Project Math Access DVD 04 - Graphing Part 2- Part 06
Transcript Start

Audio Description: Part six; Tiger braille embosser, producing bar charts.

KAPPERMAN: Rob, what I'd like to have you show us now is to use the Tiger to illustrate how you would print out or emboss bar charts that emanate from an Excel worksheet. So if you could go through the steps to show us that and then emboss it to show us the results and give us a simple example of doing that, please? 

ROB: Sure, Gaylen. I have a set of data here that‘s three months: January, February and March and just some arbitrary values:10, 12 and 14 next to them and everything we're going to do, by the way, is totally accessible and I'll do my best to speak through what I'm doing. So now that I have my focus inside that data I just “alt I“ to the “insert menu" and hit “h" for chart. This is just the regular chart wizard and I'm just going to go clown to “finish.“ Oh, by the way, “column chart“ is selected by default with Excel. If I wanted a pie chart or a scatter plot or something, I could just cursor through this list and pick that one. 

KAPPERMAN: And any one of those charts is embossable using the Tiger isn‘t it? 

ROB: Absolutely, yeah exactly. The Tiger can emboss anything that an ink printer would ink from the same applications, in exactly the same way. So, yeah exactly, they are equally doable. So I'll just hit “finish“ and right now my focus is on this chart element and what I'm going to show you is a few tricks to make this a little more tactually accessible. 

There‘s a lot of things that Excel does that are kind of eye candy driven that are distracting tactually, so I'm going to hit my right click key and if I was a teacher or a sighted student I could just right click with my mouse, but I'm going to try to use the keyboard. So I'll just right click on this and go to “format chart area" and the first thing I want to do is remove the border on the outside, so I'm just cursoring through here and JAWS would be reading to me what these radio button labels are and I would just be selecting through them. Tab over to the font tab and this is a pretty nice trick that I think you'll like and I kind of trick Excel into using computer braille for its chart labels. 

So, I'm changing the font from Ariel to Braille 29, which is a Viewplus font to size 29 and then I'm going to tab clown to this check box that says “auto scale." And what that means is regardless of the size of my chart, i.e., when I fit it to page, when I print it off, my braille will always be size 29, which is the size of braille. It's pretty important. So I'm going to hit “okay" here. While my focus is still in the chart, I'm going to arrow around until Excel says I am looking at the “plot area." I'm just arrowing around, there we go, “plot area." And then I'm going to right click again and the folks who are looking at the screen will see that there's kind of a gray background there. What I want to do is kind of take that away, because that's really distracting when you're trying to find out where the bars are and where the background is that you don't need to pay attention to. 

So, I'm just going to switch that shading from what is labeled here as “automatic" which was choosing that light gray to ‘‘none'' and hit “enter" there and then that's pretty much clone. I could change the colors of my bars if I thought they were too light or something. We printed one off earlier, Gaylen. I think you kind of liked that shading that Excel picks automatically which is kind of a medium blue on the screen. 

Now folks looking at the monitor that's being filmed will notice that the chart's pretty well squashed down right now because the labels are so big, but if I go to ‘‘file'' and “print preview", you can see that when it fits the page, those columns are back to normal and it's kind of a much better tactile chart. So I'm just going to go ahead and go to the print dialog. Tiger Max is selected as my printer and all I need to do is hit “okay", so I just hit ‘‘enter'' and it should print right off. And then of course when this is clone I could translate my data table in Excel and braille that out or ink it before I translate it to turn in with my graph or however you want to do that.