WEBVTT Hello Zoom and in-person. I'm glad to have you here. I'm Chelsea Elkins. I use she/her pronouns, and I'm the school of Public health Access and Advocacy Coordinator. Bathrooms are right around the corner for those of us in person. And for folks on zoom, please feel free to use the chat, unmute, and if any tech issues arise, please let us know. Hi everyone in person and on zoom. I'm Sara Berk. I use she/her pronouns and I'm the Manager of Program Operations at the Department of Biology. Oh, maybe not handed over to me. Hi! I'm Gabi Kito. I also use she/her pronouns, and I also work in the Biology department as the Program Coordinator. Hello, everyone. I'm Mary Colleen Jenkins, and I'm an access. What am I? An instruction accessibility specialist with the accessible technology services. I still am not able to get my title or my actual department down pat. But I will eventually. and I'm here with Gaby de Jongh from ATS as well, and I'm gonna let her introduce herself, and then we'll we'll kind of talk about the framework of what we're doing today. But here's Gaby. Yeah. So yeah, thank you. Again, my name is Gaby de Jongh with, I'm a member of the IT accessibility team with accessible technology services. And yeah that does not roll off the tongue. It takes a few years for you to get that kind of down pat. So my specialty is. or my area of focus rather, is document accessibility. So thank you for inviting me here today. This is a lot of fun. We're excited to have a real expert. So I'm gonna just open up with how we operate. And some of you recognize me from Biology accessibility cafes or the SPH cafe we had recently. So today, what we do, we have 90 min. and during that time we will have a short presentation from Gaby about 30 min or so we will take Q&A at the end. So save your questions, or you can put them in chat if you're if you're happy to do that as we go. We'll kind of monitor through those. And then, after the presentation, we'll turn off the recording. I think we're recording right?We'll turn off the recording for an interactive kind of open work time. During that time. That will be the Q&A. Time. So people in the room can ask questions verbally. People on Zoom can unmute and ask questions or put them in the chat. We'll monitor those and during Q&A. You can also be working. So you can kind of tune out the Q&A. And just start practicing some of the skills that you're learning from Gaby's presentation. You can chat with your neighbors. I will set up a breakout room if you just want to work silently, but during that time, if you run into a question. You can ask that at any point, and we will share that. And Gaby will answer if she well, she'll answer all of them. I'll try to help. So that would be the interactive work time. So we'll try to get as much time as possible for that. So on to the next slide. I want to do my usual wait! How do you do this, Gaby? Let me try to down error this where you could just click on it. Oh, yeah, I'll click it. Okay, here we go. I wanna start with my usual mantra before I do any sort of you know, my role is outreach and and supporting faculty and accessibility and accessibility skills. And whenever I talk to faculty, I want to start with my mantra, which is progress over perfection. It can feel a little overwhelming sometimes to learn all the different accessibility skills, technical skills, mindset ideas of how to make your content accessible. and it can feel a little overwhelming and so I always encourage adopting an incremental mindset. If you're learning for the first time, or you're building your skills. You're not gonna know it immediately. It takes some time to build habits and practices, to kind of power through questions you might have. So it's okay to adopt. I'm gonna work on this slowly but surely, because all those small changes add up over time and make you more confident, more more able to handle some of these challenges sometimes. So again, keep that in mind, progress over perfection. Gaby's here to answer questions at all levels, so don't feel like it's any question is too simple. If it's a really complex one, you know, we'll we'll kind of handle that with people who might have advanced skills, and maybe in a conversation over here. But don't worry about your skill level at this point. So that being said, I'm gonna turn it over to Gaby. Excellent. Thank you, Mary Colleen. 00:05:05 I'm right. Gonna just take care of some issues. We got going on the screen here. How's our, how's our video is that okay? Or do we need to switch it? We've got desk view camera didn't pop up again video settings. Let's see. might be here. Oh, I do need to put that back in there, do I? That's for the document camera. Yeah. Sorry about that. That's what's the problem. How do I? But yeah, okay, so there we go. Yes. this is fun. Huh? Cause we're like working. We're like talking about technology. Okay, we're getting there. We're getting there. Okay, so we've got, we got our video views looking good. Okay. great. So again, welcome everyone to creating accessible documents. I wanted to start off with kind of an activity. So the next slide I'm going to show you this is an example of a typical course. Syllabi has all the information that you would need to be successful in this course. It has course objectives has a grading rubric. It has reading assignments. But it's not accessible. So this is kind of what it's like for somebody who uses a screen reader to consume information that has no structure. So the activity that I want to have you perform today is, I want you to look at this course, syllabi, and see if you can find for me what the total percentage for your final ex- final Final project will be not your final exam, but the final project. So see if you can determine that from from this particular view it's at the bottom somewhere. Okay. either 15, 20, or 10. Okay. Anybody else? What do you think anybody else? anybody online have any ideas? What the the final project is going to be worth. Yeah, if you're you can unmute, or you can put in the chat, too. Okay, lots of quietness on the zoom there. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and advance it to the next slide. So this is the exact same information. But this time it actually has structure. We have heading levels. And we can, we can see the heading levels. They're a different color of blue, and usually the font is a little bit bolder and bigger. So it organizes the information a little bit better. We've got bullet lists for the course objectives, we have a couple of tables that organize the information in a way that we can visually see it a little bit better. And now we could see that the final exam is actually worth 20% of your grade. So that's a pretty important piece of information, right? As you're going through this. And so you wanna make sure that that structure carries through to your document so that anyone who uses assistive technology, not just screen readers, but also text to speech kinds of tools. That they are presented the information in the way that is understandable. And it makes sense. Okay? So I wanted to talk a little bit about just basic principles of accessible layout. Usually when we talk about accessibility guidelines, they talk. You know, they're focusing on layout and presentation. Well, other things are important for for accessible documents as well, including logical structure, is that really helps paint. and and I it gives a - what's the word I'm looking for? It's Friday. An outline, that's what I'm looking for, an outline of the information, and it helps draw that hierarchy of information when you have that structure. Also, including things, navigation features, such as table of contents. If you have pages that, or if you have a document that has many pages. The heading levels that you create can form a table of contents and provides a little bit more navigation for folks, not just for using, not for folks just who are using assistive technology. But that's really helpful for folks in general as well. Descriptive body copy that really helps with supporting other elements and materials that you have included within your documents, specifically images and graphs. So that descriptive body copy is actually really going to help 00:10:04 with understanding of why you are including a a data table or an image. Of course we'll talk about alt text and things like that. And why that's important. But having descriptive body copy help supports those kinds of elements. And we have a question question from the chat. Is that the header levels built into Word or will readers recognize any headers we create? That's a great question. We'll talk about that, and the difference between the 2, because that is a big, that's important. So we'll talk about that. Another principle of accessible documents are making sure that you include a predictable user experience. So screen reader users, they kind of like kind of like us general folks when we get a printed document, or or any kind of a document, we might look through the document first to see what the overall structure is like. We might look at the heading levels and we'll just flip through it or scroll through it. Screen reader users do the same thing. They like to listen to the heading levels. just just to kind of get an idea of the structure of the document itself. So providing those kinds of elements within your documents will help with that predictable user experience and allows the user to understand the relationship between the information, and also gives them more ways to navigate through those documents as well. Okay. so tip number one is, we're talking about heading levels. Right? We talk about the importance of heading levels. And one, what makes a heading level. So there are heading levels that are built into word. And into Google docs. Now. heading levels visually look bigger and bolder. but just creating bigger and bolder text does not actually make a heading. What I'm gonna do. Well, let me finish this up, and then I'll I'll show you a demonstration. So for documents, the title of your document should be a heading level one. Okay? And then everything else is gonna cascade down there from from the heading level. One secondary heading should be heading level. 2 tertiary headings should be heading Level 3. And the reason why you don't want to use the title style is because it actually doesn't. It's it's actually not a heading. It's more of a style itself. So I'm gonna I'm going to go ahead. And I'm going to switch to a word document. While you're switching gears, there's a question from the chat. "What is the difference between 'screen reader' and "text to speech tools"? Both were mentioned at the beginning." So a screen reader is a very specific piece of software that is primarily used for people who are blind. And so a screen reader announces the focus of where a blind person is on the computer. So it gives them a lot of feedback as to where they are within, where they are on their system. It allows them to interact with different applications on their computer and navigate a computer as well. So it has a lot more functionality. A text to speech. Application will just read text out loud. So, and we're talking about machine readable text. So a text within a document. A text to speech application will read that information out loud. And then sometimes it also gives semantic context of that particular text within that document? So a lot less functionality for text to speech, does that make sense? Does that help? Okay? Great. Okay. So let me go ahead. And I'm gonna open up this word document. Here. move these tools out of the way. That down there. Okay. so this is, I'm I'm on a Mac. But word looks pretty similar on a Mac as it does on a PC, maybe a little bit different. But what we're talking about here is we're talking about this styles pane, and that appears kind of in the center of the ribbon here. We also have these tools over here. These are more text decoration tools. So this is where you can increase the the size of your font. You can make it bold and italic and underline, and make it appear as a heading level. But it's actually not a real heading level. So we're talking specifically about these styles that appear here. And I can access the styles a couple of different ways. I can access it through this ribbon here, or just to the right of that. I have an icon that when I hover my mouse over and I get the the tool tip that says Styles Pane. So I'm gonna click on that and open that up, and that opens up the styles panel on the right hand side here, and it's a lot easier to see the different styles that I have available. 00:15:12 Now I mentioned that the title of your document should be should be coded, or should be stylized as a heading level one, and I could see that here. And then I have my secondary headings that are falling below that. So I've got - I'm just gonna highlight this piece of text right here, and I can see that it is stylized as a heading level 2. Now I can change that, if I don't like the way that that looks, I can modify that style, and I can change it to a different font if I wanted to. A different size. a different color. I can stylalize this, however, I want to, and when I do that it's going to change all of the heading level twos visually in my document. So it was a pretty subtle change. But you could see all the heading level twos are now a slightly different text and a slightly different caller. So what the other thing that I wanted to point out. I'm gonna turn on the the non printing characters here. So this is, you could kind of see a little bit of the structure, more of the structure when I do that. So I've got these different paragraph levels. And when oh, it's not showing up on here sometimes when I when I show the non printing characters you'll see like a little black box that appears just above this heading level, and that's the anchor point that I was talking about. So when you use styles in this way to to include heading levels in your document, it provides those anchor points for assistive technology to navigate by so simply using these decorations to make your doc or to make your text look like a heading is not gonna provide those anchor points for for the screen reader users or the the assistive technology to understand what that textual content is. Okay. So let's look at Google, cause. I know a lot of folks use Google docs. So Google Docs has a a very similar way of assigning heading levels to documents. I'm gonna I'm gonna place my cursor here in my heading level 2 here. And again I have these text decorations where I can bold and italicize and underline, or I can change the font size. But when I hover my mouse over the you know, just to the left of the decoration, I've got this tool tip that says styles. And when I choose the dropdown, I've got a bunch of different styles here to choose from. I mentioned - don't use title. Same thing in Google documents. Don't use the title style for the title of your document. It doesn't map accurately. Instead, the title should be a heading level one, and you can change the look of this heading level. But it it's a little bit different. So I have to stylize the text first. So I'm gonna decorate it now. let's change that just really quickly, make it red. And then if I go back up to my styles, rich text editor dropdown, I can select update heading level 2, and then all my styles change within the document. Okay. great. Let's go back to our Powerpoint and let's talk about accessibility tip number 2, document title. So document titles are required for accessibility. If you run an accessibility report and your document does not have a title, it will flag it as an error in your report. So you do need to include document title. That helps with contextual understanding for screen readers. So the screen reader will announce the title of a document when, if the screen reader user wants to, wants to hear that and that usually gives a little bit more information about the document, so that they can make an informed decision as to whether or not that actually is the document that they want to look at. it also helps with navigation page identification and also search engine optimization as well. So there are places where you can add keywords to help with searching for different things within your document. And that could be really helpful. You know, if you're posting something online. So let's take a look. Let's go back to my word document. So where do you include your document title? In Mac, it's a little bit different than windows, so we'll take a look at the Mac first. So we're gonna go to file properties, and then I've got my my properties. Dialog window here if I select the summary tab. This is where I'm going to add all that metadata. Okay, got the title. I've got author. I could add keywords in here if I wanted to. And I've got additional comments. Okay. 00:20:02 so let's take a look at Google, and then we'll look at word for windows. So Google, it's a little bit different. The title actually is in the upper left hand corner of Google Docs itself. So if I hover, if I hover and dwell my mouse over that text field. It says Rename. So this is where I would rename my my title. So that it's it's kind of it's actually not coded accurately. So that's an accessibility issue with Google Docs. But that's not. That's kind of beyond this. That should say title. But this is where you're going to enter in that title information. Okay? And then let's take a look at word for windows. So I'm gonna I took a screenshot. Because I again, I'm on the Mac. So it's a little bit different. You would go to file and then info. And this is the page that you would see. And actually, your properties are going to appear on the right hand side here. Now. It doesn't look like it, but these fields are editable. You can click your mouse in there, and you can actually change the title. You can add tags. You can include a, a comment and also author information is included here as well. Question 2 good questions I'll start with the most recent. Is everything the same in Word online as opposed to the desktop version? It's not. That's another class. That's another topic altogether. It's not. They're working on trying to make it streamlined. But at this point it's not yeah. And then here's this question, What about "Accessible University" at the top of both the Word and google doc? It looks like that may be an image. Say that again, could you repeat? What about "Accessible University" at the top of both the Word and google doc? It looks like that may be an image. yeah, we'll talk about that that's an image. So we're, we're getting there, yep, you guys are all on it. This is great. I love it. Okay, I think that's all I had to say about document title. So let's go ahead. And yeah, we're going to go right to describing images. So it's really important to add alt text for your images is that provides a that provides context for visual information that is included within your document. So alt text should be simple and to the point, about 140 characters or so, remember your your body copy is going to support why those images are included within your document. That should have more of an explanation as to why that's in there. But the alt-text itself should be really really short and sweet, and and not enough just enough information to give the screen reader user an understanding as to why that image is included, but not too much information to burden the user as well. If you're including decorative images within your documents that don't provide any additional meaning or context to the document itself. Those should be marked as decorative or artifacted. If the authoring program supports that. Okay, so let's go back to my word documents and you are correct. This is an image, and this is going to require alt text. So to access the alt text panel in word, either Mac or windows. And online, it's all the same. You can right click on the image. And from the context menu, you can select view alt text. Now, if you're on word online, that view, alt text might not be there. It probably won't be there. But there will be a search field at the very top of that context, menu. And if you just type in Alt, then it will appear okay. So I'm just going to select that, and that's going to pop out the Alt text panel. And I want to enter in my alt text into this main field right here. Now, on word for Mac, and word for windows. There is a checkbox that, says mark as decorative. Now this will be true if you are working in documents that have the dot X extension on it. If it does not have the dot X extension, you might not be able to get to any of these accessibility tools. So update your your version of office. If if you have an older version of office, you're not getting the most, the best experience of using your office products. There's also another button here that's, or there is a button on another. There's a button here that says generate alt text for me so that utilizes artificial intelligence to help with your alt text. At this time it's not that great. I'm gonna show you another tool that is much, much better. But it is here hopefully over time. It's gonna get better. If you start to use it hopefully, the AI is gonna get smarter, as well. 00:25:11 Okay, let's take a look at Google. Google is different. So we've got another image here. I can do the same thing. I can click on the image, and then I can right click. And from the context menu, I can select alt text. So here's my alt text panel here. I've got a description field. I've also got advanced options, which is a clickable link. If I select that, then it will also allow me to add a title. Now this is optional, but be aware that the title is not going to be announced at all by screen readers or assistive technologies, and if you export it to Pdf, that information gets lost. So just enter in your alt text in the the description field itself. Okay. any questions about images? Okay? Excellent. Okay, great. I will share that resource with you in a little bit. The Alt text resource. Okay? Formatting tables. If you decide to include a table within your document. The header row should be marked as a table header. Tables are a great way of expressing information, or data rather, and the relationship between data, and should not be used for layout purposes, because it's really really difficult to control the reading order within a table from a screen reader perspective? So if you're including tables, do you want to make sure that they're very simple tables with with no merged or split cells. As that makes it again really difficult to understand their relationship between the information. So I'm going to show you how to in word how to assign your table header. So we've got a table here, very simple table. We've got a more complex table down here. We're not going to talk about that today, but I've got my simple table here. I can select that. And when I do, I get this table design tab that appears in my ribbon that was not there before. So if I select that then I can see up here in the upper left hand corner. I've got these check boxes. Now, when you add a table into your document by default Header Row is going to be checked. First column is going to be checked and banded rows is going to be checked. So it's automatically going to assign that top row as the heading row. And it's all, it's gonna automatically assign this first column as a header column. And what that does is it gives the screen reader. it allows the screen reader user to associate the header cells with the data cells. So they have a better understanding of that relationship. And it's really difficult to do that in tables where you have split or merged cells, banded rows just allows you to change the color of the rows in between each one of those rows and just makes it a little bit more visually pleasing. It's a lot different in Google if you're going to include a table. So I've got a simple table here. and if I hover my mouse over the top row. You'll see I've got this little. I don't know panel, I don't know what to call it. That kind of bumps out on the left hand side. There I've got a plus icon, and if I click that, plus icon, that's gonna add a row. But next to that there's a little icon of a thumbtack. and when I hover my mouse over that the tool tip says Unpin header rows so I've already pinned this top row as a header. If I select that, then then I have no header row. There's no header row in this in this table now, so very simply to add a header row to your table in Google Docs is to just hover your mouse over that row and then select that thumbtack - oops. Yeah, there we go. And now I've got a header row, and that's it's that simple. Okay, we're going to move on here. Got one more tip for you. Tip number 5 is to use an accessibility checker. So there is an accessibility checker that is built into office. So that includes word Powerpoint, Excel, all of the office suites. and it does check for technical accessibility, not for usable accessibility. Those are 2 different things. Again, that's a whole nother topic. But they are helpful for making sure that your documents are accessible. It does provide guidance and feedback. The accessibility report. Well, I'll talk about that a little bit more as we get into it. There is an accessibility checker built into office, as I mentioned, but there's also one built into acrobat. If you're, If you're looking at Pdf documents. That's another topic for another day. 00:30:08 But there is no accessibility checker that is built into Google documents itself, so that it's a third party Plugin, and it's called brackle. And unfortunately, it's not something that we can download to our UW instances of the Google workspace. Right now, we we looked into it and they had some security issues they've addressed. So those security issues so hopefully, soon, we can get grackle included in our Google Workspace. But if you want to do that for your own personal Workspace, your own personal Google Workspace, I highly encourage you to check that out. So let's take a look at the accessibility checker built into word. And actually, let's take a look at this one. Alright. This is the same document. But I know that there are some issues with this document. So to access the accessibility checker and Microsoft products, you go to the review tab. and then you have check accessibility, icon on your ribbon. You select that, and then it pops out the inspection results on the right hand side there. So we've got some errors, and we've got some warnings now. Sometimes the inspection results will also include some tips. Tips will just help improve the accessibility of your document overall. It's not gonna cause any barriers. Warrants could be potential issues to accessibility and should be looked out, looked at. And any errors are definitely going to cause barriers to accessibility and should be fixed. So the nice thing about this inspection results window in in office is that I can click on these issues, and it will take me directly in the document where that issue is and towards the bottom of the inspection results. It gives me reasons why this is an accessibility issue, and then it gives me very specific steps on how to fix it. Ok? So in this case we don't have any alt text on this particular document. This, this image. I could click on the warnings, and it says that I've got some merged or split cells in this table down here. So I would need to simplify that in order to make it a little bit more accessible. Ok. again back in Google, there is no, there's no way to check for accessibility. So Grackle is going to be your best bet. But we can't access that right now. okay, so let's take a look at some resources. Put this up. So. We had a comment. Yeah. Merged cells in tables are sometimes used to help organize information, conceptionally. So, they can't necessary be avoided. They can. Who says you can't avoid them? You absolutely can avoid split or merge cells. You just have to think creatively about how you're going to present your information. A lot of information in tables can actually be presented adequately with just a heading level and a list, a bulleted list. So so, you know just, I would say, challenge yourself to think a little bit differently about how you're presenting that information and how you can simplify it and make it more understandable to everyone. So this is our accessible technology website on documents. And here we have 12 tips. I only gave you 5 today. But there are more. So you could go to this website, and you can look at 12 tips on how to increase the accessibility of your documents. Here is the accessibility image, Creator, that I wanted to share with you. This is pretty cool. This is new. And this was developed by Arizona State university and what you do is you. You take a clip of your image, and you upload it to this tool, and it will produce alternative text for you, and I've been testing it out this last week, and it's phenomenal, it's really good. So, and if the thing about this alt text Creator is, if you're not completely satisfied with the alt text that it gives you. you can give it hints, and it can kind of drill down a little bit more, and give you something a little bit more accurate to help you with your your alt text. So usually I don't promote these kinds of things, but this one is really good. I initially thought that you know you could start with this to help you with creating your alt text, but this is good enough that it can create your alt text for you. But I should say as the author, if you are the author of your documents, and you're including images in your document. You are the subject matter expert, and you are the only person who knows the reason why you've included that image, and so that should be in your voice. So this can help you with that to help us understand why you included those images within your documents. I'm gonna skip, skip the pack2024 checker. That's for Pdf, we're not talking about that oops. And then I do have a link here for grackle if you wanted to include that in your own instance of the Google Workspace. So I'm not going to share that right now. I think there's a table question in the room. So tables are not considered images, correct? Correct tables are not considered images. Okay? But you can. You can include a table summary which is kind of like alt text for an image. Or a caption. Or a caption. Yeah, you can do that. And that just helps with understanding. It's not necessary for accessibility, but you can include that, and it will help with understanding. Yeah. alright, I'm gonna hand it back to Mary-Colleen who's gonna talk about interactive work time? Yes, thank you,