Creating Accessible Documents: An Introduction This video is posted online with the following chapter markers: Chapter 1. Document Structure Chapter 2. Styles Chapter 3. Images Chapter 4. Meaningful Hyperlinks Chapter 5. Tables Chapter 6. Things to Avoid Description of graphical content is included between Description Start and Description End. Throughout this presentation, the speaker modifies a MS Word document on his computer screen. Transcript Start Chapter 1. Document Structure [Silence] Fade up from black. Animation: Text for TSBVI transform into braille cells for TSBVI. Fade to black. [ Slide start: ] Content read by narrator. Narrator: Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Outreach Programs. Creating Accessible Documents. November 3, 2015. Presented by Jim Allan, Accessibility Coordinator. jimallan at t-s-b-v-i dot e-d-u. [ Slide end: ] Jim Allan: ...and the first thing we're going to talk about is the outline of what we're going to be covering today. And our outline is -- let me just get that here. Sorry. Yeah. [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Accessible Document Components Content: • Structure • Styles and Formatting • Alternative Text for Images • Meaningful Hyperlinks • Simple Tables • Things to Avoid Description End: We're going to be talking about structure of documents, then we're going to jump in and talk a little bit about styles and formatting, and then alternative text for images, meaningful hyperlinks, simple tables, and things we should avoid. [ Slide end: ] So I've got some little prerecorded videos and the first one we're going to do is called Structure: Building your Document. [ Video start: ] Jim: First thing we're going to be talking about is the structure of your document. Without structure your document is just characters on a page with a carriage returns. Think of walls of a house that give the house structure, so it all holds together. So the structure also provides you a map of what is going on in your document, like an outline. So there's a tool in the productivity toolbar, called the document map. [Screen start:] This is part of Word. We've just gathered all the tools together to help make your document accessible in one place. So the document map, if we click on it, it shows us the outline of our document. And if we look over here, it says this document does not contain any headings. So, we have no headings in our document. That's a problem if we want to navigate through it by headings because most screen readers allow us to do that, and if we want to convert it into braille, [Screen end:] having headings is a really useful thing in order to create structured braille, so kids know where to find the information. So you can say, [Screen start:] but you say, but, look, we have headings. They're right there. They're these things with extra spaces between them. Well, that's just words with spaces between them. In order for something to be a heading, it needs to be labeled a heading. [Screen end:] And in Word, and in any structured document, we can go to what are called styles [Screen start:] and click up our nice little style menu. And we're going to start our document and I'm going to go through this pretty quickly, just so you can see that the headings appear and you will see the document map change and the outline will appear. So the title of our document is The World of Dogs. We're going to make that heading 1. Introduction is heading 2. History of Dogs, we'll make it a 3. And then we're going to scroll down and continue. Wolf Theory is part of that heading 3, so we'll make that a 4. Prehistory is a 4. And this is just a little document called the Story of Dogs that we use for illustrative purposes, and then this goes back to a 3, Classification of Dogs, Classification of Morphology. Okay. By function. And Herding Dogs is a Function of Dogs, so that gets us 6. Oh, I guess we'll make that a 7, then. Okay. We'll go through here, and then Hounds becomes a 6. And Afghan Hounds, and Basenji -- who knew there were that many kind of dogs? So, you can see, over here on the left‑hand side, that we're getting this really nice outline of our document, and it's all because we're just adding some headings to the document. And then we can choose this. This is like -- this looks like a heading to me, so I would call it a heading. It's not part of the classification and it's not part of the history of dogs, so I think I will make this a heading level 2, which is on par with the Introduction. So I'm going to call it heading level 2. And then down here, it looks like we have something with a table. Okay. So that gets us our main structure. We've provided our basic scaffolding for our document, and we see we have a really nice outline now, over here on the left‑hand side in our document map. And you can jump -- you can also use this for navigation and jump to like the Herding Dogs. If you wanted to change the heading level, just click on it and it will immediately pop it out. [Screen end:] The next thing we're going to talk about is lists, now that we've got our headings done, we're going to jump to lists, which is the next important thing because there a structure of information -- [Screen start:] and I think there was one in this document. So what we have done here is the Top Five Dog Breeds for Families. Now, you say, well, look, it looks like a list. It's got numbers, it's got periods and spaces. But if we click on it, it just says over here in our styles, it says normal. But the important part is, right up here in the top in our document, and it has bulleted lists and numbered lists. And if this thing were a list, then the numbers here would be highlighted. So we're going to change this into a real list. We're going to highlight the entire list. And we're going to click on the numbers. Now, you can see that numbers is highlighted, and we've got an intent and we've got tabs, and we still have numbers and we still have all the words. The thing that changed is that in the document, this was specifically labeled as a list. And this will help you when you're converting it into braille also because it will see the codes in the Word document, and it will convert it into appropriate braille format. [Screen end:] So the other three things in our document that's about structure -- we're talking about paragraphs, [Screen start:] and notice that we have paragraphs in our document all the way through. That's what these little signs at the end says, this is a paragraph. And paragraphs are useful things, and they help format the braille also. [Screen end:] We also have columns. [Screen start:] We're not going to talk about columns other than if you're going to use -- put your document into columns, you want to use the proper tool like this button right here in Word that says, put it into columns. I've seen people try and make columns with tabs. It's very ugly when you change the formatting or change the word [Screen end:] and when you try and convert it into braille, it's not going to work at all. So for some reason, you have to have columns in your document. Use the column button in Word to help you create your columns. [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Structure: Building Your Document Content: • Use the built-in tools • Headings • Lists – ordered and unordered • Paragraphs • Columns • Page breaks • Get the Productivity Ribbon (gov.texas.gov/disabilities/accessibledocs) Description End: And the last thing was page breaks. And page breaks are generally specific places in the document where you want to have something break. Like you don't want to have one line at the end of a page, and you can do that, it makes the reading a little bit easier. It's not going to impact your braille at all. And that's all we're going to talk about in structure. Make sure that you use the buttons that are there for the headings and make sure your lists, be they numbered or bulleted or whatever, are actual lists, not just numbers with dots and spaces after it. [ Video end: ] Jim: ...on that first slide, about structure, it talked about the productivity ribbon. [Screen start:] So this is the governor's website. I'm going to just scroll up to it here. So this is what you see when you get there. And then about halfway down the page, you'll see a section on Microsoft Word, and this tells you everything you wanted to know about that productivity ribbon that I've been using and will be using throughout the day, and it tells you how to install it and it's got the install file and the directions, and there's some videos and MP3 files, a whole mess of things related to this one particular ribbon. And it's all fully accessible, so if your students wanted to use it, they could do that, too. [Screen end:] This was created by state government employees. We spent about a thousand hours on it one summer across ten state agencies, and created the productivity ribbon and this whole series of information that you have on the screen. Chapter 2. Styles So the next thing we're going to be talking about is using more styles. And we'll have another short video on that. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Jim: The next thing we're going to be talking about is the styles and formatting of the document, [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Styles and Formatting Content: • Fonts – serif or san serif • Font Size – twelve point minimum • Underline for links only • Line spacing • Color • Full justification is hard to read for almost everybody in the universe • All-caps are hard to read • Italics are hard to read Description End: and this includes the font, the font sizes, the line spacing, and several other things. The first thing we need to look at is the font family and the font size. Many documents have things called -- or have fonts called Serif fonts. It's like Times New Roman, they have little bits on the edges and on the bottoms of the letters. Sometimes that makes it difficult to read for people with low vision. So we want to try and choose a font called San Serif, and one of them is Arial, [Screen start:] and another is Verdana, there's also Georgia and several others. So we're going to choose our document here, and these are our paragraphs. And let's see what our general format for that is. So in our styles pane, we're going to go over to normal, click on the little arrow, and we're going to select all 77 instances that are based -- called normal, and then we're going to go into normal and we're going to say modify it. And notice it says we've got a Verdana font, which is okay, it's pretty clean, but it's size 10. 10 is pretty small to read for a lot of people. So we're going to change that to 12. And now we're going to look at it and see what we've got here. So we popped everything up a little bit. That's a little bit easier to read. Now, one of the things a lot of people seem to do is, they like that full justification. Let me show that to you. We're going to go over here to normal, we're going to modify it. And justify, the full justification is where all the margins line up left and right. And let me show that to you. Now, that looks really nice. It's got a clean look to it. But for reading purposes, it's really difficult, because there's different amounts of spaces between every single word. Some have more, some have less, and then you get some of those weird sentences where things are stretched out really far, [Screen end:] and it's just really hard to read. So generally, [Screen start:] you want to leave the justification alone, just leave it as left and let that be a ragged edge on the right side. One of the other things we can do is change the line spacing a little bit, so this is one and a half spaces per line, which spreads it out a little bit and makes it quite easy to read. Takes up a little more space, but that's something you can adjust to make it easier to read for folks with low vision or people who have just, you know, any sort of little difficulty in the reading. [Screen end:] I generally use 1.15 lines in between, just to give it a little extra space and not have the letters crowd so much and it's much easier to read. [Screen start:] Okay. Another thing to watch out for is an extensive use of italics. Those are -- italics is hard to read so you only want to use it when you have to. And you can find the italics under the home button here. You can click on italics. But it's difficult to read. Also, you want to avoid using things like underlined, as well as -- especially in documents for on the web. [Screen end:] Having things underlined, people think things underlined should be links and they're going to try and click on them. When nothing happens, they get frustrated, and they don't trust anything else that's underlined. So only use underlined, especially if it's going on the web, for things that are links. If you have to use an underline in Word, then that's what it is, and go ahead and do it. One of the last things to think about in your formatting and styles is all caps. All caps are very difficult to read for people, and they should be used minimally. [Screen start:] So let me show you what an all caps looks like. Go up here, and say upper case. That's really hard to read for people. [Screen end:] If you have to use it, if you have some style for your school or your agency that says you have to use all caps, use it only for headings, not for in the middle of your document, unless it's something really, really important and for whatever reason, bold won't cut it for you, then use it, but please do it sparingly. It's very difficult to read. [Screen start:] One other thing under styles and formatting is the use of color. Now, our headings came out mostly black. You can change the colors of your headings. And you can get really wild on those. And you can change whatever color you want and choose them. But let's say I chose that as a color for my heading. There's just one problem with that. The contrast is very poor, and you can't see it. So be sure you make -- have all of your colors something that is readable so you have the proper color, and also make sure that you don't have colors that are used for information, like all of the red things are new. [Screen end:] If someone is color‑blind -- and there's like 12 to 16%, depending on the numbers you look at, of people who are color‑blind. So if you say something is going to be -- if all the red ones are new or all the green things are good, or whatever, you need to include some other sort of marker, like an asterisk or things marked with an "at" sign or some other indicator, so that it's not just the color that's telling people that something is new. That way, if they can't see the color or for contrast reasons or whatever, you still have that little bit of information to help guide you into letting you know the things that are new. [ Video end: ] Jim: Okay. Welcome back. So, that was a little bit about fonts and styling and line spacing and things. I want to show you a little bit on my computer screen, and we'll do that right now. This is that World of Dogs document. [Screen start:] And notice here that our introduction, it says, heading two on it. Now, down here I've got this one called Wolf Theory. I'm going to switch over to my home tab, and I'm going to call that Arial. Arial? Hello, Arial. Where are you? There. I'm going to call it Arial. I'm going to make it 14 point, and I'm going to make it italic, and make it bold. There we go. Now, let's look at that. It looks just like this heading 2 up here, where we have the Introduction. And if we click on Introduction, our style says it's a heading 2. Down here, Wolf Theory looks like it's a heading 2, but it's really not, it's just a bunch of characters that have been styled to look like a heading. If you translated this into braille, the word "Introduction" would come out and be formatted appropriately like heading level 2. The word Wolf Theory would just come out bold and italic and just be some words. It'll look just like a paragraph. So it's really important, even though you can make things look like it, the important thing is to have the structure. Chapter 3. Images All right. The next thing we're going to be talking about are images. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Jim: Many documents contain images and we need to label them so that screen readers can find them for -- they know what's going on. [Screen start:] So on this document we've gone a picture of a Labrador retriever and it's important that we include the picture that is -- it's in‑line text with everything else, so that means that there is a carriage return at the end of that paragraph, then we have the picture, and then there's another paragraph mark, and the dog just falls in line with all the text, just as normal. That way the screen reader will find it. If you have text over here beside the picture and there's more information over here, JAWS will not read it; it won't see that picture of the dog. So there's several things we need to do. One is include a caption for the picture because every picture has a label, generally. So we're going to use this text down here that says Top Dog in the U.S., Labrador Retriever. And I'm going to cut that out of the document. We're going to go over here to the dog and right‑click on it, and we're going to say, Insert caption. And when we put the caption in, it says Figure 1. It's nice to label your figures so you can tell people, you know, I need you to go to figure 7 and they can do a search and find figure 7 or figure whatever, if you have a number on it. Otherwise, they have to just count all the pictures and try and find whichever one you're talking about. If you label it, they'll be able to find it much more easily. So we're going to paste in that bit of text. This labels our figure. It says we can put it on the bottom -- or label the figure, we're going to put it below the selection, which is generally where people look for captions on pictures, and we're going to say, okay. Nnotice it did it in bold for you so you don't already have to do that. It puts a Figure 1 on it, and it says: Top Dog in the U.S. So JAWS will read that for you, but we still need a description of what this picture is. So we're going to right‑click on the picture again and we go down to "format the picture." And format the picture is -- we can do all sorts of fancy things, and this tells you what the size is and how big it is, but what he want is the "Alt Text." And alternative text is what will be read by the screen reader as a description of the picture. This tries to answer the question, what does this image convey, in context, and it says Labrador retriever. One would hope most people know what a Labrador retriever looks like, and that's good enough for me, for this presentation. If it was a chart or something, you would want to put the information in related to the chart, in explaining what it is, a bit, if the caption doesn't already do that. The thing you need to remember is that this -- even though the box is really, really big here, only 120 characters will be read. [Screen end:] That's -- you have to be really terse to get all your information into 120 characters. That's less than a tweet. [Screen start:] So in some cases, it might be better to put the description of the image in the document itself and then as the alternative text, you would say, you know, description of image is in the text. [Screen end:] [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Alternative Text for Images Content: • Captions – Title of picture, copyright, etc. • Alternative (Alt) Text – describe the image 120 characters Use description field “Eye Candy” use space character in description If text is in image, all text is in Alternate Text Context – Answer “what information is the image conveying?” Description End: Okay. So it's important that we put a caption on the picture and it's important that we put a description of what the picture is, which is usually different than what the caption is, because caption is usually said, you know, here's the title of the picture, it was done by this artist in, you know, 1873. And it might have a title. It might have nothing to bear -- you know, no resemblance with the actual image. So you would -- in the description, you would describe what the picture was, if it's, you know, a lady in a boat, or it's a picture of factories in the wintertime, or whatever it might be that may not be conveyed in the title, and it has to be in context. Because you wouldn't want to describe the picture in terms of the color pallet used when we're really talking about the Industrial Revolution, and a picture shows a bunch of smoke coming out of all the factories. [ Slide end: ] So you have to pay attention to what the context is of the picture, so when you write the description, it conveys the information that you want it to. [ Video end: ] Jim: Okay. So now we're back. So we've done the images and there's one part of that outline you had that said "Eye candy." So eye candy are pictures that convey no information, [Screen start:] like I added this little paw print to the bottom of the screen. So if you followed the rules and say, oh, this is, you know, a silhouette of a paw print, and you can put that as a caption, that would be for most people who are blind or using a screen reader, that's a bunch of noise. And it's not necessary. You had it there just for decoration. And so that indicate that decoration, we would just go to format the picture and in the ALT text, we would say space. That's all there is to it. Don't use the title, just use the description, and then you say close, and we're done, and JAWS will ignore that picture. All‑righty. [Screen end:] So, that's a little bit more about images. Chapter 4. Meaningful Hyperlinks And I totally spaced out on what my next section is supposed to be. And we will be talking about -- oh, meaningful hyperlinks. Hyperlinks in your document is really important and this little video will tell you all about it. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Jim: Hyperlinks are things that people know they can click on to go somewhere else, on the web. [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Meaningful Hyperlinks Content: • Use words for links. e.g. TSBVI Home Page • Make it easy to read and navigate. • Place URL without “http://” in parentheses next to descriptive link for print purposes. e.g. (www.tsbvi.edu) Description End: In our print documents, we want those to be in plain, human, readable words, and then we put parentheses around the actual hyperlink, so that if you happen to be reading it with a screen reader, then the actual words are read as a link. And then if they happen to get to the parentheses with the actual URL, then that won't be read as a link. [ Slide end: ] So they'll know that where this particular set of words goes, they have it in human, readable terms. So let's look at the document. [Screen start:] We have here -- this is the list of the top five breeds for families. And it says, so associated content. Then it gives this great big link here -- you know, I'm not going to read it out. It's ugly. It has slashes and colons and underscores and numbers, and just imagine this being read out loud by the screen reader -- and it would be really annoying. And you might or might not have been paying attention by the time it gets to the end, and you hear the top underscore five, underscore dogs, underscore breed, underscore four, you get the idea. It would just be annoying. But what we're going to do, is, we're going to highlight all the text and I'm going to copy it, and we're going to paste it in. This is the actual link, the associated content. We're going to go up here to our button called hyperlink, and notice it says text and display. This is the text that's going to be on the screen, and the actual URL appears down here. So we're going to paste it in. We're going to say okay. Notice that our link automatically shows up blue and underlined, thank you very much, very pretty. People know immediately that that's a link, and then we will put the parentheses around this so that when they print out the document, it actually shows up on the paper, [Screen end:] so if they have to type it out, they can do that, because, unfortunately, you can't click a link on a piece of paper. [Screen start:] Let me give you another example here. Here's another one. Oh, this is, you know -- I'm not sure what a "dog reg stats" is. Not much fun to read. Notice this is blue and underlined so we're going to not make that a link. I'm going to say remove the hyperlink. I right‑clicked on the link and say remove the hyperlink. Source is the American Kennel Club. I'm going to select those words, right‑click, and say hyperlink. So notice that we've done it two ways now. We did the hyperlink button up here on the toolbar, and we have done the right‑click and chosen hyperlink for selected text. It still says American kennel club up here at the top. Down here in the address bar, we're going to hit control V, paste in the American Kennel Club down there, say okay. So now the American Kennel Club is the link and that's what will be read, [Screen end:] [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: URLs in Plain Text Content: • URL is not descriptive. e.g. http://www.tsbvi.edu • Hard to read and navigate • Lists of URLs are not helpful for navigation Description End: and then all of this goop out here at the end, which is the actual address, is just in the parentheses. So when you print out the document, it will be -- you can read it and type it in if you want. [ Slide end: ] [Screen start:] The other thing people sometimes do is remove the H-T-T-P, colon, slash, slash, at the beginning. It doesn't do anything and most browsers add that in anyway. So as an additional make it easier to read for people, if they want to type in the address, you could do that. [Screen end:] And that's all there is to it for making a meaningful hyperlink. [ Video end: ] Jim: Okay, sometimes you might have hyperlinks that are images. So I took that paw that we had and moved it up to the American Kennel Club link. [Screen start:] So the paw is going to become our link, and we're going to use this web address here, that "dog reg stats," we're going to copy that, and we're going to click on the paw print picture, and we're going to right‑click on it, and down here in the menu it says hyperlink. I'm going to choose the hyperlink and the address is going to be that address we had. Now, notice up top it says text to display. It doesn't say anything. It says selection in the document. That's okay. So we're going to say okay for that. So it's now a link. But, remember our description or our Alt tag for that image was just a space. That's not going to work. So JAWS will tell you that it's a link, but I think we need to do this American Kennel Club here. Let's just delete that and we'll highlight our picture again, and we'll go to Format the Picture. We'll go down to the Alt Text, and here we will just put in -- we'll delete that space, and put in American Kennel Club. Close. Then we'll do our same thing with our parentheses here. Delete, delete, delete, delete. And then down at the end. Where is it? There. And now, we have this as a link, and we know that because the cursor has changed and we see our little U-R-L that pops up by the paw, and we have it printed out so that if they did click on that, it would go to the American Kennel Club. [Screen end:] We probably should go change that to put a frame around it and make it blue and underlined or something so that they -- [Screen start:] or blue, put a blue line around it so they know it was a -- a link. Let's do a blue line. Okay. Close. There. So hopefully they would know that, and screen reader would pick up the link automatically and it would say link, American Kennel Club. [Screen end:] Chapter 5. Tables All‑righty. So the next thing is tables. And we will watch a short video on tables, and then I'll be back for that, and then we have one more thing to cover, and then we'll take some questions. [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Jim: Tables are structures that allow you to present tabular information in a meaningful way. We can see in the document here, [Screen start:] we have a table that -- well, this looks like a table, but it's not really a table because we can't go -- down through the information with a screen reader. If I hit down arrow, it's going to read the whole line -- and that's not going to work. We want to be able to read cell by cell and know that -- which things are associated with which things. We do that with a table. Now, this is a set of tabs through everything that are used to, you know, at least put the information in something that looks like columns, but they're really not columns, they're just tab marks. We can convert this into a table very quickly with Word, by highlighting the table. And we go up here to the button that says Text to Table. This converts text into a table. And it says automatically. It says, "Oh, looks like you have a bunch of tabs. How about we do this in three columns?" Well, that looks about right to me. Looks like there's three columns there and 11 rows. That works for me, too. And we're going to separate the text at the tabs. That's not a bad thing, either. We've got tabs between every single column, so that should split it out quite nicely. So as soon as we hit okay, it converted our table, or all those tabs, into tables. It put the lines in for us so we don't have to copy and paste, and structured the information, made it really nice. So the thing we need to do is make this top row here, we'll probably make that bold. I'm going to hit a control B, make those bold so that they're -- they look like they're headers. I'm also going to select this first row and make sure that this check box up here is checked that says Header Row. Display special formatting features for the first row of the table. All right. Now, notice also that the table tools came up. This is a special set of tools that only shows up when there is a table. You won't see it any other time, unless your cursor is inside a table. So that's how we get to the Header Row. There's an important thing we need to do for the layout. That's this button over here that says Repeat Header Rows. This repeats the header row on the top of every page, so if there's a page break in the middle of your table, the header rows will repeat themselves on the new page. [Screen end:] [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Tables Content: • Header row • Break across pages • Caption • Cell margins Description End: Makes keeping track of where you are and what's going on in the table very nice. And it saves you the work, because it does it for you automatically. That's the nice thing about a lot of these tools, is they do things for you automatically, and help you structure the information in an accessible way, [ Slide end: ] that also converts it when you -- when you convert into braille, it also helps you that way. [Screen start:] One of the other things we need to do is adjust the spacing of the cells in the table, because sometimes these -- information in the table cell gets scrunched up so that you can't see the text because of the boundaries on the cell. So we're going to change the cell margins to be one‑tenth of an inch, to give us a little more room all around the edge of the table cell, so that the actual content... So what this did is, I increased it to one‑tenth of an inch so we have extra space between the actual characters and the lines on the page. Now, look -- some of these are pretty close to the top, and for some people, that might be difficult to read. So maybe we want to do those also. Let's go in and add some extra information, let's say on the top, default cell margin, we're going to say .1‑inch there also. And notice the texts automatically dropped down as soon as I did that. You saw that on the screen. So now when we look, we have some nice space all around our text within the boundaries of our cell. That makes it a lot easier to read. I'm going to go back and erase all of those so you can see how they looked when they're all scrunched up, and see if this actually is a useful thing. I try and do it, because it makes it easier for me to read. Let's just put in a zero there, and we'll put in a zero over here and a zero over here. So when I say okay, everything should jump much closer together. And we see that our numbers are right up against the edge of the lines on the top and the left edge. That's really hard to read for most people. This table is just sitting here. It just says rank, breed, and 2006 count. What does that mean? What does this table apply to? [Screen end:] Well, this table needs a title to it. Actually, in Word, they call it a caption. [Screen start:] So let's add a caption to this table, and this is in the section called Ten Most Popular Breeds in the U.S. So we're going to copy those words, because even though that's the section and we've got the five best ones for the family and the picture of the dog, we're going to give this table a caption. We can do that several ways. We could go under, you know, select the whole table and go to insert a caption down here, or we have a button in our toolbar up here that says insert a caption for the table. So we're going to do it this way, insert a caption. Figure 2. I'm going to put a colon in there. 10 Most Popular Breeds in the U.S. And actually, I'm going to change this to a table because it's not a figure, it's a table, and notice that Word thoughtfully said, wait, this isn't the second table, this is only the first table. So that does it nicely and it's going to put the title above the table, which is where most people look for titles of tables. They don't look for them on the bottom. They look for captions for pictures on the bottom, but titles for tables, you generally want to have on the top. And so now we have a nice table. [Screen end:] And it's labeled, and you can tell people when you're doing a presentation or whatever, you can say, go to table 3, and they can quickly find it, because it automatically numbers them for you and it says it was a table, which is separate from a figure, and all of this will show up in braille also, which makes it easier to find that way. [ Video end: ] Jim: Okay. And we're back. And I left out one step about the table headers and breaking across pages. So one of the things we need to do is select the whole table. [Screen start:] We're going to go to properties, so I right‑clicked, go to Table Properties, and we're going to go to the Row tab, and there's a little button or a little check box here that says: Repeat as header row at top of each page. We want to make sure that that is checked, and we are going to say, okay. And we're going to go back to our table, and I'm going to go to the design part, and scroll down a little bit over here, and let's just say this one. That looks like a nice formatting, so we know that that's a table header, and we mark that it needs to break across page boundaries. So we're almost at the edge of a page here. So I'm going to just pretend that we had a whole bunch of extra texts and I'm going to hit return about four times. So now our table should break across -- and it didn't work again! This really works! I just did it, right before the presentation and tested it. I love when this happens. Oh, here we go. Repeat as header row at the top of each page. There's a nice check box. Okay. And what have we got here? Still didn't work! Let's -- highlight this row. And now we're going to go to -- nope. I'm going to highlight this row. I'm going to go to properties. Repeat as a header row at the top of each page for the row, and we're going to say okay. And I'm going to cross my fingers and it's not working. So I've completely it messed it up. [Screen end:] But in the -- after the next video where we look at things that we're supposed to avoid, I'll have this fixed and I'll show you what it is you're supposed to do, because I gave you the right steps, my computer is just misbehaving because it knows I'm in a webinar. So let's watch the things to avoid in Word. Chapter 6. Things to Avoid [ Video start: ] Description Start Description End Jim: So, there's one last thing to think about for accessible documents, especially in Word, [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Things to Avoid Content: • Text boxes • Watermarks • DropCaps • TextArt • QuickParts • “Floating” things Description End: is "things that you don't want to do." These are things you should avoid. And generally, if you look down on your handout, down at the very bottom of the list, it says "floating" things. Most of the things we're going to talk about that are things to avoid are things that float or things that appear in a text box. We're going to look at some of those and I'm going to show you them, and these are places you don't want to go because it's not going to make your document accessible. All right. [ Slide end: ] [Screen start:] Let's look at these. The first place we're going to go is the insert and the things you want to avoid are most of these over here in the text section. We have a text box. So a text box says, I'm going to just create a chunk of information -- and I want a simple text box, and it just puts a bunch of text in a box. And you can put a quote from the document or whatever you want in there. The thing is, is that JAWS will just skip right by it. The cursor will never see that box. It doesn't go into it. Anything you put in there is essentially hidden from JAWS. It just doesn't exist. If you do it in braille, it will probably -- well, actually, it might disappear. When you convert it in Word, when you convert it to HTML, it actually makes a picture out of a box, so there's no text there, it just gives you a picture of the words that were in the box, and then you have to create the Alt text. So that's -- the first one is the text box. The next one is QuickParts. You can add different parts of things. It creates information and it puts it inside of a text box, not a good thing. Now, there's some places where you will read that you can add TextArt to -- a document. Let me show you what Word art is. So I can add -- you know, I want to do something fancy for my heading, a fancy heading, and this is what it looks like. First of all, you can't read it. But you could adjust it and make the shadows and the outlines and all that sort of stuff readable, but the thing is, it's done in a text box, and JAWS pretty much skips right over it, and they'll never see it. So if you put anything important in there, not going to happen. So another thing people sometimes like to do is create a -- drop cap, just because it looks fancy. There. Notice that it's in a text box. So when JAWS is reading along, it's just going to say, "ccording" to the American Kennel Club, they'll never see that A because it's not there. The last thing we want to watch out for is over here in the page layout section. Sometimes people put water marks on their document, you know, like they'll say "Confidential" or they'll say "Draft" or something like that. This is invisible to screen readers, plus, it's in such a pale font, I mean, you could change the color, but it's very difficult to read, and for other people with low vision, this information here, where the text overlaps the watermark is very difficult to read. If you have to put something with a watermark on it, then I would suggest you put across the top of the document, you just say "Draft." And you might just repeat that three or four times, right across the top of the document. Then, for sure, they won't miss it. It's in plain text, available to everybody, [Screen end:] [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Things to Avoid Content: All of these are created in a text box. The cursor cannot move into a text box with arrow keys. Screen readers do not see text boxes. Description End: and it doesn't interfere with the reading of anything else that anybody else might have for print. And chances of it coming out in braille are -- if you put it in plain text on the top of the document, it will come out in braille. I think the chances of it, I haven't tested it -- but I think the watermark would not show up in the braille. And it probably won't show up if you convert it to HTML. It might if you converted it to P-D-F, but chances of it showing up as an image are pretty high. [ Slide end: ] Okay? So that's it for things to avoid. [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Things to Avoid Content: • Text boxes • Watermarks • DropCaps • TextArt • QuickParts • “Floating” things Description End: Avoid all those floaty things, such as text boxes, QuickParts, WordArt, Drop Caps, and the wonderful Watermark. [ Slide end: ] [ Video end: ] Jim: Okay. We're back and I've got my table working. I just had to calm down a little bit. So, what we need to do is, we've got the same table, we've got it highlighted. [Screen start:] We highlight the row, and we go up to properties, and we say: Repeat as a header row across the top of each page. We're going to click on that. We're going to say okay. And now I'm going to hit the carriage return a couple or three times, and we split our table across the page, and voilà! I feel so much better. We have the header on the top of the next page. So, if the table shifts, it's always there, you can always keep track of where your headers are. One other thing that might not have been clear is the floaty things. So this dog is in line. We're going to go to picture tools, and I'm going to say -- we're going to position it. And right now it's in line with text. So I'm going to -- I could center it, but I could just say -- nope. Cancel that. Put it on -- oh, come on, Jim. So we can wrap the text -- we can put it -- there we go -- in front of the text. So now, this is truly floating and this is what the other text boxes do for the TextArt and stuff. I can put this picture anywhere I want. It's on top of the text. JAWS never sees it, it's not there, it'll just read the text right along behind it. So if there was any important image, it would never find it. So that's it for the presentation. If there's any questions, I am happy to take them now, and hopefully this covers what you needed. [Screen end:] This is true, so when you do Word documents, you can convert it into Braille, you can convert it into HTML, and the headings and things will come out, and you can make it into .pdf and those headings and the Alt text and everything else will come out, too. Control Room: Jim, we have a question in the chat about Headers and Footers. Jim: Yeah. Control Room: How do screen readers handle those and what happens to them when translated into braille? Jim: Generally, JAWS does not read headers and footers, and -- there's ways you can get it so you don't want to really be putting important information in the headers and footers. Usually it's the -- you know, document title and the page numbers. The braille, I honestly don't remember. I would check with -- well, you can ask Sue Matson at the school or you can check online. I have just completely forgotten that. [ Slide start: ] Description Start: Title: Resources Content: • Microsoft – Creating Accessible Word Documents (bit.ly/1kkkqlS) • WebAIM – Microsoft Word (webaim.org/techniques/word/) • NCDAE – Microsoft Word Cheatsheet (ncdae.org/resources/cheatsheets/) • Portland Community College – How to Make a Word Document Accessible (www.pcc.edu/resources/instructional-support/access/word.html) • Penn State – Image ALT Text (accessibility.psu.edu/images/alttext/) • Penn State – Microsoft Word Tips (accessibility.psu.edu/microsoftoffice/microsoftalttags/) • ADOD - Accessibility of Office Documents and Office Applications (adod.idrc.ocad.ca/) Description End: And there's a bunch of resources on the -- in your document. Those are all links. And there's some tutorials. I've covered most of it today, that Microsoft Word cheat sheet, the third one down is really quite good, and the ones from Penn State on image ALT text talks about putting the ALT text in context so the image makes sense within what it is you're looking at. [ Slide end: ] And if there's no more questions, then -- I'm done. [ Slide start: ] Content read by narrator. Narrator: Thanks for joining us. Creating Accessible Documents. November 3, 2015. Property of TSBVI Outreach Programs. Request permission to use content. Transcript End