  what you'll need: you'll need to be on a computer, or have a computer handy. On your computer,  open up one of the two handouts. So, if you want to work in Microsoft Word, if that's where you  typically create documents, then open

the handout that Brenda sent via email yesterday. If you  want to work in Google Docs, open the Google Doc handout, um, and then make a copy of it so that  you can edit it, and we'll drop that in the chat, here, again, that Google doc handout. Make sure  to make a copy of it, um, and save it to your own drive. Otherwise, you won't be able to edit it  but not copy. Um, many... many people indicated, in that pre-training survey, that they might  use either Word or Google Docs, or, at least, have

access to both. So, I just want to give a  little bit of a caveat, um, on this topic, if you're trying to choose between the two. Microsoft  Word and Google Docs don't offer all of the same features, with regards to accessibility, um, at  this point in time. At least, Microsoft Word has just a few more features built into it that will  help you make a more accessible PDF. If you only have access to Google Docs, you don't have access  to Word or a different tool called GrackleDocs—you know... you

would know if you have it—Um, you will  not be able to make an accessible PDF. And so, if you're just working in Google Docs, um, that's  fine, but your... your end goal is just going to be to make an accessible Google doc. You won't go  through the PDF conversion process. If you have Microsoft Word, but you prefer Google Docs, um,  that's fine. Create your document in Google Docs, and then you'll just do one extra step of  downloading it into a Word document format, first, before converting in

to a PDF, and we  can walk through all of that together when we get there. Just wanted to point out, um—if you're  going to work in Google Docs—there might be that one extra step. Um, if you are working with Google  docs, there is a tool called GrackleDocs. It's an extension that you can add to your Google account  that helps you make a more accessible document, and also allows you to download an accessible PDF  from Google Docs, um, without having to do that extra step of taking it through Micr

osoft Word.  However, it is not free. Um, if you're interested in trying it, they do offer a 30-day free trial,  if that's something you want to try out, and then, finally, um, if you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, we  will use that as well. You don't need to open it, just yet, but we will get there. So,  what is document accessibility? Um, actually I'm gonna pause. Does anybody need  help getting those handouts pulled up? Okay, nobody's saying anything, so I'm guessing  everybody's good on... on choos

ing which handout they want to use and pulling that up. Um,  talk for just a minute about what exactly document accessibility, is and what it means. So, document  accessibility is the inclusive practice of, uh, removing the barriers that might block someone  from being able to interact with the document. And by "interact with a document" I mean, from  being able to read a document, from being able to understand what's in a document, from being  able to navigate throughout a document, maybe from

being able to find a document in the first place.  Uh, doing this requires consideration for the way that people with disabilities—and, in particular,  people who use assisted technology—might interact with a document, In this training—and, probably,  in any accessibility training that you take—there will be a lot of reference to screen readers.  Screen readers are, um, a really great example of why a lot of as... accessibility concepts are  important. If you don't know what a screen reader is a

nd does, um, I would highly encourage you to  learn... learn about that. Um, ideally if you can talk with the screen reader user, and talk about  their experience, you know, using a computer, navigating a document. Otherwise, there are lots  of great videos out there that can help you, kind of, get an idea of what a screen reader is  and how it interacts with digital content. There are other types of technologies, and lots of other  user experiences, that we are also thinking about and being ver

y conscious, um, to include when  we're talking and thinking about accessibility best practices, in addition to screen readers,  um, as this is an inclusive design practice, you know, we're thinking about how can  we make this work for as many... how can we make our document work for as many people  as possible, and, um, with inclusive design, as we know, um, thinking about that often  improves the user experience for everyone. Um, so we're not actually going to watch  any of these videos, right

now, but, kind of like I was talking about on the last  slide, if you are interested in learning a little bit more about what a screen reader  is and how it interacts with the document, here are just a few video examples, um, of some  of the ways that that happens. And then, also, just going to mention this very briefly, I'm  guessing some people might be attending this training in relation to recent legislation  in Colorado around accessibility House Bill, uh, 21-1110 will require that any org

anization  that receives State funding make all of their digital content which includes public facing and  internal digital content and communications be accessible by July 1. So, just wanted  to provide a few links and resources, in case anyone needs additional information or,  um, is looking for, kind of, where they can go to learn more about this legislation. Our focus,  in this training, um, will be on just, kind of, some of those best practices for making documents  more accessible, more us

er-friendly for both assistive technology users and non-assistive  technology users, and I'm going to hand it over to Liz, now, to talk to us about, um, the  intersection between usability and accessibility. Awesome. Hi everybody! Thank you, Claire, for  that introduction. Um, I'm currently speaking to you from my home in Germany. Um, I work for  the Center for Inclusive Design with Claire, um, but I do work from Germany. Hello, it's rather  dark where I am, um, and my kids, I think, got the sen

se that, um, I have a... an important  training to be with you all, so they're still awake, behind me, right now. Um, so, but, maybe,  uh, we'll all stay awake and enjoy the excitement of creating accessible documents, and my kids  will fall asleep for that conversation. Okay, so, I'm excited to talk a little bit about, um,  this intersection between a usable experience for folks using our documents, and the accessible  experience, because these are two separate things, and the house bill that C

laire just mentioned  is mostly talking about accessibility, but something can be fully accessible and not be  very usable for the reader. And, so, what we're really trying to do is to merge the two so that we  can have, um, a universally useful document for... for people who are looking at our materials. So,  this is just a little Venn diagram, on the screen that we're looking at, um, that talks about that  concept where, in the usability side of thing, we've got ease of use, and efficiency, an

d, kind  of, a user-centric design. On the accessibility side of things, there's all sorts of standards.  There's assistive technology, like screen readers, that we want to be aware of, um, and then there's  just the ability for everyone, uh, who's using assistive technology to access that content.  So, we're going to get at some... a little from column A, a little from column B. Um, and we'll  do that today. Okay, um, just a little bit about, um, design as we're thinking about our documents.  U

m, we want our messages to be memorable, useful, clear, and inclusive. I don't know if anyone read  this excellent book called, um, I feel like it was called "Sticky", where it talked about how we want  our messaging and our, um, instruction to be, um, sticky. We want people to be able to remember  it, and so that's some of the usability and design issues that we've included in here. It's  for that reason we want things to be accessible, and we also want them to be useful for the people  who are

accessing them. Okay, so we are going to just get started with a brief overview of heading  structure, um, and so, headings are—and you'll hear a lot about heading structure from all of  us—headings are the way that folks are going to be navigating our documents, so that's why we're  going to talk about them a lot. They provide a consistent structure in style, an outline, a table  of contents, um, and they're very important for screen readers and other assistive technologies,  um, for navigatio

n purposes, um, just in the same way that they are for people who are reading the  document... sighted readers reading the document. Um, so it's few different rules for heading  structure we want to make our headings concise, accurate, and unique. So, this is important for,  um, for navigation... excuse me, I'm listening to my son in the background just absorbing all this  information. Um, this is important, especially that our heading structure be... that our headings  be unique, um, because it

's not super useful if our high-level headings all say the same thing.  Okay, we can move on to the next slide. Alright, um, uh, basic rules of thumb for headers. Uh,  we only want to use text. So, we don't want to use images or logos for headings, we want to  use the styles pane. This is a little bit of foreshadowing, we'll use the styles pane a lot in  this training because it's amazing. Um, and if it looks like a heading, if it's bold, if it's big,  it needs to be tagged as a heading. So, we'

ll be talking a lot about styles, and we'll be talking a  lot about tags, and those things go hand-in-hand. Okay, the other thing we need to be aware of,  with headings, is they need to be nested. So, in heading hierarchy, we want, um, we want to  not skip levels moving in—I won't say down, I'll say in—Um, and we... but we can skip when  we're going backwards. So, as an example, we have a heading. "One" is going to be the title, and  sometimes you'll hear me refer to that as an H1, a heading one

. The next one down is going to be an  H2, and then an H3, maybe, but not necessarily. We could just have one H1 and then H2, 2, 2, 2, 2,  and then our document's done. But, if we want to go to an H3, that's fine. But what we don't want  to do is skip ahead, because people are using this to navigate the document, and so it doesn't make  a lot of sense if it's skipping all around this nested hierarchy for our headings. Um, if there  are any questions about that, please, uh, please feel free to po

p any questions into the chat. Um,  or unmute, and, uh, we can... but, but, we'll have some examples for this heading structure, okay? In  fact, here's an example, right here. This is what I was talking about. We've got heading one, we've  got heading two, we can hop back to heading two at any point, but we only ever want one unique H1  in a document, that's the title. Alright let's... I'm gonna go ahead and take over the screen  share and I'm going to demonstrate what we're talking about. So, w

e're talking... talking about  heading structure. The thing that I really want to emphasize, as we're working in these documents, is  these are our source documents—in Word, in Google Docs, and Source, documents are so much easier to  work with than remediating a PDF in acrobat—it's just so much easier, especially if you have a big  team of content creators who are all working in their own, um, authoring tools. If you have a  team that's all creating accessible documents at the source, this is g

oing to be so much more  streamlined, it's going to be so much easier to be creating accessible documents if we're starting  the source. So, heading structure. We've already talked about some rules, we've already talked  about some design considerations, um, and there's some additional resources here in your handout,  but we're going to skip to this activity. So, we want to create one heading, one style, in the  title of this document. So, I'm going to scroll up. This is the title: SWAAAC Spring

Training -  Document Accessibility Activity. Now, all I need to do is find the styled area. Now, normally...  Oh, there. They are they were disappearing for a second. There we go. This is going to be in the  Home tab—and thank you, Jim for the comment in the chat—Um, there was a question: "Should we use the  title style in... instead of the H1 style?" and, Jim and—so do I—suggest an H1 instead of a title  style because it pulls over to, um, acrobat a little bit better. Just... and it's kind of

a a  matter of preference. But, okay, so we've got this highlighted in our home tab on the ribbon. We're  just going to click heading one. Now, I think that changed the look of this, a little bit. Um, so  I'm going to undo, control Z, and rather—because I like the look of this—so... instead of  just clicking H1, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to say "update heading one to match  selection". Done. Now, this heading one—that used to just look like a heading one, but not actually  say anyt

hing to Assistive Technology—it's tagged, so it looks great and now, when someone is using  this document who can't see how great it looks, or who's, uh, navigating with their keyboard,  they can find it, and this is what we want. Okay, let's see what our next task is. "Apply heading  two styles to the topic introductions." So, there's a few different topic introductions in  our handout. Heading structure is the first one, that's what we're working on now. I'm... I'm  going to go to H2, right th

ere. It changed the look again, I didn't really want that, so  I'm going to control and right-click, "update heading to to match selection". Now, we say that  this is going to create really great navigation, it's going to give us a table of contents, let's  look at it. So, I'm going to go over to view. The view tab opens the view ribbon. One more time:  I was over on home, now I'm going to go to view, which is over here, and I'm going to  open the navigation pane. This is in the "show" area of t

he ribbon. I'm gonna ping  my mouse, here. I'm just going to click that, now. It's opened up a whole long list of  areas in our document, but—notice something really special about our title and our new  H2—this document, this navigation pane, knows exactly what I've just done and, now, this  is going to be so much easier to find. Let's add another H2. We're going to scroll down typography.  This is our next heading two. I'm going to go back to the home—my navigation pane is still here—but  now,

in my home ribbon, I'm going to click H2. A new heading two has just appeared, love  it. So we're going to go down, again. Color contrast. H2. It appears. It's  like magic, it really is. And now, if I want to go find these again, I can just click  anywhere in here and it'll take me right there. It may feel a little, um, hopefully not boring—I'm  having a good time—but, it might feel like overkill for me to be doing this live, but I  just really want to show you how great this is, because I'm goi

ng to use this in the rest  of the training to navigate this document, and I hope you are as well, because it's going to  make the rest of the training just all the better. Okay, we've got document review. I think we're  almost to the bottom... PDF conversion and... yes. So, now I'm gonna just click heading structure  again, because now we've got our awesome... "Not overkill." Fantastic. Robin, you have a Mac,  I'm so happy you mentioned it. I also have a Mac, um, let me think, where is it on a

Mac.  Tell you what, I'll do if it comes to me, I will. I'll speak it out. The other thing I  did was, when I created this... okay, perfect, thank you, Judy. Um, when I created this document  in... on a Mac I recorded what I was doing, I screen captured it, I'll give you access  to that video after this training. Okay, I'm going to go back up to heading structure by  clicking the navigation, and if anyone... Judy, are you on a Mac? The control, shift, 1, 2,  3, to quickly make something a headin

g... Control Alt. Okay, no windows, okay. Oh, of  course, command + control. Um, if anyone can answer Robin's question, in the chat. You'll get  brownie points. Alright, heading structure. We're back up here. I'm actually going to click  down to activity using my navigation pane. So easy. Alright, next... next job: We're going  to check your heading structure in the document map... already done, love it, amazing. Now,  document map might be what you're looking for, um, in the, uh, on the Mac, Ro

bin, because I...  I think, maybe, I wrote that on the Mac. Okay, last job: "One heading in this document is  long and wordy, fix it." Okay, I think, maybe, we all know which one it is. So, "Typography  Can Make Documents More Accessible to Readers When Document Creators Are Aware of a Few Basic  Principles". That is pretty long, it's pretty wordy. Remember, we want to be concise, so  all I'm going to do is just call this... ...and that's it. So, um, I am gonna wait for a  moment. If you have an

y questions about headings, please pop them in the chat or  unmute. If you are ready to move on, give me a thumbs-up in the chat  and, uh, and we can move on. No? Okay. So, we've got an awesome trick from Jim: We can move things around. Oh no,  I just messed it up. Control Z. You've got a thumbs up, awesome. Perfect, okay. We're gonna go ahead and move on.  I'm gonna stop share and give share back to Claire for just... oh, hold on, one second. I'm in a  Google doc, oh, we need to... we need to s

how Google Docs. Google Docs is great. Okay, quickly,  on Google Docs—I'm not going to create this whole, um, thing, again—but, notice that, on  my view, I've got this super nifty, similar-looking navigation ping. I'm going to  close that, it's just right here. Google Docs has it immediately available to us. We're going  to go in and right click... Oh no! We're not, oh... it's right up here. We're going to highlight  where it says normal text, we'll turn it into an H1. I think that's a little bi

t big, don't  like it. We're going to update heading one to match heading structure—we're getting so  many thumbs up, awesome, awesome, awesome—H2, and... look at that, Mary, it just shows up  right here. We've got our heading structure and, if I went through and updated all of these, um,  it would look look almost exactly the same, um, as it does on Microsoft. There we go, now we've  got heading structure and typography, cool. "Seeing it in Google doc is helpful." I'm  glad! Yeah, Google Docs,

in my opinion, kind of "wins" in headings, because it's  always available. So... happy to have that. "What did you click on, to get the list  on the left?" I hope it looks the same on your view—I'm in Chrome, so I'm not sure  what browser you're using—but, in Chrome, there should be a little three dot hamburger  looking menu up here in the on the top left. Good. Okay. Perfect. Alright. Now, I'm going to hand share back over to Claire  and we're going to look at some more slides! Awesome, okay. S

o, typography and alignment. I came into,  um, this field of accessibility from kind of a "design-y" place. I'm an instructional designer  and I just really like designing things. Um, I like to make things look really pretty, um  and so—this is probably my favorite part of the whole training—okay, so we're talking about  typography, and alignment of our text, kind of, goes in with typography. Um, what we want  is for our... all of our text to be legible, we want it to be readable, and we want it

to be  understandable and, when we talk about legible, we're mostly talking about letters and words.  Individual, uh readability or legibility. We're talking about readable. It's the look of  the entire block of text and when we... when I'm talking about understandability  I'm talking about emphasis mainly... Okay, so, legible. There are some, uh,  preferences. Personal preferences. I think about what type of font is the most legible,  I person... personally feel like if we're using two—at most

two, or maybe three fonts, at  most—in a document and, if they're common fonts, I don't really care if it's a serif or a sans.  There are some folks who—for instance, um, might have dyslexia, or some other type of  learning disability—that feel very strongly about it. However, if we're... you're using  common fonts such as Times New Roman, Ariel, things that have been around for forever, um, a  lot of times people can adjust common fonts to work for them on their own devices. So, that's why  I

feel like I don't... I don't really, honestly, care if it's a serif or a sans serif. I care if  it's common, um, and, unfortunately, that does, um, exclude a lot of these super decorative fonts.  Let's... So, typography to use sparingly—and, again, I'm designing... I really like some of  these decorative fonts, they make me happy, but we really want to use them sparingly and  purposely. If we have a purpose to use them, then that's one thing, but, if we're just throwing  decorative fonts on the

page, that can be a... a problem. If, for usability, um, all caps. It slows  down reading for a couple of reasons. Uh, the first is: the coastline of our text is completely  lost. Coastline... it's so important to being able to read quickly. So, if we want someone to have to  read slowly, for example, for a single heading, or a single title, I think it's fine. But, if we have  an entire... okay. Thank you, Judy, I appreciate your... your input that sans serif is easier to  read, um, and I'd be i

nterested in your input on all caps, as well. Um, for me, all caps is  definitely harder to read if it's in a big block of all-caps text and, not only that, I feel like  I'm being yelled at. So, we're going to try and avoid using all... all caps. Um, emojis. I like  emojis. It's Valentine's Day, so, uh, they've... I feel like emojis have played a big part in my  relationship with my husband, because we avoid a lot of, um, miscommunications by sending emojis.  However, couple things to think abou

t with emojis: they might be read by technology... by assistive  technology, they might not. If they are read, all of them will be read. So, this uh, this set  of emojis, for instance, might say something like, um, uh, "frowny face, frowny face, frowny face,  frowny face, frowny face" over and over and over. So it's... it would... it's just annoying, mainly,  for, if it is going to be read, all of them will be read, and, if it's not going to be read, if  we're using it for one... for one substit

ution, uh, then the meaning is completely lost. So,  um, this particular emoticon on the screen, uh, a screen reader will likely read it  macron, back... back-slash, parentheses, two, back-slash, underscore, macron, which doesn't  make any sense. And it makes it really hard to listen to, hard to understand. Um, okay.  so. that's my little spiel about emojis. Okay. Alignment. I really like alignment, um,  there... because it's so clear what's best, and what's not best. So, let's start with  the w

inner and the loser in alignment. Um, always-left justified is going to be, just,  probably the best and... and maybe it can be uh, kind of boring, but that that's all...  kind of all I'm going to say about it. The worst is fully-justified types—like what  you might find in a newspaper, for instance—um, and that's because, um, if we move to the next  slide, the spaces in the words are not regular, and this creates rivers of white  space that's pretty distracting. Um, this one I actually can very

much, um, empathize  with. I have ADHD, and so those rivers stand out so much! They're quite annoying. Um, the,  kind of... the middling ones, center-aligned, right-aligned. I feel like those can be used if  you have a reason to use them. Um, for instance, a lot of titles are centered, um, there are some  design reasons to use right-aligned text. Um, but, for most documents—I would say 90% of  documents—left-justified text is just easier. Okay. Emphasis. So, most important: Um, we  want to be u

sing language to call out things that are important to us, or that we really want  to stand out. Um, we don't want to overuse bold and italics, because many screen readers will  not, um, indicate bold or italicized text. If, uh—we had this question in, uh, one  of our last trainings—was, um, like, for academic papers, you might use italicized  text for specific formatting reasons. That's fine. Yeah it... it likely won't show up  for many people, uh, using screen readers, but, yeah, it's fine. Um

, what we definitely  don't want to do is underline for emphasis, and that's because we live in a digital age, and  if something's underlined you want to tap it, or click on it, because you think it's a link, um,  and we're not going to want to use color, ever, by itself. We like to use color to emphasize things,  but, if color is the only reason, the only a form of emphasis, we're going to get in a little bit  of trouble, and we'll talk about that in a bit. Okay, paragraph spacing. Uh, we want

a lot  of white space. White space is fantastic. Um, we do want to use the paragraph tool rather  than, um, our "enter" key to make white spaces, and that is because screen reader users will  hear the word "blank" so— this is especially important—if you're using it between your  paragraphs, it's a little annoying, um, and it's also annoying to remediate that document  later. However, the big... the big issue is—if we're using lots of paragraph or... or returns,  enter keys, at the end of a docum

ent, too instead of, um, a page break—because then what is a user  going to hear? They're going to hear blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank,  and... and how do you know this... if there's anything left in your document, unless you go  to the next header? Okay, so, that's my soapbox about the blank, and here's an example. Uh, they  would, on every... on every one of these, uh, paragraphs you would hear blank, so, um—and I'll  demonstrate that paragraph tool in just a...

okay, uh, line spacing between lines. Um, this is  important for folks with learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities, it's very important  to keep enough space in between so that the text doesn't feel really smushed, so, somewhere  between 1.25 and 1.45 is a good rule of thumb. So, this slide is just a, uh, another  example of... or, excuse me, just a list of the rules so, I... I won't go over  it, but, just, something for your records, and we are going to get into the styles pane,  again,

because I really love the styles pane, and, so, I'm going to go ahead  and take over screen share again. Alright, let's... let's start in Microsoft, again,  and go up to typography using my navigation pane. Um, I also want to point out, um—I should  have done this at the beginning when, um, when I'm sharing my screen—um, probably  everyone already knows this, but it is possible... there's a menu, at the top of your  Zoom screen, that you can—on my screen, anyway, it... it makes the screen share

full screen,  and then, I can't see what... what I'm doing, but there should be a menu at the top of your Zoom  where you can, um, go out of full screen so that I'm not taking up your entire computer screen.  Okay, so, here's some, uh, information for you, for your records, about typography. A little  more in-depth than what I went in to, here, but, more or less, the same information, and some  additional resources, if you're interested. But, let's get into our... our to-do list. So, I,  kind of

, already, like our title and our H2s in this document, but let's pretend like I don't like  them very much. Let's go up to this H2, let's say I want to change its color. So, I'm just going  to mess with it a little bit. I like blue, I'm going to make it blue. Maybe I... I like it to be  a little bit bigger or smaller, there we go. So, I'm just going to use these font tools that we're,  kind of, all used to to, just, change it the way I want, and I'm going to showcase this tool, again:  Right-cl

ick and update to match selection. I'm going to go around, that one's blue and big,  that one's blue and big, very good. There's another way to do this, if I want to... let's say  I want a line underneath, just to show off where this is. I'm going to go and right-click,  again, on heading two and select modify... ...and then down here under... ...format first I'm going to go to paragraph... ...and I think, maybe, I want a  little bit of space before my H2s. I'm just going to bump that up a littl

e bit... Okay, and look at that. There's a little bit  of extra space, that's good, so I'm going to do it again. This time, I'm going to add a line,  modify, format, border, that's where I hit it. And I'm just gonna tap that button, there.  Okay, now, every single H2 in my document has a little bit of extra space and a line  under it. It stands out great, but notice that this line that stretches across it doesn't  look like a link because it's far enough away, which I'm happy about. So, uh, we'v

e done that.  Let's see what else we have on our to-do list, and... I'm actually gonna wait, for just a second,  if anyone has any questions or would like me to repeat any of these skills—sometimes I go a bit  fast, so I'm more than happy to do that—this room is also really cold so I'm going faster than  I normally do. Okay, uh, use the instructions above to adjust one example of an H2, select it,  up... update the others to match. We've done that, well done us. Find a fact in this document that

's  interesting to you and make it stand out. Okay, so, I'm excited about this, I... let's look  for a fact that we really like. I'm actually going to go to the next section, I really like  this fact right here. Maybe something else... this one. I like that, so, how am I going to  make it stand out? I could use language... ..."Important!" and I'm going  to use some space. Come back. Looks pretty good. I'm also going to see  what the styles pane can give me. So, I've highlighted this whole thing

and here's  an intense... let's see, intense emphasis. Let's see what that'll do. That's exciting, I'm  kind of liking that. It's also... that one that looks pretty good. I'm hearing someone  off... off mute. Do you have a question? Okay, so, there's some some interesting  ones. What we want to be aware of, however, when we're using this, is, not only are these  styles going to change the look of our text, they are going to tag the text. So...  intense emphasis, that's... that's fine, that works

. If I use the styles pane, however, to  give it a heading title. Say, I re... a heading... say I really like that one. That makes it really  stand out. I'm... I'm not going to do that, because it's going to tag it as a header  which is going to cause problems, later on, for my users. So, I'm going to stick with intense  emphasis, um, and that's going to call it out for... for our users. Alright, our last to-do list  is the one that I mentioned I would showcase in a second. I'm going to go up to

paragraph...  the paragraph tool set in the home ribbon, and I'm going to to click this little show/hide  paragraph symbol. Um, I don't like working with this on, I find it distracting, but it's very  useful because I can quickly scan and I can see if there are any of those pesky little, um,  enter signs. So, I don't see any right off, so that's good. Oh, I found one, look at that.  That's going to be read as blank, so let's delete that. But I still did like that space, so what I  want to do is

go to the paragraph tool set, again, under the lines and spacing options, and I just  want to add some space before the paragraph. That looks great, here's another one, delete that.  But, look at... at this. Okay, now, I want to add some space. I really liked that space. So, we  go back to paragraph... the paragraph tool set... Add space, look at that, perfect. Okay,  now, I see your comments. Yeah, hi, oh, does someone have a comment? Okay,  not a problem. I see your comment, Andre, um, let's

switch over to  Google Docs and see what we can do. Alrighty. Yes, so, we want to make our something  stand out. Absolutely, we can do that, just like we did before. Adjust it, maybe give it a color  purple, make it an H2, but "update to match", now all of our H2 are going to be purple, which  is great. Yep, absolutely, and not a problem. Alright, let's see if we can do the next one. Oh,  we already did it: "Use the instructions above to adjust one example of H2." Okay, done. "Find  one fact and

make it stand out." Okay, let's see if we can do that. Um, let's see. The fact  that I really liked was this one. So, I'm just going to give it its own paragraph. Now it stands  out with a little bit of spacing. Let's see what Google offers. It doesn't... so, like we said,  sometimes Google is not going to be as helpful, but what I can do is say it is very important  that your contrast should never be less than 4.5, which we'll talk about in a second. Using language  is always going to be our f

irst option when we're trying to make something stand out, so... and, if  we want to make it stand out for users that are looking at the document, we can make it a little  bigger. I guess maybe we can give it a color... Okay, so, that's about what we can do and, last one, "Use the show nonprinting characters  function." Can we do it? I actually do not know, if we can do it, so... if Claire or Jim knows,  I'm happy to defer to them. I don't see it. But I'll move on, for now. Anyone  who knows if

we can or can't show that show menu... show and add space view... There it is, thank you very much. Okay, so,  now, we can see... there it is. We'll delete our extra spaces, and now those will not show  up as blanks if we put it into a PDF format. Format menu. Aha! From the format menu, we can  add space before a paragraph, remove space, custom spacing, so, I'll show that one more time. In the  view menu, we can show nonprinting characters, and, in the format menu, this is where we can  increase

... excuse me, this is where we can increase our spaces. Cool, any questions about  typography, and adjusting typography in Google Docs or Microsoft? If you have no questions,  you're good to go, A+, give me a thumbs up. Awesome, alrighty. Let's go  ahead and go back to our slide. Liz, do you want to... should we do a break  after this section? Yeah, I think I'm gonna go get a sweater, it's so cold in here. Okay,  um, color and contrast. So, contrast is, uh, the difference between the brightness

in the text  and the background. Um, I believe there are some people on our call, right now, who have personal  experience with how having good contrast, um, is beneficial, and, probably, some experience  about having bad contrast. It's the worst, and I wear glasses or contacts, and... and  so, I have limited experience of just how annoying it can be, but let's look at  what the... the WCAG standards are... Okay. So, the, um, web content  accessibility guidelines, WCAG, um, states that, um, the

color contrast ratio  of 1:1 is the least accessible ratio. So, you may not even be able to see the word text  over on the far, uh, left side of your screen. Um, the highest ratio you can have is 21:1. That's...  that can only be achieved with black and white, whether it's black background/white  text, or black text/white background. WCAG requires a 4.5:1 ratio so that, uh, text in  the middle, that text box, that's 4.5:1 brightness ratio. Um, if it's larger text, like, for heading  it can be a

s low as 3.1. Um, so, you have a nice solid goal. You... if you fall below that  standard, it's not an accessible document. Okay, there are a couple of... oh, we've got a comment:  "Studies show black background with white text is good for dyslexia." Interesting. I had never  heard that. I do know that, a lot of times, people are using their own devices to switch  the background. If you go into night mode—or dark-color mode, I'm not sure what it's  called—um, and a lot of people prefer to have a

black background with the white text. Um,  there are a couple of methods we can use. Um, first is a visual inspection. If it's... if it  looks like it probably passes that 4.5, chances are it does. If you're not sure, there are two  tools we can use. The check accessibility tool... "Always aim to overachieve." Perfect, Jim.  Um, so, we can use the check accessibility tool. Let's do that now. Um, I'm actually going  to take over share screen for just a second... Alright, in Microsoft. Let's star

t there.  I'm going to go up to review. It opens the review ribbon and I'm going to  just click check accessibility. So, here, we're not seeing that any... let's see.  We've got some warnings, we've got some errors, we've got some intelligent services, and one  of our warnings is "hard to read text contrast" and it is suggesting that we use the WebAIM  Contrast Checker. Oh, no it's not. Our text on here is... was so impressed with Microsoft's  accessibility checker, for a moment. "Wow, look at..

. look at how smart it is. That's  exactly what I was going to suggest." Okay, so, it did catch that something in our  document does not have um enough contrast. Um, the other option, uh, is that we can use, um,  we can use a third-party checker. One of those, that's really great, is the web aim  contrast checker. So, all I'm going to do, I'm going to go ahead and make that a little  bit smaller and, in my browser, I'm just going to pull it up. Typing it in. WebAIM Contrast  Checker and... and l

et's pop that in the chat. Like... I missed something in the chat.  Some personal information from Lori: "My daughter in nursing school, yesterday, made  a PowerPoint using this color combination. She knows what I do all day, but found that  on her own." Love that. Um, okay, so, this is the WebAIM Contrast Checker. This is a  free tool, um, and, uh, it's quite useful. So, what we want to do is... we need to check to see  if this meets standards. We're going to go into the color picker and, when

I click on this color  in the foreground, there's a... an eyedropper tool, right there, I can pull that eyedropper out  of my browser, and I'm going to grab foreground. So, I'm going to grab some text. I'll grab this  tiny black text, there, so we've got black. Now, I'm going to grab the background color, same deal.  Click the color, down here there's an eye dropper. Now, I'll grab the background color. Okay, so,  this tells us normal text will pass at AA and AAA standards. AA means, um, most of

the time, you're  good. Triple A is... you get an A+++, basically, um, and it passes for large text, also, so, good  job us. Um, so, that's one of the tools. "I'm not finding check accessibility button in my version  of Word." It could be because of the version that you're using. Um, if you have the review tab  open, um, I'm not sure where it used to be, or if it's moved places, but one great place to  look is in search. Just look for accessibility, or accessibility checker, and then it... it 

should show you where it is. I... I think search, in the last couple versions of word, was  always at the top, but I could be wrong. Um, let us know if you find it, Cecilia,  um, because it could be that other people in the group have your same version.  Awesome, good, was it in the same place? "Found it and searched."  Awesome. Select file, info, select "check for issues".  File, info, check issues. Oh, there it is. Check for issues, check  accessibility. Great, we've got a couple of different

ways to find it. Okay, um, let me glance  back at our slides, here. I'm gonna stop share and Google. Folks, hang tight. I promise I will  show, uh, the skill I just showed in a moment. Okay. Uh, the other... if we just hop back, just,  real quick. The other option for a third party tool is the color contrast analyzer. Um, I won't  show it right this second, because I'm using my husband's PC and it's not downloaded, and it  is an app, um that needs to be downloaded to a machine. So, depending on

the rules for your  organization, it's possible that you won't be able to access this tool. It... it just depends  on what's blocked or not blocked on your machine, uh, but I actually do prefer the the CCA, um,  to the WebAIM, just because it's embedded, and I like apps. Okay. Um, color reliance. Um, I kind  of foreshadowed this a little bit earlier. Um, in the US, about 4% of the population have some  form of color vision deficiency, sometimes called color blindness. Um, users with low vision,

um,  might also override the colors in a document like we were just talking about, um, and so, if we're  using color by itself to give information, uh, that can create some problems. Let's look at a  couple of examples of that. Um, unfortunately, in Microsoft Word, if you're creating a chart,  the default chart is this, um, that has, you know, some colors, and then it has a legend at the  bottom that's very small on our screen, right now, um, and there is no... nothing linking the  two... the...

the different parts of the chart, and then the legend. So, the way to fix this is  to go into the chart table ed... the chart editor, and find a different template. So, a lot of  these different templates that they have in in the chart editor in, um, in Microsoft Word,  some of them attach directly to the pieces that they're talking about, and then, we aren't  only relying on color, that's one example. Um, another example is, on the next slide, yeah, so,  in this example, how to respond if a be

ar attacks, red equals fight back with everything you have,  green equals play dead, and then we have a list of red and green colored types of bears. So,  this is some pretty important information that's being lost for anyone who r... who cannot  rely on color to give them that information. Uh, so the... probably the better way to do it  is, again, to just use language to express what the information is. That's really so  vital, um, to, uh, do this. So, on this side, we just have some informatio

n: "If a black  bear charges and attacks you, fight back with everything you have." and some information:  "If a grizzly bear attacks and... play dead, unless it keeps going, and then fight back." So,  um, that's a way that we're not relying on color to give some pretty crucial information.  Okay, let's see. We've got how to test... Yep, same thing. Start with a visual inspection, and then there is a third party tool that is  listed here, um, but we won't demo it today. Okay, and a slide for you

r information, for  your records, um, to, uh, to how to use color, best practices, okay. Let's get  in and practice a little bit more. Okay, so, I'm going to use my navigation  panel to go in and to color contrast, again, here's some information. We've got a link  to the WebAIM Color Contrast Checker. I'm going to go ahead and go back to the home  menu and turn off my, uh, paragraph tool. And here we've got an activity. So, uh, I can  already tell, just from a visual inspection, that this box, h

ere, is going to fail and, in  fact, we know that because we... we've got it in our accessibility checker, right now, so I  wouldn't actually have to use the WebAIM Color Contrast Checker on this one, all I would  need to do is change the font color or the paragraph shading in this menu, which is so  great, that it just offers it right there, so, I'm just going to click and... look at that,  it's fixed and it disappeared from my menu. So, I'm going to show that one more time. Say  my accessibili

ty Checker tool is gone. I'm going to go up to review, check accessibility.  Or, I could just search accessibility checker. Here. It is "hard to read text  contrast". Let's just fix it. Let's change that to Black. Looks great,  and "add to dictionary", perfect. Okay, um, let's go ahead and do that over  in Google. Where are you Google... Okay, alright. So, here,  we've got color contrast... And we will go to... I know  I saw it, where are you... Nope. I knew it. Unfortunately, I don't think  the

re's a... an equivalent accessibility checker in Google. If anyone knows different, please  let me know. I... I've spent 90% of my time working in Microsoft, I don't think there...  Okay, Jim. Yeah, if you have Grackle Docs, you can use it as an accessibility checker. In  Google? No luck. But a visual inspection will tell us that no, that does not... "If you  are not able to just click within the menu, just open up WebAIM to fix it?" Absolutely. So,  let's just pull this into its own window, and

it made my text really small, so I will try to fix  that for you without making everybody sea sick. Oh, okay, I see what happened. Alright, so here  we've got our, um, definitely not accessible, um, thing, but let's... let's just check it.  We've got foreground, which is white. It can be a little hard to click on, you got to  have, kind of, a steady hand, and, on Mac, you have to manually change font, or background  good... good to know, good to know. We've got our background, that yellow color

, it is a fail  on everything. We have AA, AAA, large text, all of that. It's a fail, so, WebAIM does offer  some options. We can adjust these colors until they pass. It gives us this really lovely brown.  Um, we could also, just, do our best to change it right inside of Google. I'm just gonna...  sure, we, why don't we pick, like, an orange, and then we can... oh, that's also brown. Alright,  we're working with brown today, folks. So, we can just pick that color, again, and see, if we would  li

ke, that it absolutely passes so, good job, good job us. I'm going to make that smaller, so  I can see everything. Again, WebAIM tool does not work as well if you're using Firefox. Um, Color  Picker doesn't work and I think... that's true, Jim. In our... in one of our last trainings,  someone wasn't seeing the color pickle... picker tool. Um, I use Chrome and it... it  has always worked for me. Okay, and... Robin, keep... keep the Mac tips coming. Um, oh,  looks like I missed one so I'm just gon

na... There we go. Um, any questions about  using the Color Contrast Checker, um, or on... on either Google or Microsoft? Okay, I'll take those thumbs  up, now if you don't mind. Only if you're ready to move on. We can certainly  go over some other color-related things and contrast-related things. Okay, welcome back,  everybody. Hope you were able to stretch out, a little bit. Get a sweater, if you needed  one. Um, okay, so, with images there are some technical issues that we need to be aware of

,  and there's also some, uh, general good design, uh, issues that we want to be aware of.  Um, so, when we're choosing our image, we want to make sure that we're creating a  connection with the text that's clarifying the information that's already there, and  adding meaning, and sometimes, our images are going to evoke feelings or associations,  and the reason we want to think about this is because we're going to be needing to create  alternative text for each of our images. So, if we're choosi

ng something in order to  evoke a feeling or an association, um, or add any meaning, it's important for  us to be able to express to ourselves, as the document creator, what that is, so that  we can then try and replicate that in text. Okay. Alright, so, there's some different types of  images, um, that just tend to convey different things. Um, we've got photos that tend to convey  reality, stability, maybe empathy for the people in the photo, if it's real human beings. Um, and  those are going

to be saved as JPEGs, normally. Um, illustrations can, um, illustrate, kind of,  subjective or abstract ideas. Those are going to be usually PNGs. Sometimes you might find an SVG  file. Um, charts, data, pie, charts, analytics, that kind of thing, um, also PNG, and icons that  are used for navigation or ident... identifying things. This is, probably, all repeat information,  but I want to make sure we're on the same page, um, especially when it relates to the file  types that we're working on, b

ecause file type matters for, kind of, a different aspect of  inclusion. Um, if we're using file types that are wrong for the... the image that we have, it can  increase the size of our documents quite a lot, um, and this can be really hard for folks with  older devices, or poor Wi-Fi, things just won't load. So, that's why we're talking a little bit  about, um, types of image for the, um, folks who are using assisted technology. There are a couple  things we want to be aware of with our images,

and one of them is that they need to be kept in-line  with the text. Um, so... and I'll demonstrate that in just a second... second, um, and, uh, as I  was saying, with these large files, um, I'll... I'll also... I'll give you a bonus, um, tool that  can be used, uh, to optimize our really extra-big files—especially photos that are taken with  nice cameras can be just massive file-sizes—um, and if we optimize those images, our file sizes  are going to load... our our files are to load so much b

etter on, uh, like, student devices  and things. Okay, I think that's... oh, we've got some best practices. Uh, choose the right  file type, keep images in-line, let's get to it. I'm gonna go ahead and... share, okay, alright.  Again, here's the information in written form. It's basically a repeat of what you had in the  slides, we wanted to offer it twice just, uh, for you may have... whichever version you prefer  to use. Okay, um, we've got additional resources. Squoosh is not, uh, something t

hat's listed in our  activity instructions, but I think I do want to, uh, demo it if we have some time. Okay, um, so  we've got some... a story here. We've got Allison, who's creating a flyer for parents of young  children who are new to AT, or Assistive Technology. Uh, she's trying to choose a picture  for the flyer. What I would... what I would like you to do, um, is just, in your own mind, think  about how you might describe the images, here. So, what feelings are coming up? What do image... 

uh, and I'm gonna just try and type on my copy, um—if anyone would like to put in the  chat, so we can do this together, um, I would love to make this kind of a group  activity—for this first image. Image One. Let me try and make it a little bit bigger. What message  or feelings might this image convey, and what, uh, what type of description should we put in? We're  going to need to describe this image. For folks who can't see it: An adult putting hearing aid on  a toddler in her lap. A mom put

ting a hearing aid in her son's right ear. Woman inserting hearing  aid in child's ear. I'm loving where we're going, um, what I want to cons... have us consider,  um, is how detailed we need to be, and this is very contextual, if this is an image that  needs to be minutely described. For instance, Beth, perfect example: "Mother with brunette  hair with brunette son wearing a red shirt inserting a hearing aid into his ear." This is  very minutely described. Sometimes context will require this de

pth of description, and sometimes  it won't. Um, if this is an image that is going to be talked about in the context of... of the  document that it's in, we could even keep our, um, our image description super, super  short and simple. Um, something like... Something like that. I'm not saying  that this is preferable to anything that's been put in the chat, but I do want to  suggest that it doesn't have to necessarily be minutely described. If that's what's called  for in-context, that's what we

want to do, but maybe it doesn't need it. Um, so let's  look at this next one. Out of context, it's a little bit hard to decide.  Let me scroll over a tiny bit, but let's give it a try. I'm eyeing the chat,  again, and I can make it a little bit bigger. We're holding space for this because it's an  important skill, and it's also a skill that I think most of us are not, um... Oh, I... I did put  a description, excuse me. The description for this first one, uh, that... that I wrote was "Mom helps

  son with hearing aid". "Is it okay to unmute?" Yeah, of course, please. Hi. So, I think that the  helping with hearing aid isn't as specific as, like, putting it in their ear. Like, "helping  them with the hearing aid". Doing what? Like, putting batteries in, or, like, we don't know,  but there is a balance there, because, of course, it just depends. Like, what you were saying,  how significant that image is for the document, but I would say, you know, specific enough to  know what's going on,

but not over the top, and, I know that's super subjective and not always  helpful, sorry. Oh, I love... very helpful, Judy. I've changed it and I'm curious about  your reaction to "Mom puts in son's hearing aid". Yeah that sounds great. Short and  sweet and descriptive enough that we know what's happening. Awesome, love it. Some of  our, um, suggestions for our next image are: "Six individuals using a variety of assisted  devices.", "Everyone needs tools for life." Which, perhaps, Katrina, that

would be more of a caption  to go in text near the image. If we're wanting to describe the image, "Six individuals  using a variety of assisted devices." It accurately describes the image. Any other, um,  suggestions for this second image that we have? Otherwise, I'm happy to move on, because we do  have some other, um, opportunities to do this. Oh! Made it a little bit too big. There we go,  great. Um, there are two other images on this screen. I will let you, um, take the time  on your own. O

kay, Katie: first one. "The alt-text you submitted could be controversial or  assumed. Could a doctor and a child versus a mom and child?" Absolutely, I really appreciate that  insight. A lot of times, alt-text it... it is, um, a little bit of an art versus science, isn't  it? And, again, as the author of the document, you'd have a little bit of an easier time. For  instance, if we're talking about a care provider, in the context, of course we... we'd  write that, but yeah. Very good point, and

it's a good conversation to have, as well.  Um, there are a couple of other, um, images but, in the interest of time, I am going to go ahead  and move on, and I'm actually gonna pass the the microphone over to Claire, here, in a second.  Robin: "In the second image, I'm curious about the importance of including what the image shows  people of different ethnicities. I feel like it's likely taken into consideration when choosing  the image, when would that be important to include in alt-text?" Rea

lly great point, yeah.  It depends on the context. So, we could, um, rather than "six individuals using a variety  of assistive devices", like Patty suggested, we could say something like, um, "a diverse  community of people using assistive devices", something like that. "Six people grouped to...  together in a line. One person has a white cane and appears to be a guide. One person is seated in  a wheelchair. Others are standing. They have their arms outstretched to each other." Yeah I'm...  I d

on't know if I'm the right person to, uh, to give a "yes, that's perfect" or "no, I wouldn't  do it that way" because, what can you do. Now, I will say that—for alternative text, which Claire  is just about to talk about—um, a lot of times, it can be better to make it concise, um, because  what we don't want to do is repeat information, so, if we have written something in the context  of the document, we don't want to write that again in the alt-text. Um, "Would you want to  focus on cultural di

versity, or the disability diversity?" That would be a question for the  author of the document. Absolutely, great... great questions foreshadowing our next topic. So,  I was just gonna add... I was just going to add, it really depends on the point you're trying  to make. Why is that image in the document, and, if it has to do with diversity, that's  the importance, you would describe that. If it doesn't have to do with diversity, if it's  really about the assistive devices, then that's what you

're emphasizing, that's my perspective.  Love it, so I'll—in closing my part of this, um, of this presentation, because my brain, I think,  just shut off at 10 pm—but, before I close, I just want to check one thing over in our accessibility  checker in Microsoft. Before, we had multiple images that were missing object descriptions,  and now, let's see. We like this mom's putting in son's hearing aid copy, and let's see if  we can just... there we go—oh! It was already in there. Okay, that was yo

ur quick foreshadowing  for Claire's wonderful topic that she's about to, just, go speed off on, and I'm gonna head off  to bed, so, thank you all so much for having me, it was really wonderful to have this conversation  with you, and I wish you luck for the rest of your training. Thanks Liz, thanks Claire. Bye bye.  Alright, I'm going to share my screen again, get things pulled up. Um, I love the discussion  that's been going on in the chat, and with Liz, so... so, we're going to shift into tal

king,  um, shift away from talking about images and, um, shift to alt-text and, kind of, how we can  use the meaning from images to describe them in alternative text. Okay, so, it sounds like most  people are already very familiar with the concept of alternative text. In case anybody is not, um,  alternative text is a description of an image, um, it often benefits, uh, blind or screen reader  users who may not see the image in your document. And so the, um, if... if they don't see the  image, th

en they risk missing out on that super-important meaning and context that Liz was  describing, that your photo adds to your content, and so, um, alternative text is a description of  an image that can be read by a screen reader that, um, helps convey that same meaning, hopefully,  if it's written well. Um, alternative text, um, needs to be more than just a visual description,  um, of what is in the photo. It should really capture the purpose of the image. Why did you  choose to include... includ

e it, and, I think, the discussion we were just having, post some  really great examples, um, of how we can think about that. Um, thinking about the image that's  on this screen... on this screen. We've got a cute little dog with his, uh, with his right ear  kind of perked up, and he's also wearing a very cute little scarf. Okay, so, if we think about  the alt-text, we might put on this image, um, again it's going to depend on... we're gonna ask  ourselves what are we using it for and why did we

choose this image. So, let's say I was creating a  survey, um, I wanted to solicit some feedback on a program that I'm running. So, I'm sending this  survey out, I put this picture of this cute little guy on there, and I put the words, like, "We're  listening.", or, "We want to hear from you!", or something like that. In that case, my alt-text  might be something like, "A dog with his ear raised." Conversely, if I put this photo on...  if I created a flyer for my grandma's Etsy shop, and she cr

eates very nice hand-knit scarves and  sells them on Etsy, and I put this on my grandma's scarf shop flyer, then the alt text might be "A  cute dog wearing a hand-knit gray scarf". Okay, so, can you, kind of, tell how, um, we used  alt-text to convey different meanings based on why we chose the photo? Um, I think the question  in the chat about, kind of, um, and... let me make sure I get the question right. "Curious about  the importance of including an image that shows people of different ethni

cities, I feel like this  is likely taken into consideration when cho... when choosing that image." Absolutely, I think,  um, again, we're thinking about why did we choose this image. If we chose the image specifically  because it represents diversity of ethnicity, or diversity of disability, or the use of adaptive  equipment, then I would absolutely include that in my alt-text. So, hopefully, that answers that  question. A couple of other, kind of, best practices when thinking about... or when

writing  your alternative text, like we mentioned before, keep it brief but accurate. Um, typically,  alt-text should be less than two sentences, and it should describe, again, what do you want  the reader to take away from the image. Um, you don't need to say this is a photo of, or  this is an image of, uh, that is because that, kind of, becomes redundant information. Typically,  most screen readers will tell the reader, um, that is reading, you know, alt-text of a photo or  an image, and so, i

f you start your alt-text with "photo of", then the reader might hear "photo of  photo of a dog wearing a cute scarf", so you don't need to say that. Um, if the image is a link,  or has some sort of behavior, you do need to state that. So, a good example of this is, like, a  lot of people will, um, have a clickable link of, like, the Facebook icon that will link to their  Facebook page. Um, the alt-text on that icon, um, would need to say something, like, "link to our  SWAAAC Facebook page" or s

omething like that, so that the... the reader knows, um, where they will  go if they click that link. Um, it's if possible, you want to try to avoid using any images that  contain text. If you absolutely have to use an image that has text within the image, then the  alt text must con... contain the same text. Um, I think the common example of this is logos.  So, a lot of logos will have your... you know, school, or company, or whatever, your name in it,  just make sure you're also including that

in the alt-text. Um, when it comes to punctuation  and capitalization, this can be helpful, um, especially commas, if a pause in your description  would make it more clear. Um, some screen readers will read punctuation out, so, just, try not  to overuse it, but you... but it can be helpful to use regular punctuation and capitalization,  and then the last thing is, just, to be careful of any automatically-generated alt-text that  might already be in your alt-text field. So, more and more, the co

mputer is able to add its  own alternative text to a photo, um, especially if you're pulling, like, a stock photo from...  from micro... Microsoft's, you know, stock photos folder, or whatever. Um, a lot of times it will  come with its own alt-text. Sometimes too, even if you're uploading your own photo, um, something  will populate that alt-text file. Sometimes it's just, like, the file name, and so it might,  just, be like, image 3, 4, 5, 6, whatever, something essentially meaningless. There's

also a  tool in word, at least, in newer versions of word, where, near the alt-text, you can press a button,  and it will use AI to generate some alt-text for you. Again, that's just going to be, basically,  a description, um, of what the computer thinks the photo is, of... the computer doesn't know why  you've chosen to include it. You have to always go in and edit any automatically-generated alt-text  to make sure it still conveys that same takeaway message and is not, just, kind of, a descri

ption  of the... of the image. Um, complex images are non-text elements that cannot be described  easily in one-to-two sentences, so, think things like maps, graphs, charts, infographics, like,  process flow-charts, things like that, and so, um, of course, the... the alt text, there, is  going to be a bit more complex and take a little bit more... take more to describe. So, instead of  putting it in that alt-text field, it tends to be a better practice to bring it out into, um, like,  the paragr

aph text that surrounds that photo, or, sometimes, people will create a link that  goes to a longer description of that photo, and this is really helpful for a lot of people,  um, to provide that... that text description. Um, this can get a little bit complex, and there are  more best practices around this, so I don't want to spend too much time here. Um, there is this  nice online training, if you are someone who uses a lot of complex visuals in the content that  you're creating, you might cons

ider watching this, um, online training on describing complex images  from AbleTech and AT3, and it's linked, here, on this slide. Right, so, I'm going to pop out of  the Powerpoint and go over to our activity—and, I know that we got a little bit of practice with  this already, um, with... with thinking about what might make good alternative text—I'm going to show  you, um, how to go in and add it. Um, couple ways to do this in Microsoft Word, and I am underneath  our alternative text section of

our Microsoft Word document, and I'm down in the activity section,  and the instructions for this activity are to, just, go in and add alt-text to the images below.  Um, so, easy way to do that: Select the image by clicking on it, and then right-click, and then  view alt-text, and then you'll type your alt-text in here. Um, since we spent so much time, kind  of, in the last activity thinking about, you know, what makes good meaningful descriptions and  alt-text, I think we can go through this a

ctivity a little bit quicker. Um, I think, for  this image, we had decided... what did we say? "Mom putting a hearing aid in a young child's  ear" was nice, concise, descriptive. Okay, so, if you're working in the Word documents, um, get  a little bit of practice with adding alt-text to these next few photos, here, thinking about how  you might describe those, and then I'm going to switch over to the Google Document and show our  Google friends how to add alt text in a Google doc. So, it's basic

ally the same process, you're  going to select the image by clicking on it, right-click, and then find alt-text. Click on  that, and you can add your description in here. One thing I will point out—I'm going to flip back  to my Word document—you might notice in Word, underneath the field where you add the  alt-text, there's a check-box that you can choose to mark this image as decorative.  You can use this if there is an image that is purely decorative. If you have chosen an  image, it doesn't r

eally convey any meaning, it doesn't really have any purpose in your  document other than decorative, then you can check this box to mark it as decorative and that will,  um, not be read by assistive technology. Okay, um, unfortunately, that's not an option, um, in  a Google doc, unless you have Grackle, and I'll show you what that looks like, in case anybody  does have Grackle. You'll launch Grackle Docs. It appears that... does this, kind of, pop up on  the right side of your screen, and it, k

ind of, automatically will do a full check of... of  accessibility issues within your document, and it has found, um, a few images that don't  have an alternate text description—probably these next two, here—I can click locate, and it will  find it for me, and, if I wanted to mark this as decorative, I click tag, and it's called "mark  as artifact" that's what the tag will ultimately be called on something that gets skipped over by  assistive technology is... is an artifact. So, I'm going to mar

k that as an artifact and then  update it, but I know from the survey most people in the group don't have Grackle Docs and so,  if you're just working in Google Docs and you don't have Grackle Docs or a way to mark images  as decorative, I think it's just extra important to be really careful about what images you're  choosing and, just, really purposeful about really only adding images to your content when they  have a really clear purpose in your materials. "Is Grackle an extension?" Um, yes. Y

eah, it's  an extension that gets added directly into Google Docs. It's not... it's not exactly a Chrome  extension, but, if you were to go to Grackle and create an account, then you could you would have  this here, underneath this extensions drop-down, you would have the option for for Grackle Docs.  I'm just on a 30-day free trial, right now, so, um, if you want to try it, you can try it for  30 days. Jim... yeah, great point... point, you can also mark an image as decorative if the  image has

a descriptive caption or a description elsewhere in the surrounding text. In that  case, it would be redundant to add the same text to your alt-text. You've already conveyed  that meaning to the reader, so you can mark it as decorative. Thanks for adding that, Jim. "In  Google there is an advanced option to add a title, which will appear as a tool tip when published on  the web. How does this work with a... with screen reader tool tips?" Great question. I'm not sure,  exactly, what a tool tip i

s, but I do know that the title is not the same thing as the alt-text.  Um, the title is often what you'll see if you're on a web page and you hover over an image. It  also helps with search engine optimization, so, um, so, you might add a title if your document  is going... going into, um, a... a website. Judy said... "A screen reader reads tool tips, but not  by default. You have to set it up that way." Okay, so, thank you, Judy. So, really, um, we want to  be using that alt text field, and th

e title is, kind of, an optional, additional piece of  information that you could add. Hopefully that answered those questions. I'm going to share my  PowerPoint, again, and we'll move on. Thanks for all the discussion around alt-text, that's great.  Um, so, next, we're going to shift gears a little bit, talk about use of language. Specifically,  um, plain language and inclusive language. So, using plain and inclusive language will help the  people who are reading your content to understand it t

he first time that they read it. Um, the  most important thing that you can do, when thinking about the language that you're using, is  to consider who your audience is. So, if you're creating a document that will be used by, um, by  a limited, like, a known subset of people and you know who they are. For example, maybe you're  creating a handout for a group of teachers in your school. In that case, it'd be... it'd be okay  to use some teacher-specific jargon, to use some acronyms that they are

already familiar with. It  might be okay to write at a higher reading level. However, if we don't know exactly who we're...  who we're talking to—and typically we don't—um, maybe you know you're creating a document that's  going to get posted on a website, and that's going to be publicly available for anyone to access.  Or maybe, um, maybe you're even writing to just a small group of, let's say, parents, but you  don't know... you know exactly who they are, you might not know where they're from,

what they  do for work, what's their educational background, you might not know what their first language is.  So, in these situations, um, we can, kind of, fall back on some principles of plain an inclusive  language. Um, I'll just, actually, pop out to a browser and show you some of the resources linked  on this slide. Plainlanguage.gov is... has a really nice set of guidelines for how to write,  um, in... in plain language that will be easier for people to understand the first time they read

  it. So, they have these different guidelines like how to write for your audience, how to organize  your information, um, choosing your words carefully, concision, and then, if you click  on any of these, you'll see, like, subtopics, and then reading about those subtopics. What I  really like about this website is that they give you examples of what you might say, instead...  so, so, for example, you want to use pronouns, speak directly to your reader. So, as an example  of this, instead of say

ing "Copies of tax returns must be provided." you could instead say "You must  provide copies of your tax returns." So, that's much, much, clearer, everyone knows exactly who  needs to do what. Okay, so they've got, just, lots of great examples of these different concepts,  so, definitely, um, this is something, personally, I'm always working on, so, just a really good  resource to, kind of, have bookmarked and, just, review through as you write things for different  audiences. Um, the other one

that I will show you, quick, is, um, the inclusive language guide  from the American Psychological Association, or APA. Um, inclusive language is, um, a little  bit... a little bit different than plain language, but super important. Um, inclusive language  means, kind of, identifying individuals, groups, or communities, using their preferred language.  Um, of course, the best way to know how people and groups of people prefer to be identified is  by asking, but, when you don't have access to so

meone that you can ask, um, I find this resource  really helpful. Basically, the APA compiled some research around the language and terminology  that is preferred by... by people in various communities, and so, if you're ever referring  to or talking about specific identity groups, um, they have these tables—you have to scroll  pretty far down past some of these definitions to get to them—but tables with terms to avoid  and suggested alternatives. So, for example, if I wanted to refer to wheelch

air users, um...  um, this suggests that many wheelchair users do not prefer terms like wheelchair-bound. Instead,  use one of these alternatives. So, they've got, um, kind of, several different tables with  terms to avoid, and suggested alternatives. So, this one is related to... to body size and  weight. Um, to disability status. Terms to avoid and a suggested alternative. Um, and then,  I believe, um, terms related to race, ethnicity, and culture, as well as, uh, gender diversity and  sexual

orientation, I believe. Yeah, so sorry, I'm scrolling through this very quickly, probably  making you carsick, but, um, just wanted to show you all of the different information that they  have here. The other resources on this slide, Hemingway Editor, we're going to look at in  just a minute. So, that's just a little bit of foreshadowing. We're going to talk  about grade level, and then, finally, there's a video on disability-inclusive language.  So, if you're looking to learn more about the the

idea of inclusive language specific to disability,  then that's a really great video. It is about an hour long. So, a couple more best practices  regarding the use of language: you want to try to chunk information into manageable sections—use  those meaningful headers like Liz taught us to—and then put your most important information near the  top. Um, a lot of people aren't going to read very far through your document, especially if the  information towards the top isn't important, so put that

most important stuff up top so that, you  know, people get that information. Try to avoid using long, run-on sentences. Keep your sentences  short and concise. Use bulleted or numbered lists when appropriate. Um, and then write like  you speak. So, keep your writing tone very conversational. It is okay to use contractions,  I still am stuck in, like, I think I learned in, like, fifth grade or something, that you shouldn't  use contractions in your writing, um, so, I... I still... my mindset is,

like, stuck there, but  it is easier to read, for the general population, if you use contractions. Speak directly, um,  use... use active verbs, things like that, um, in your writing, and then, um, provide  examples for more complex concepts when you can. So, for this, um, activity, we are going  to... whoops. I'm going to share my screen again. Sorry about that. We're going to pop  over to our Word document and this... this is going to look the same whether you're  doing this in Word or in Goo

gle Docs. So, in whatever version of the document you're  using, find the "Use of language" section, the header two for use of language, and then  the activity, plain and inclusive language, and take the passage that's in that  activity section. It starts with "In the realm of accessibility, the goal  is to transcend language and disability barriers." You're going to copy that, and  then we're going to go to Hemingwayapp.com I can put that in the chat, here, and, once you're  at Hemingwayapp.com

, um you're going to delete all of the text that is in this editable text field.  Delete all of that, and paste... whoops, paste that passage that you copied into that text field.  What it's going to do is give you a readability score. Um, the readability score for this passage  is grade 15—it's telling us that is poor, probably too high for most audiences—and then it gives you  some ideas for how you might change some things, and it, kind of, uses some color coding, tells  us, you know, one of

our sentences is very hard to read so we might think about, maybe,  breaking that up into multiple sentences, or rewording that, um, these top two. Actually,  all of our sentences are hard to read. Um, we could consider removing adverbs, things like  that. So, take the next, like, two, three minutes and work on either using these hints or read  through some tips on plainlanguage.gov and, um. And work on... Getting this passage down. Let's let's  aim for grade level nine and see what... Passages

we can come up with. Okay, thanks  Tiffany. Tiffany came up with... "The goal of accessible documents is to reach a broad  audience, this guide will help you improve the accessibility of your print and electronic  publications. The focus will be on creating accessible PDFs in Microsoft Word. but the basic  principles apply to other software as well." And let's see how this does. So, got it down five  grade levels, that is impressive. Nice work, nice work. Alright, thanks everyone for  doing that

. I'm gonna share my slides again. And we will move on to talking about links.  Alright, so, a link is something that you can click on that will take you somewhere  else. So, a link might take you to a website, it might take you to a document, it might take  you someplace else in your current document, especially in larger documents, um, or an email.  Typically, a link is to a website. There are three links on this screen, and they all go to the exact  same website. So, I want to know, in the ch

at, which one you think is the most accessible.  So, number one is just a URL. It says https drive.google.com/drive/folder/1...some string of  letters and numbers. Number two says click here, and here... the word here is, uh, hyperlink for  a doc... for document accessibility resources, and number three, the whole thing  is hyperlink, and it says document accessibility resources. Which of these,  do we think, is the most accessible? Awesome, everybody is answering three. That is  correct. Number

three is the correct answer, and that is because it is descriptive. So,  of course, we want to avoid long URLs in our content. No one guessed number one was the correct  answer, so that's good. That's probably because no one wants to look at this, um, or listen to  that. Um, it's essentially meaningless. You're not going to click on it because you don't  know where it's going to take you, and so, using descriptive texts to label links so that  the user knows exactly where they will go when they

click on it, um, is the best way to do  it. Um, so, the link in number two wasn't correct because the link text itself, um, needs  to be descriptive, not just the text around it. Screen readers and other assistive technology  can pull a list of links out of a document. Um, if a screen reader user is looking at that list of  links, they will not have the surrounding text to tell them to help them out with what those links  are to. So, number two on the previous slide, where it said "click here f

or...", and the word  "here" was linked. Um, if that was read by a links list in a screen reader, um, all it would tell the  user is... is "here". This... this link is going to take you here, and, especially if you do that  multiple times throughout a document, you're going to have multiple links that are just saying  here, here, here, so that's not helpful. Um, so the one where the descriptive link text said  "Document Accessibility Training Resources", and that whole thing was linked, that's w

hat would be  read by that screen reader list links feature. Um, a couple other tips. So, describing link behavior  is, honestly, not as important in documents—unless it's a document that's going to like, live on the  web—Um, this is generally more of a web rule, but, um, describing link behavior means, like, if the  link is going to open a new tab, or if it's going to cause something to automatically download  when you click on it, you just want to tell the user that so that they know that thei

r  focus will be taken away from where they're currently at and they're going to be put in a  new tab or in a download. Um, typically, though, if you're... if you're just using a document,  it's, kind of, implied that clicking on a link will launch a browser, right? So, um, so that's  not as as important in a document. Um, finally, if your document is going to be printed, um, then  you'll want to include the URL in parentheses after your descriptive text, um, so, um, so that  someone could click

on the link if they're using it on the computer, or if they're... if they  have the printed document in front of them, they could go to their computer and they can  type that URL into their browser. Um, if you do need to provide a URL and it's really long, then  you might consider using, um, a link shortener such as bit.ly or tinyurl, um, and, that way, if  someone... well, that way, we don't have to look at big long links, or listen to big long links  via a screen reader, um, and, um, it's eas

ier for someone to go type into their browser. That's the  way that they're accessing that. So I'm gonna... Yep, thanks for your question, Judy. Okay,  I'm gonna leave, here, and I'm gonna go to my Word document, and now I'm in the links  section of my Word document. We've got some examples of what not to do versus what to do,  in here, as well, and, in the activity section, um, for links, the activity is, um, is "How  would you change the following link text?" So, I'm trying... it looks like I'

m trying to  link to a document about how to customize text for a hyperlink, and what's actually  been linked is this text that says... yeah I've succeeded in this task. Um,  let's see where this link is going. Yeah, so, it goes to a link to Microsoft support about how to customize text for a  link. I'm going to copy that URL... That I want to link to, and I'm actually just  going to delete this whole thing because that text is not necessary where it says... yeah  I've completed this test. What

I want is for this to say for this how to customize text for a  hyperlink. I want that to actually be hyperlink to that online resource. My mouse is running on...  okay, so, I'm going to highlight the text that I want to make into a link. Right-click, click  link, this dialogue is going to pop up. I have a few different options, if I want to link to a...  a file, or a webpage, then I'm going to use this top one that I'm on. Um, I'm going to click here  if I want link to another place in this doc

ument, and that I could link to any other  header within my document. Um, or, if I want to link to an email address, I'm going  to click here. But I want to link to a web page, so I'm going to stay here. I have my text already  selected that I want to be hyperlink, and I'm just going to paste my URL in this address field, and  now I have a nice descriptive link. I know that, when I click on this link, it's going to take  me to a resource about how to customize text for a hyperlink. Let's say I w

anted to edit this.  Maybe, I think... oh, shoot. I actually want to say that this is... I actually want my link text  to say this is a website about how to customize text for hyperlink, um, but, if I just type it  there, it doesn't become part of the link. So, anytime after you've created your link,  you can go back into it by just going... right-clicking on it, and then editing the  hyperlink, and then I can adjust my text here. Okay, so, that's how we do that in Microsoft  Word. If you're wor

king in the Word documents, um, and want some extra practice with that, there  are several other links throughout this document that aren't, um, displayed optimally. There's one  here... here, there's a few here under tools and tips for writing inclusive language. So, go  practice creating nice descriptive link text out of those. If you're working in the Google  document, I'm going to pop over there now, and I'm going to find the links section activity.  Same thing here. So, I want to change thi

s so that "How to customize text for a hyperlink" is what is  actually linked. So, I'm going to delete this... And make sure my URL is copied. Highlight the text that I want to be  linked, right-click on that. I'm gonna find "insert link", and then it tells  me, just, search or paste my link. So, I'm just going to paste my link in there  and click apply, and same thing here. If, after the fact, I want to edit it, I can  click on... click anywhere on the link, and click on this little, like, penc

il-shaped  button that says edit link, and then I can edit my link-text or my URL there. Website about how  to customize text for hyperlink. That's probably a little long for descriptive link text, but  hopefully you get the idea, there. Alright, check the chat for any questions. "Ctrl+K  is handy for that, too." Thanks, Judy. Alright, we're gonna move on, next, and talk  about tables. So, tables are really great for showing relationships between different pieces  of information. Interpreting a

table requires understanding of the table's rows, um, row  headers, and column headers, if you have them. So, this example is of a table that, um, is showing  prices of various fruits at different grocery stores. As a sighted reader interpreting this  table, I look at any one of these prices, and then I visually follow that price up to the  row header, um, and I know that this price, $152, is relating to an orange, and then I visually  follow it over to the column header on the left, and I know

that that price, $152, is  the price of an orange at Safeway. Um, so, that's great. But when I... when I create  this table, I just need to take a few extra steps to make sure that a screen reader user can  have that same experience in interpreting this table. Um, by the way, these are completely  made-up prices for fruit at these grocery stores, so do not use this to determine where you  should go grocery shopping, I don't... Okay, um, so the very best thing that you can do for  anyone reading

your table is to, just, keep it as simple as you possibly can. You only want to  use tables when it's absolutely necessary. Don't use tables just for the purpose of making your  information laid-out visually in a certain way, only when you're trying to show relationships,  kind of, or organize data, that kind of thing. Um, you can accomplish the same layout of a table  using the styling... the layout styling features, um, in, like, the column, and then the paragraph  style options in both Word o

r Google Docs. Um, you'll want to be sure you designate your header  row, and then, if you can, the header column, if you have one, uh, so that a screen reader  can tell the user which cell they're in, and what the header is for that cell. You  want to avoid merging or splitting cells, and don't nest or merge tables together. If you  have a complex table, think about how can you break that up into two or three simpler tables,  and then, finally, circling back to what Liz taught us, um, always co

nsider contrast with any  shading that you might add to your table. So, I believe, yep, that's it. So, I'm going  to pop over to my Word document, again, and we'll practice doing some of these things. So,  I'm under the table section of my Word document. Um, and, if I scroll down, I have this table,  here. It's actually two tables, kind of, combined together. I was trying to be fancy and show the  number of homes available in both Paris and Rome in different styles of homes, in different numbers

  of bedrooms, um, but I'm breaking some of those rules that we just talked about. I've got merged  cells, here, I've got nested tables, so I'm going to take a few steps just to make this a little bit  easier to look at, and a little bit, um, easier for a screen reader to handle. So, I'm going to  split the nested tables into two separate tables. So, I'm going to highlight me...  I'm going to highlight the bottom section of this table. Basically  the Rome table, and, under layout... Um, in this

merge section, I'm going to click  split table, and that split my two tables into two tables. Okay, the next thing I'm going to  do is remove the merged cells from each table. We don't want to have any merged cells. So, I'm  just going to delete these... so I'm just going to delete this row and just help me remember  that this top table was Paris and the bottom table was Rome. Okay, so, now I have no merged  cells, I don't have merged tables anymore. Next, I'm going to add a header row to that s

econd  table, and I'm going to mark it as my header row. So, in this second table, when I had  them merged, the second table was, sort of, borrowing the header row from the first table but,  now that they're split, I need to give it its own header row. So, I'm just going to insert a row  above, and then I'll just add my labels in there. Studio, apartment, chalet, and villa, and I'm  going to make the shading look the same just because I want to. Okay, so, now I have two  separate tables. They lo

ok pretty much the same. Um, I need to mark my header rows now, so,  visually, I have... I can tell which rows are my headers, but I need to tell the document that  as well. So, I'm going to select that top row, I'm going to right-click, click, and go to  table properties, and then the row tab of my table properties, and, under options, there are  two check boxes. I'm going to check the box for "repeat as a header row" at the top of each  page. That tells the table, or the document, or the scree

n reader, that this... this top row is  my header row, and I'm going to uncheck "allow row to break across page" because, if my table were to  span multiple pages, I wouldn't want my rows to to be messed up, so that's good, now I have my header  row marked. Unfortunately, Microsoft Word does not give you a way to mark a header column. This is  technically, or visually, a header column, but Microsoft Word doesn't give me a way to do that.  That would be a step that I'd need to do later on in my P

DF, is tag this as my header column,  um and, I think, just another good argument for keeping your tables as simple as possible.  Could I make this table in a way that I can convey the same information in a simpler layout  that doesn't involve a header column? Um, I'm just going to check that this one already has its  header row checked so, again, I'm going to table properties and... it does, it has that header  row is checked. Okay, so, two tables. They have designated header rows. Then, I'm go

ing to add a  table caption to each table. Um, so, to do that, I'm going to select the entire table, right-click,  and then insert a caption, and this was, uh, homes available—all this, in Paris—homes available  in Paris. Table one. Homes available in Paris. Um, same thing, here. Here we go. Insert  caption, table two homes available in Rome. Okay, so that's, um, a couple of ways  that you could, kind of, simplify tables, convey the same information in Microsoft Word. I'm  going to switch over t

o Google Docs and find the same table in my Google doc. Um, as far as I have  found, Google Docs doesn't have a split tables, um, option. Oh, Andre... Andre says it  does. Um, do you know where it is, Andre? Otherwise, another way to do this is, just,  to copy it. Okay... "Was looking for it, and couldn't find it." I haven't been able to find  it either, um, but pretty easy to do it this way, too. So, if I copy all of the information that  I want to, like, create in that second table, and then I

'll just delete... delete this, and  then I'm just going to add a new table. So, insert table, and, I think, I  need, uh, I need a 4×5, yeah, and then I just pasted... did a quick paste into  that first cell, and it kept my formatting. Okay, so, I split my two tables apart just by  copy and pasting, here. Um, I'm going to remove my merged cells. This is the same as in  Word. So, right-click and delete these rows... ...and then I'm going to add this header  row back in. Insert a row above... So,

I added labels for Studio,  Apartment, Chalet, and Villa. So, now, I have my two separate tables. I need  to mark my header rows. So I'm going to select my header row, right-click,  and pin it, um, as my header row. In header row... ...and then add. Um, I also don't...  haven't found a table caption tool like the one in Word. I haven't found  that in Google. So, I'm just going to, kind of, write it up, here. I wonder  if there's something in the styles... Exactly, so I'll just... A bit above eac

h of my tables. Okay, um, so that's in Google Docs. I'm going  to show you one more thing for the people who do have Grackle, um, Grackle allows you to do  a few more things I'm going to launch Grackle. Give it a minute because it's got to analyze my  documents. I'm going to scroll down to the tables section. So, tables must be tagged or marked as  layout tables. Um, I'm just going to click locate, so that I know which table it's talking  about for each of these, and then tag... and then I can m

ark the first row as a header, and the first column as a  header using Grackle update... ...and then same thing here. Mark the first row as, ah, header,  and the first column is tagged. Okay, there we go. So, now, it shows our tables  are nice and tagged up, and it's passing that on the accessibility checker. Moving on, we're  going to talk about headers and footers, just briefly. So, headers and footers. You know, a  lot of times, we want to put information into the header or the footer of a do

cument. This might  be things like our logo, um, sometimes it's, like, the title of the paper, page numbers, dates,  copyright information, things like that. Um, this, typically, is, kind of, background information,  um, or decorative, maybe, even in the case of a logo, um, we probably aren't expecting anyone  to read that information on every single page, and so the same goes for a screen reader user.  They don't need to read that information on every single page. Um, one thing that's kind of n

ice is  that, if you use the header and footer features in Word, um, Word will automatically mark that  info as decorative or... or artifact it, and, to do that—so, I'll pop over to Word, here—so,  to do that—like, we have our logo down here in the footer section—just make sure you're  using the insert, and then either header or footer functions, here, um, to make sure  that that goes in that header/footer section, and then, like I said, it will... it should... it  should automatically be treate

d as decorative and marked as an artifact. However, sometimes, you  don't want that to be not read on every single page. Sometimes, you want the person to,  like, read that information once and then, on the rest of the pages, it might be decorative.  So, what you might do, if it is important for them to have whatever information you're putting in  the header or footer, is use this checkbox. Again, I'm in the header and footer section of the  ribbon. So, I went to... to get there, well, to get th

ere, I went to insert header—or, in this  case, footer—and then I went down to edit footer, and now I'm in the header and footer section of  the ribbon. Under options, if I check different on first page, my logo that I had in my footer  went away on the first page, and now, whatever I put in my footer on the first page will only be  on the first page, and down here I still have my logo on the rest of my pages, and remember that's  going to be artifacted on pages two through 12, but, on page one,

I want it to be read. So,  I would just put it anywhere else, basically, in the body of the page to make sure that it  doesn't get artifacted. Everybody has access to that information the first time, whether it's  my logo, or my copyright, or whatever, and then, in the rest of the document, they don't have to  pay attention. In Google Docs, it's pretty much the same. Um, if you just, kind of, double-click  in this header or footer section, it will open up that you are editing the header or foot

er and,  um, you... you can add different options. If you're on your first page, I believe, you get that  checkbox. Yeah, you get that checkbox to make it different on the first page. So, you would put in  whatever you want on the rest of your pages, and then make it say "I want it to be different on my  first page" and then put that information out more in the body of your, um, page. With footnotes—if  you're using any footnotes—just make sure you're using the footnotes feature instead of tryin

g  to do your own thing with like, uh, subscript and creating notes that way. It will make those  tags that link together, like, the footnote with the paragraph text that it corresponds to. So, if  you notice any sort of theme throughout this whole presentation, it's, basically, use the features  that are available in your ribbon, in Word, or as your options in... in Google Docs, instead of  trying to, um, make things up on your own, if that makes sense. Okay, um, so, we've covered, kind  of, al

l of the concepts we wanted to go through. We're going to move on to talking, just a little  bit, about accessibility checkers. Accessibility checkers we have used, just, a couple of times  already, throughout this presentation. Um, there are many different types of accessibility  checkers out there. Most, um, authoring tools, kind of, have their own built in. Word has its  own accessibility checker which... which Liz used, a little bit. Um, PowerPoint has an accessibility  checker, Outlook has

an accessibility checker. Um, for Google Docs, it's pretty much just  Grackle Docs which, um, like I've mentioned, is not free but does have the 30-day free  trial. Adobe has its own accessibility checker, and then there are other programs that you can  use, where you, kind of, upload your document to them and it'll do a check. Um, a popular and very  robust one is called PDF accessibility checker, or PAC 2021. This is a program that you can  download onto your computer, for free, and, basically

, you upload your document into it and it  will actually check it against different standards like the web content accessibility guidelines  or, um, PDF/UA standards. Um, so that's a very rigorous PDF checker. Don't be surprised if  your PDFs fail that one, um, it's just... they check. The point is, they check to... kind of  different sets of accessibility standards, um, depending on which checker you're working with.  So, just something to keep in mind and, just, realize that... that accessibil

ity checkers are a  really great place to start, definitely use them, but, just... just remember that accessibility is  very nuanced and requires a lot of consideration for what might be the user experience and...  and, in particular, the assistive technology users experience. How might they be interacting  with your document? Sometimes there's a human element to that that these accessibility checkers  aren't going to catch. so you're going to have false positives and... and false negatives. Um,

  a really good example of this is, like, when we were talking about, um, that alt text field and  how, sometimes, something can get in that field, and you don't even know it. Like, automatically  generated alternative text or the file name might go into that field and—if you forget to go in  and add your alt text, but something got put in there—that you don't know about, then you might  still pass an accessibility checker because all it cares about is that something is in that alt  text field.

Um, actually the Microsoft Checker is getting a little better, it will flag you if  there is automatically generated alt text that you haven't edited, in that field, so that's kind  of nice. Um, but most, probably, don't do that. The point is, um, accessibility checkers can be  great, but should not be fully relied on as your only means of considering accessibility  when you're working on creating things. Uh, so, we're going to talk about PDF conversion,  and some best practices around convertin

g to a PDF. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, you can  still follow along here for a little while. You can convert to a PDF and, as long as you've...  well, let's talk about if you're working in Microsoft Word. As long as you've followed along  with all these steps, and done all these things, even if you don't have Adobe Acrobat, you can be,  um, relatively certain that you've got a nice, um, at least, fairly accessible PDF, even if you can't  go into Adobe and actually check and and see that. So

... so, still follow along here and, um, again,  if you just have that... if Google Docs is the only tool that you're working with, then you won't  be converting to a PDF, and I will actually show you why in just a minute. Okay, so, we're going  to start by... I'm just going to have you follow along with me, here, if you are going to be doing  the process of converting to a PDF. So, I've got my Word document that I've been working through,  um, some of the accessibility issues throughout this pr

esentation, and I'm going to quickly run  the Microsoft Accessibility Checker on it, just to see, maybe, if there's anything that I missed.  Let's see how we're doing. There is a warning for hard to read contrast, but I did that on purpose,  but I will go ahead and just change back here. Okay, and, now, no accessibility issues  are found. So, my checker just confirms that I've done a good job, okay. Next thing I'm  going to do is add a title to my document. So, I'm going to go to file info, and

then,  over here in the properties section, add a title. The title is really helpful for  someone looking for my documents, um, like, if they have a lot of windows open, the title is  what might help them identify what they're looking for. So, I'm going to call this, um, let's see.  Accessib... accessibility training activities. You can, um, you can add tags and comments.  I believe tags might have to do with search engine optimization so, again, if you're going  to... if your document is ultima

tely going to be... going on some kind of website, it might  be helpful to your SEO to add some tags, there, but that's not required. The title is the most  important thing. You can also change who the authors are. I just learned this recently,  um, but you can add authors, remove authors, things like that. So, few things you can do in  there. So, now we've got a title on our document, and we're ready to save it as a PDF, the most  important thing, when you're saving your document as a PDF, is n

ot to use the print to PDF option.  So, do not print to PDF. What that will do is it will strip away all of the, what we call tags, or  all of the accessibility things that we've done to this document, and it will, basically, be a PDF  with... without recognizable text in it, even, so don't print to PDF. You've got a couple of  options if you have the Adobe PDF maker... whoops, right here. "Save as Adobe PDF", that's okay to  use. The best way to do it is to, just, do a "save as". So, mine says

"save a copy" but that's  because my OneDrive, but you can you can, um, find "save as", and then, in your save dialogue,  you're going to switch the document type to a PDF, and then you're going to go into your options,  here, and make sure that all of the options under "non-printing information" are checked. So, we  do want to create bookmarks using our headings, we definitely want to include document properties  and document structure tags for accessibility. So, I've done those things. I'm jus

t going to save  it to my desktop, and it's going to take a minute, but it's generating my PDF. You might have it set  up to open automatically, apparently I don't. I thought I did, but I'm just going to go find  it on my desktop and open it up. Here it is, you can see, here, it's called accessibility  training activity and, if you remember, that's what we added as our title so I know that  that carried over, so that's great. Okay, um... Any questions so far? Are people who are following  along,

following? I will assume yes, so... "Is the title different from the file name?" Yes, um, if  I'm looking through my open windows, I'm seeing the title here. I'm not sure if I answered that  question very well, let me know if I didn't. Um, yes, it is different, um, and Jim, if you have  anything to add on that, please do. Okay, so, um, I've got my PDF open in Adobe. I'm going  to run the Adobe Accessibility Checker now, and see what that says about my document. Um,  one thing to note: I'm worki

ng in a fairly recent version of Adobe. If you use Adobe 2017, Adobe  Pro... Pro 2017, that'll... or any older versions it... it'll still work, you should be able to do  most of the same things, but your menus might be on the opposite sides as mine. Um, but what you're  going to do, basically, is find tools and then something called "prepare for accessibility" or  "accessibility", click on that, and then, um, I'm going to run "check for accessibility". I believe,  in the older version of Adobe,

this is called "full check" or "full report", but it's going  to pull up, like, some options, here. You want all of these boxes checked, and then we're going  to start checking, and there's always going to be two issues that it identifies, and that's because  it wants you to check these things manually. So, this is just a reminder, you need to do a manual  check of your reading order and a manual check of your color contrast. We already did a manual check  of our color contrast when we were work

ing in our Word document, and we're not using a lot of color  in this document, we're mostly black text on white contrast which we know is a 21:1 ratio—it's good  to go. So, I'm not actually going to do anything further on checking my color contrast, but I am  going to do a manual check of my reading order. So, to do that, I'm going to close this stuff, and  I'm going to open up my tags tree. This will be, um, in this sidebar. It kind of looks like a  tag, and, if it's not there, you might have

to right-click in that bar and, just, make sure  that it's the, um, accessibility tags... tags button is checked, and that should get it to  show up in that sidebar. When you open that, you'll see all of the tags in your document. These  tags that we've been referring to throughout the training, these are the things that, um, assistive  technology like a screen reader are going to recognize and be able to interact with. So, what  we're checking for, here, is that everything goes in a logical ord

er as I click through my tag tree,  and that elements are tagged appropriately. Like, lists are tagged as lists, and headings are tagged  as headings, and, um, links are tagged as links. Here's a link, and, if I open, um, it's within a  list, so it's showing up as a list tag, but if I open up that list tag and the list body, I'll  see the link tag, here. So, we're just walking through to make sure things go in the right order,  things are tagged appropriately. Here, we see an instance of where I

forgot to, or where I used the  enter key instead of... of, um, using my paragraph spacing options, so this is just an empty tag,  and I can delete it and then we've got... yep. Looks good. Okay, so, I would basically do  that for my whole document. Just, make sure everything's in the order that I expected to  be. If I've followed all the steps that we've gone through throughout this training, um, it  very, very likely will be in a good order with things tagged appropriately. Um, next thing  I'

m going to do, is just make sure all of my images have alt-text. Um, they probably would  have been flagged by the accessibility check, if they didn't, but I'll just do a double check.  So, I can go back into my accessibility menu and, um, if I click "add alternate text" it will...  Acrobat will detect figures and display associated alternate text, and it'll just, kind of, highlight  each figure and show me what I have in that alt text field, and I have the opportunity to here...  here to mark t

hings as decorative, as well. So, if there's something I forgot to mark as  decorative in Word, I can do that here. And then, the last thing I might do is, if there's anything  that I don't want to be read, I might just go through and change the tag to an artifact tag.  That's the basic process for going from a Word document to an PDF in Adobe, and checking  all of my accessibility features. "Title and file name are different, you can choose which to  display in acrobat using the document proper

ties, menu, title should be the choice as long as  you provide a descriptive title." Yeah, so, what Jim is talking about is, if I forgot to add  a title in Word or, if I wanted to display the file name for some reason instead of the title,  um, I can go to menu and properties here's where my title is. If I had forgotten to add a title in  Word, then this would be blank, and I would have to come add one here, and that would be flagged by  my accessibility checker, and then, under initial view, I

can choose whether I want the document  title or the file name to be my initial view. So, like, what, using a screen reader as an example,  what a screen reader announces to the person, this file is called. Typically, the document  title makes more sense as long as, like Jim said, we're using a good, descriptive, concise  title. Um, the other thing I might want to do, in this document properties menu, is just make  sure the language is set correctly. Typically, if I've been working in Microsoft

Word, the...  the language will be correct, but, if you are working in a different language, you might come  check that, or, if you're working in a different authoring program, like, if you got your PDF from  Canva, definitely come check the language setting. "Do you find that you prefer one checker over the  other, Word versus Adobe, or do you always use both?" Um, great question, I typically use both.  They do occasionally flag different things. Like, for example, Adobe is always going to tell

  you you have to manually check contrast, but our Word Accessibility Checker did flag,  um, that contrast error, right? So, they check different things, so I... yeah, I always use both  and, typically, like... like I've been saying, if I've done all of these steps leading up to  this, then typic... typically, the access... once I get the accessibility checker, it's pretty easy  because there aren't many, uh, issues to resolve. So, in addition to those accessibility checkers  and, kind of, walki

ng your tag tree, and making sure everything goes in a logical order, if you  have any further questions or concerns or, if you just want to triple check that your document  is nice and accessible and a good user experience for people using assistive technology, then,  probably, the best thing you can do is actually test reading it using assistive technology. Um,  so anyone can... can get a screen reader on their computer. NVDA is a free... free-to-download  screen reader for Windows and , if yo

u just learn a few basic commands, you could pretty  easily learn how to, kind of, navigate through a document and test to make sure that everything's  reading properly, reading in the correct order, that headings and lists and links and everything  are... are operating correctly. Voiceover is the screen reader that is built in to Mac OS and  iOS so, if you're... if you have a Mac or, um, an iPhone, you can turn Voiceover on at any time  and, um, again, learn a few quick commands to navigate. Ke

ep in mind the gestures are different  whether you're on a Mac, or an... or an iPhone, or an iPad, so, um, and then, if you are using  Adobe, Adobe has a read-aloud, uh, tool, like, a text-to-speech tool that, if you set it to read  the whole document, you can check that things are moving in a logical order. Some other things you  might just try, especially if you are working with more complex documents, um, especially if you are  working with... if you've created a document that doesn't necessa

rily follow, like, a... a top down  layout, um, then you probably want to try it out for some different user experiences. Um, keyboard  navigation. So, some people will not use a mouse and navigate exclusively with a keyboard, and you  can always test this out really easily by just using "tab" and "shift+tab" keyboard commands,  and... show you this. Um, so, if I click tab... if I'm in my document and I click tab, it's going  to take me through all of the clickable content, and that's a good che

ck that things are, mostly,  in the right order, and that a keyboard-only user can get to everything that's clickable, um, and  can activate things with their keyboard alone, and then you might also go in and turn  on, um, a... a... again, especially, if you have a document that has a lot of visual  components or, um, that, um... great question, Judy, let's talk about that in just a second.  So, um, um, inverted contrast or zoom. So, a lot of people who use a magnifier like ZoomText,  or the bui

lt-in magnifier that's on Windows, um, don't have the context of the full screen. So,  if your document doesn't follow a very logical, top-down progression, and you, kind of, have  things laid out in another way, it might be harder for someone to find everything when they don't  have the full context of the screen and, kind of, visually, where they're supposed to go next.  So, just testing it out by turning on your zoom, by, um, changing to an inverted contrast scheme,  um, things like that, jus

t to make sure the user experience is the same. Judy asked if we've ever  tried using Windows narrator to test, and how does it do. Um, personally, I haven't. I know Jim and I  have talked about this, and, maybe, Jim can offer a little bit of feedback here. Narrator is the  built-in screen reader on, uh, Windows platform, so, kind of like Voiceover. Jim? Any... any  ideas how Narrator does with testing out... Yeah, I'll unmute for this part. I'm such a slow  typist. Um, you have to jump through

a couple hoops to get Narrator to work with inside of an  Acrobat Pro, or inside of Acrobat, so, a lot of times, you'll have to actually put it into, you  know, um, another tool to have that PDF using narrator, so, I... it's been a while since I've  actually done it, because it's sort of a pain in the butt. Um, I'd rather use any number of other  ways if we're just checking proper reading order, um, traversing the tag... tag tree, or using  read-aloud inside of Acrobat, that, um, are... are good

for those scenarios. They catch 99.9% of the  major issues, unless you've got a lot of tables, and then you really want to, then, step in with  a screen reader to make sure that your tables are being... the header rows, the header, um, cells  are being announced correctly. So yeah, you want to make sure the experience is good. Okay, um,  I think, maybe, even have passed our tables with this conversion to PDF that you did, but we know  for... well, you did it with... you did it from Word, we kno

w for a fact the... the individual row  headers weren't tagged, because Word doesn't tag those right. So, table pass but, technically, it  may not be the greatest experience. It's not gonna be terrible because, again, it's a simple table,  kept it simple, um, but it could be better, and, in acrobat, you could tag those as header  cells as well. Um, but yeah, so, Narrator, I know that's lengthy, but Narrator takes a  few extra steps, so I would go other routes. Okay, thanks Jim. Yeah, great quest

ion,  Judy, because it... it seems like, um, that would be a great solution, since Narrator  is built-in, um, to the Windows system but, um, yeah, thanks for adding that... that, um,  context, Jim, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, like everything else, if we design digital  content to be accessible, if we're thinking about accessibility from the very beginning, we're going  to save a lot of time, energy, money, frustration. PDF remediation is not the recommended approach.  It is much easier, in

most cases, to go back to the source document and make changes there than  it is to make an inaccessible PDF more accessible using Adobe Acrobat Pro alone. So, hopefully, if  you have any PDFs that need to be made accessible, um, you have access to that source Word document  or Google Document, and you can go back and do this work that we've done today, there, and then  convert it. It is a really good habit to get into, to save your source document and your PDF  in the same place so that, down t

he road, if you do need to make any changes, uh, you can do  that more easily. If you don't have access to your source document, then you will need to do the PDF  mediation work in Adobe Acrobat Pro, or, if you are authoring in a tool that doesn't, necessarily,  offer a lot of accessibility features, then what you end up doing is that... that remediation work  in Adobe Acrobat Pro. So, the steps—and we can go through this process in Acrobat together—but  the steps to remediating a PDF, um, at le

ast, to a fairly accessible, uh, product, would be  adding a title and those document properties. You would need to tag all of your content, so you need  to tag your headers as headers, your text as text, list as list, figures as figures, links as links  etcetera, etcetera. Um, use your reading order panel and your tag tree to do that tagging, and  I'll show you that in just a minute, and then, um, walking the tag tree to... to check everything,  um, tagging and editing tables would happen in Ac

robat, and adding alternative text with Acr...  would happen in Acrobat. Checking color contrast, uh, things like that. Depending on what other  types of content you have in your document, there could be other steps you would need  to take as well. Um, what I'll do is, um, demonstrate what a PDF that you get from a Google  doc looks like, and then we can talk about those steps. We can we can use that PDF and remediate...  do a little bit of remediation on it. So, I mentioned this a couple of tim

es, but, if  you're working in Google Docs, you cannot automatically export or download an accessible  PDF by just doing this download to PDF. Um, you have a few options. You can either download this  to a Word document, if you have Microsoft Word, or you can use Grackle Docs and, um, once  you've, you know, fixed all of your issues, use this export to PDF button and that will  give you a tagged PDF. But I'll just show you what it looks like if you were to, just,  download a PDF straight from Go

ogle Docs. So, here it is. I'm gonna  save it to my desktop again. We'll find it on my desktop and open  up. Okay, so, um, if you remember, in our... in our last PDF that we looked at,  that we converted from Word, when we opened the tag tree we had all those nice tags that we had  made in Word carried over into tags into this PDF, but this document that I downloaded straight  from Google Docs says no tags available. So, this is an instance in which, um, unless I can go  do it, one of those othe

r ways I would need to be remediating this PDF and making it accessible,  here in Adobe. So, um, again, to do that, our steps... first, we're going to add a title.  So, we're going to go to document properties, description, um, this title, actually, it's here.  It just came from the text that I had in this title field of Google docs. So, I guess, that's  one thing that it does pull down, so that's nice, um, but we'll just call this "Document  Accessibility Activity." We can go to my initial view

, check that it is set to the document  title, and then make sure my language... so my language did not get carried down, so I'm going  to make sure my langu... set my language English. Okay, the next step would be tagging my content.  Um, if you have a newer version of Adobe, there is an auto-tag tool that does pretty  good. Um, there's always, probably, going to be some things you might have to fix, especially in  documents with more complex layouts, but, if you have access to this auto docume

nt tool, you might  start there. For the purposes of showing you, kind of, what it looks like to fully remediate...  remediate a PDF, I'm not going to use this, um, but, if you have that, definitely give that  a try. But, if we were in a situation where we needed to completely tag this document up by  hand, we would start by creating a tags root, and then we're just going to go through and tag  every single piece of content in our document. So, I'm going to highlight it, create a tag  from the s

election, this is our heading one. Go... this is just document  text or paragraph text. These... Alright, try this again. So, here is my label. There we go. Here's my list body. And I'm going to create... That my... And my list body went underneath. Um, so, I would continue doing that for the whole  document. You do not have to watch me struggle through the whole thing, but, basically, working  through this document to get everything tagged up. Links would need to be marked as links, all  of the

se lists would need to be marked as lists, and then we would go through the rest of  our steps of adding our alternate text. And, um, that won't work until  we tag our figures as figures. Let's try one of those. I actually have to do... in the  reading order panel the figure. And now it will come as we all tag. So, hopefully, this just gives you an idea of  how it's to... it's a little bit more painful to do this work in Adobe, rather than to do  it in Google Docs or in Microsoft Word where thes

e options are a little bit more built-in  and easier to use. Jim offered another option, in the chat, you could download a Word document  from your Google Docs file menu, and then upload it to the on... free online Adobe conversion tool,  which produces a tagged PDF, that's awesome. Does anybody have, um, questions about anything  that we didn't cover? Was there anything, any other content you were hoping to get out of  this training today that you could talk about? This is Alexander. I was just

wondering.  I'm thinking presentations and making sure slides are accessible. If I used PowerPoint, would all of the things that you taught us in  Word, um, be available in PowerPoint? Is there anything that you'd like to add about  PowerPoint that we need to be aware of? Yeah, absolutely. So, there are, um, a few  additional, kind of, considerations for, just, presentation accessibility, generally, but we can,  definitely, all of the things that we talked about today will apply. I'll actually

just pull our  PowerPoint over here and show you a few tips. The very best thing that you can do to make an  accessible PowerPoint for yourself is just stick to the slide layouts that are, kind of, preset  in PowerPoint. Basically, like, sticking to these slides that have, you know, the title slide, or  the title in one content box, and avoid finding just, like, a blank slide and trying to add your  own text boxes or add your own content pieces. What the layouts do is... they already have, like,

  the heading structure that you need built-in, so it's, actually, even in terms of heading  structure, as long as you use these layouts it'll be even fewer steps in PowerPoint, because, when  you convert to a PDF, it will treat whatever you have in that slide title box as your heading. Um,  I believe it converts it to a heading one and I, kind of, think it would make more sense as a  heading two, but that's probably not important. Um, but it will if... if you use these preset  layouts, you'll h

ave a nice heading structure and then, same as, kind of, everything we've talked  about in Word, just stick to all your options up here. Like, if you need to make a list, don't just  use your keyboard to make the little, you know, dash and then make a list that way, but use  these—whoops—use your options, up here, to create, you know, bulleted lists and numbered lists,  um, and to divine... define your spacing. Like, if you wanted more spacing between these bullets,  instead of using that enter

key, come up here and use these paragraph line spacing function.  So, yeah, I mean, to answer your question, really most of the same, um... um, practices  apply, but the biggest tip would be to stick to these preset slide layouts. Um, another rule,  with presentations, is that you want all of your every sl... every slide should have a unique  title. This is related to making a logical heading structure but, um, it creates an outline for the  slide out... this outline view tool is, kind of, nice,

um, for, kind of, helping to understand that  you can see how each slide is, you know, different and unique, offering different information, and  then you'll have those unique headers throughout your PDF outline, as well. Um, so, that's another  tip, um, I believe, as far as, like, text side, um, the rule is like nothing smaller than like 18  point font, but that's kind of small, honestly, um, I tend to stick to, like, 24 point font or  larger where I can. Um, of course, you're going to be thin

king about contrast throughout, um,  making sure everything is nice and really visible. What else, um, alt-text works pretty much  the same way. Uh, you just right-click, you alt-text, and put it in there, or  mark it as decorative, um, and then... Yeah, do you have it? Did that give you some good  ideas? You have any specific questions about..? Yeah, did... go ahead. Can you show them, just, tabbing through a slide to real... do  a quick check on reading order. You, like, click in the upper lef

t corner  of the slide, just hit tab to start. That's your reading order. Yeah, great point. Um, yeah, if you stick  to these preset layouts, then your reading order will probably be pretty logical. But,  if you add anything of your own to a slide, like, if you add an extra image or text box, you  definitely want to check that reading order and, like Jim suggested, you can just tab through  and you can see what order things will be read in. You can also, um, there's a lot of  nice things under t

his accessibility menu, here. You can use your reading order pane to  see what order things will be read in. Yeah, definitely use the accessibility checker there,  too. We've got a few issues here, this... we did, on purpose, hard to read text. Also did that on  purpose, check reading order, here, that's good. It tells me where I have auto-generated  alt-text. This... QR codes. Um, so yeah, those are just a few... few things you could  look for. I think... I want to say, yeah, so, this Rocky Mou

ntain ADA presentation accessibility  course. I haven't done... I haven't done this one, but I did do the Rocky Mountain ADA social media  accessibility course and it was really good, um, so, um, I would expect, if you're looking for more  related to presentations, this course might be pretty good, too. Yeah, so, Robin said "When I do  an accessibility check in PowerPoint I often get a check reading order. I do check it, but that  remains in the accessibility checker." Jim says that reading orde

r flag in the accessibility  checker is just a warning if you check it, and you're good with it, you can feel free  to ignore that warning. And Brenda reminded everyone to please sign in. There's a Google form  in the, um, in the chat, so, if you haven't signed in already, make sure you do that so we know that  you attended. Yeah, Lori, thank you. Yeah, I just wondered if anybody had tried Venngage, v e n n  g a g e, yet? I had a really good demonstration of it, this morning, but, of course, we

have to  justify the cost of it and so, I was wondering, if anybody had any experience. It's kind of like  Canva but accessibility is all built-in and it, like I said, it was pretty amazing what they  do with the AI and a few other features. Yeah, I, personally, haven't  used it or heard of it, but I would be super curious to know if  anybody does have any experience with it. Feeling like that's a no. Okay, I appreciate you  letting me ask. So, yeah thank... no, thank you for asking that questio

n. Probably been able to  into it, um, looks like you can make infographics. It has temp... like, so many templates  and the... there is a really good, um, graphic on LinkedIn that just showed all the  accessibility... let me see if I can copy this, I don't know. Anyway, comparing it to other...  other things and it... everything's built in, the alternative text, the reading order, the  tags, the color contrast, so many things, and the... what they did with tables and charts  it was... it took t

hem like two seconds to... what it just took... took you a lot of time to  explain and do, and so, right there, I'm feeling like it's kind of worth it, but we'll see. Yeah,  I think it'll be really interesting to see how, um, accessibility becomes built into more  tools in the near future and... and hopefully, gets a little bit easier. Um, Canva does offer,  like, the ability to tag things as headers and to add alt-tag, um, but it's not always super  consistent whether those things that you add

in actually show up in the PDF. So, a lot of times,  with a document that you create in Canva, um, you end up doing some of that PDF remediation  work in Adobe. Um, we did a bit of testing, trying to figure out if there are, kind of, any  tricks to that, like, um, someone suggested maybe dropping information onto a template in the...  a certain order might indicate something about the reading order, um, but weren't able to figure  out too much in the way of that. So, definitely creating any... a

ny of those more complex, like,  infographics, you know, graphic design, um, things can just take a a little bit more thought  in how... how are we making it... it accessible. Liz had asked for feedbacks about all  caps related to low vision. Judy found a good link that goes in-depth  about typography, then a section toward the end called Eight Key Tips for  Accessible Typography. Here are the links. So, choose type faces with a taller X height.  Interesting. Choose more open type faces, create

type faces with larger  white spaces within the letters, choose typefaces without joined letters... Thank you for sharing this, Judy. I love the  resource sharing. I will get this to Liz, so she can read this as well. Um, I just...  a quick note on those on custom fonts: Like, you can find them, they're out there, but, if you  make a PDF out of your document and you distribute it, if a person doesn't have that font on their  system, it'll font-substitute and it may not be the substitute that you

were looking for, so  you'd want to always test to make sure that, on a system that doesn't have these fonts  installed, that the result is good. So, just to keep that in the back of your mind.  I think the list was trying to simplify, um, because some of these fonts have been around  a while, with several of these key factors, um, but yeah, you know, there's some really good,  really readable new fonts that have been developed in the last five years. Um, fantastic fonts. It's  just... we have

to remember that PDF version. Yeah, great point. I... I really liked  Lisa's point, too, about when you can give someone the content in a format where  they can change the font. It's just, like, such a personal preference that,  anytime you can give someone the ability to use whatever font they prefer,  um, they'll have a much better experience. Alright. Well, we are almost out of time.  Unless anybody has any other questions, um, topics to bring up, resources to share?  Everybody make sure you'

ve signed in, the form is in the chat just a  couple of comments up from Jim Thanks everybody for coming!