Accessibility Using AdobeConnect This video is posted online with the following chapter markers: Chapter 1. Introduction - Chapter 2. Setting up the Room - Chapter 3. Access using JAWS - Chapter 4. Accessibility Workarounds - Chapter 5. Questions and Comments - Accessibility Using AdobeConnect Transcript [Silence] Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Outreach Programs Present Accessibility Using AdobeConnect. April 28, 2015 Presented by Jim Allan. Statewide Technical Support Specialist. Allan-J at T-S-B-V-I dot E-D-U and Kate Hurst. Statewide Staff Development Coordinator. Hurst-K at T-S-B-V-I dot E-D-U Chapter 1. Introduction Kate: Hi, I am Kate Hurst, I am the Statewide Staff Development Coordinator at Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Outreach Program. And I'm here along with my colleague, Jim Allan. Jim, you want to start your webcam? Jim: Oh, okay. Kate: And we were contacted by Norm, oh, back in the fall, to pull together this presentation since we've been using AdobeConnect for about a year and a half, maybe two years now to do webinars for teachers and other individuals around the state. We're going to share what we've learned about accessibility, what we know about AdobeConnect and some of the workarounds we've come up with to make sure that the information that we're sharing with participants is accessible. And I'm going to turn it over to Jim for the major portion of this and then I'll share some workarounds a little later. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] Jim: Okay. So this is Jim Allan here. I am the accessibility coordinator at the Texas School for the Blind -- [indiscernible] to navigate. Jim: Oh, be quiet. That other voice you just heard was JAWS. I have that running on my machine. And I've been doing accessibility and web accessibility for 20, 30 years, and was a teacher before that. So we're going to jump in. Hopefully you all have your handouts. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] Chapter 2. Setting up the Room And the first thing I'm going to cover is -- that at least what we do is we use the -- the phone bridge so that everybody calls in. As you can see, there are technical difficulties with that. But I think we've found that that works easier than people have all their different microphones and all that sort of stuff. So The first thing we'll talk about and I won't do anything on the screen yet until we talk about the user side. For the presenters, sending a direct link to the AdobeConnect room for your course is what we found works better because the keystrokes seem to work differently when the AdobeConnect opens up inside the browser because the browser takes some of the keystrokes. So having the AdobeConnect application by itself is much better. The captioning pod must be installed every time you create a new room. That's the -- We'll talk about how to get there in a bit, but that's where we have the live captioner come in. We can also send that when our good buddy Andy who's here doing the technical support, when we make this available for everybody [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] as an archive, then we'll include the captions with it so that everyone can read it and search it. For low vision users it would be useful to provide a description of the layout of the presentation window, probably also for users who are blind also. At least tell them the order in which the pods appear on the screen, left to right orientation. So for low vision people that the chat is in the upper right hand -- Kate: Upper left. JIm: Upper left‑hand. Yeah. I'm also dyslexic. So the chat is in the upper left and on the lower left is the closed caption window. The main window in the center of the screen is the PowerPoint presentation. That is not accessible to the screen reader. That's just a pretty picture of some text. So you have to send the presentation to the users ahead of time and make sure that that is accessible, be it a PowerPoint or a P-D-F or a Word file because even though you can flip sides here, it -- they're not going to be able to read anything. On the right side of the screen in the upper right we have the video portion. Below that in the middle section we have the files list where users can download files if they haven't gotten them already. And then in the lower right‑hand corner is the attendees list. All right. The presenters can change the font size and text‑based pods like the notes pod and the chat pod to a larger font size, but the users can also change them themselves. So you have it both ways. You can set it a little bit larger for everybody to begin with and if that's not enough for people, then they can have control over their own environment, which is also a useful thing. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] The host can change the name of the pods, so we've kept them pretty simple like attendees and files and video, but could you call them whatever you wanted. The one we don't have control over is the closed captioning pod because that's an add‑in to the AdobeConnect tool. So it's what it is and you have to deal with that ugly name that we have. Okay. Sometimes we have -- there's pods that pop up, like when you take a poll or something. The presenter has control over where it pops up. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] Now, there is a limitation on the question of 65 characters. So if you can't get the question under 65 characters you may have to read it out -- out loud. And that's a limitation of the AdobeConnect system and you have to work around it. You must make the pod as large as you can so all the text will show up. There is a limit of 65 characters. Before you push the poll make sure all of the question is displayed. And for low vision users always put the polls in the top left‑hand corner of the screen so they're easy to find. Usually or I would think sometimes the -- if they're watching the PowerPoint and having it pop right up over the PowerPoint is not such a bad thing either. But whatever you do, tell your participants where they're going to pop up so that they know where to look. Because if your screen magnification at six or eight X you might be someplace else on the screen and something could pop up and not know it. But AdobeConnect does make a distinct sound so that you know that something did pop up somewhere so it'll go hunt for it. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] There is no indication of the number of choices. So if there's, you know, if you have six choices you might want to tell your users that. If you did like a multiple choice question. This was an open‑ended question so anyone could get in to the poll and type their answer, but if you do a multiple choice then you need to tell them how many choices are there because when you navigate into it with a screen reader, it will just -- you will down arrow to it, and I'll demonstrate that in a minute. Down arrow to it and it will just keep reading all of the choices and you don't know. And it won't say when you get to the end. Kate: Jim, I'm going to jump in here... Jim: Go ahead, Kate. Kate: Because we got a little help from Chris who just informed us that we can indeed change the title of the closed captioning pod by double‑clicking on it. So I've changed it. Thank you, Chris. Jim: Nice. See, learned something new. I'll update the handout for that. Good. Okay. That makes more sense. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] The presenter will need to review the results of the poll for multiple answers or, yeah for radio buttons or check boxes. It would also be useful to include the polls in the handout so that users will know what's coming up. And it's also useful for any of those questions that happen to be longer than 65 characters. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] Another thing we do is all the discussion notes, if there are any. We don't have the discussion pod open so that's not an issue. If you did have it open and people did take any notes, we would mail those out to people along with the presentation. We don't use the video pod much other than to have faces there. If you have -- if you have to show a video, if it's longer than -- don't make it any longer than 90 seconds because then you have buffering issues and you will get lots of artifacts and it just starts to degrade and it's not really worth it. It would be better to put a link to people and have them go watch it ahead of it time or something like that. You can set up a participant as a presenter, you have better access, but you also have the chance of them crashing your presentation by doing something by accident as they're exploring their environment. So use that with some sort of care. Let's see. That's about all I have for presenta -- for presenters, presntaters. Yeah. Good. Do you have anything, Kate, to add? Kate: I think you've talked about most of the things, but we -- I'll -- I'll make sure we've covered what we've been doing when I -- when we get to the very end just to make sure, just to summarize. Jim: Okay. Chapter 3. Access using JAWS So now we're going to move into sort of to the -- to the user side and we're going to have JAWS talking here. I hope that JAWS is understandable. I've got it set to pretty slow. It's using one of its better voices, but it's still a bit robotic and if you're not used to hearing it. ...So there was a question that says "is it more accessible to import the file to the white board and share the screen to display the presentation?" White boards are tough because they're interactive. If you can see it you can interact with it, but it's not going to come across to someone who's using a screen reader. It's just graphics. Okay. I'm going to go on and talk about the pods. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] So the pods are different sections of the screen. I talked about the layout already. You can navigate around the pods and they're highlighted at least on my screen, and I'm using Windows 7 on -- on my laptop. They're highlighted with a green box around them and you navigate to them with a Control‑F6. So that you're -- hold down the control key and hit the F6 key, the function key. JAWS: Control F-6 Share Pod Closed caption and graphics. Jim: Okay, so it moved to the share pod and it said it was closed captioning, so it automatically reads you the title. So I'm going to hit Control‑F6 and move through the rest of the pods. Is everybody hearing JAWS okay or do I need to make it louder? [ silence ] JAWS: Control‑F6, share pod accessibility dot P-P-T-X graphic dialogue to navigate. Jim: So... JAWS: Share pod accessibility dot P-P-T-X graphic. Jim: Okay. Notice that we're in the PowerPoint sharing window and if I was in presenter mode I could scroll through the slides, but it would change the screen, but the screen reader wouldn't say anything because it said graphic. And it's -- maybe you don't know, but screen readers don't read graphics, they only read text. So I'm going to keep going around. JAWS: Control‑F6, video pod use tab to navigate through the video feeds. Press P to pause or play a video feed. If you are a meeting host, press the delete key to remove a video feed, video graphic. Jim: So you can see that -- that JAWS in its basic mode is reading a bunch of information that the AdobeConnect provides. So there's various keys that you can hit to play or pause a video and navigate through some of the other settings. I'm going to keep going. JAWS: Control‑F6, files share pod files graphics. Jim: OK, so there's our files. JAWS: Control‑F6, attendee pod attendees graphic. Control‑F6, chat pod, chat graphic. Jim: Okay. Now that I'm in the...chat pod, every pod has some settings. And in order to get to the settings you hit Control‑F8 and it will pop up a little drop‑down menu. So one of the things that I recommend for people in the chat pod -- So, I'm going to hit Control‑F8 and we'll go through those settings. JAWS: Control‑F8, menu to move through items press up or down arrow. Jim: Ok, so I'm just now going to hit down arrow. >>JAWS: Maximize. Jim: That says I can maximize so I can make the chat window take up the entire screen. JAWS: Start chat with submenu. Jim: So, I can start a chat with various people if I choose. Oh, I'm not going to go into that. JAWS: Text size submenu. Jim: So, here's one where if I don't have -- if the chat window that the presenter set up isn't -- the text isn't big enough for me I can change it myself. So I can hit a right arrow. JAWS: eight JIM: And it says eight. And I have...well a really lot of selections. I have eight to 28 on my screen. JAWS: 18. Jim: And then I just hit enter and it automatically makes my chat window to 18 point. JAWS: Control‑F6, poll pod 1, what systems have you used in the webinars you -- Jim: Yeah. JAWS: Answer list box row one of two answers. Left par -- Jim: Okay. So, for some reason my computer still thinks that the poll window was open. Kate: It very likely is. So, let me make sure. It is. JAWS: Video pod, use tab to navigate through the video leads. Press P to pause or play a vid -- Alert sharing stopped. Andy: And Andrew showed you that you could go back in the pod cycle with shift. Jim: Right. Shift F6. Right. I'm going to do that right now so I can get back there. >>JAWS: Video pod, use full screen button to ac -- stop button to -- video pod -- use tab to navigate through the video feed. Control shift F6, share pod closed -- control shift F6, chat pod, chat graphic. Jim: There you go. Okay. So, you can go forward with control F6 and you can go backwards with control shift F6 to cycle through your pods. And sometimes things will happen that you need to move off of it and then move back on to it to see a setting. So I'm going to go back and finish reviewing those settings. So we're going to do a -- we're in the chat pod, do Control‑F8. JAWS: Control F8. Menu to move through items. Press -- Max text size submenu. Jim: We talked about the text size. JAWS: Chat color submenu. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] Jim: You can change the chat color windows. One of the next ones ‑‑ JAWS: Reverse order of messages checked. Jim: Okay. So, reverse order of messages means that it will show you the most recent message on the bottom of the screen all the time otherwise it starts the chat start at the top of the screen and just go all the way down to the bottom. So you're always having to scroll to find out what the latest message is, which is really tedious. If you do the reverse order, then the newest message always appears up on top, which makes it a lot easier to read. The other item that's useful... JAWS: Chat sounds checked. Jim: is the chat sounds so that any time somebody types something into the chat it makes a little boo‑boo, which you may or may not have heard. Kate: Jim, we have a question from Samantha. How is this tool different than Google groups? Jim: I don't know. I haven't -- I haven't tried it. Kate: Okay. Jim: When I have -- I've been in a couple of presentations where we used -- we tried to do a live webinar sort of of a -- an awards ceremony and we were in the Google building at the time and the whole thing crashed around our ears. So we weren't able to broadcast it. So I haven't had a lot of experience with it other than that one time and I wasn't doing any technical stuff in it. Kate: Another question "is that option only available to screen readers because I cannot see that option when I open the menu button." I can't either, Michelle. I think that must be the case. Jim: Where what? Kate: To reverse my...order on the chat. Jim: There's a little -- it doesn't show up? Kate: No. Jim: How bizarre. It must be. You know, when I was testing this and writing it, I tested it and wrote it with a screen reader. You know, that would be really useful for everybody. [silence] JAWS: Escape, leaving menus. Kate: We've got some comments. "I'm using the Control‑F6, but not hearing the pod titles. Any idea why? I'm using JAWS." Jim: 16. Yeah. I'm using JAWS 15. When I was at my computer I didn't have any issues with it. Try a -- an insert escape and see if refreshing the screen helps. And sometimes I also do an alt tab to switch applications and then switch back in. It sort of wakes up JAWS. Kate: Does it have anything to do with the type of -- with the browser they're using? Because, you know, we did have problems with some of the things with Chrome, I think. Jim: Yeah. Well...yes. You know, that's an interesting point. So because AdobeConnect even if you have this -- the -- the separate application, it is Flash. This is just one giant Flash application. And Flash seems to work better in I-E than anything else. So maybe opening it up in I-E instead of Fire Fox and then even though you're using the AdobeConnect, I call it a plug‑in, it may work better in I-E than it does in...Fire Fox even though it's still a massively huge flash application. Oh good. Kate: Mary said she -- that's working. [ Laughter ] Jim: Hot dog. Kate: That's one thing about AdobeConnect I've discovered is that for whatever reason it seems to like I-E better than the other -- Chrome or Fire Fox. And even for non‑screen reading functions, and I don't know why. Jim: Yeah. Oh good. Somebody else said that AdobeConnect works fine for us without screen readers and all browsers. Yeah things generally work better without screen readers. But for those of us who need them, we'll move on. Hmm. Interesting. Kate: And see we've had problems with the -- the add on for windows. I don't know why. Again -- In fact, just today I spent over an hour with AdobeConnect trying to be able to use my webcam, and it -- it keeps shutting down and we don't know why. And the add‑in wouldn't install properly. And even when it did install properly moments later it wasn't functioning again. So I don't know what that's about. Jim: We call that a feature. Kate: Yeah. Jim: Okay. So let's go on. I'm going jump next to the files pod. So I'm going to do my Control‑F6. JAWS: Control‑F6 attendee -- Control F6, share pod closed -- Control‑F6, video -- Control‑F6, share -- Control‑F6 -- Control‑F6, file share pod, files graphics. Jim: Okay. So in the files pod, once I get there I can hit tab. JAWS: Tab, list box row one of three name accessibility using AdobeConnect dot P-P-T-X size 99 K-B. Jim: Okay. So it -- as soon as I tabbed into it it told me I was in a list. Notice that it didn't tell me how many files were there so it might be useful to tell your users that, but if you just hit a down arrow. JAWS: Row one of three name Accessibility Jim: Oh it did say. JAWS: Using AdobeConnect dot P-D-F size 99 K-B. List box row one of three name Accessibility Using AdobeCon-- Jim: Yeah. Be quiet. So I just hit the control key. JAWS: List box row two of three name Sign-in Roster 1-4 dash 1-5 dot P-D-F size 40 KB. Jim: And then any time I want I can just hit tab. JAWS: Tab, upload file dot, dot, dot button to activ -- Tab download file left pair and right pair and button to activate press spacebar. Jim: Okay. So then there's my download button and if I hit the spacebar I would be taken to another screen in my browser and then you would tab until you hit a button that says -- what does it say? Click to download. And then you would hit the enter key on that because it's a link and then it would download the file for you and go through your dialogue box for your operating system on where you want to download the particular file. So that's that, and that's just a fallback. Do you have another poll, Kate? Kate: I do. Jim: Okay. Let's have -- does this have multiple choice in it. Kate: I think I can find one. Let me get my -- if I can get my fingers to work. Jim: So, we'll do a poll and we'll -- we'll move through this. Kate: Do you want multiple choice Jim: Sure. Kate: or do you want -- where they can pick multiple things? Jim: Just one. Kate: Just one. Okay. JAWS: Alert, Poll pod 2, how frequently do you participate in the webinars? Use votes button. Jim: Okay. So it popped up and it says -- it read the title, how frequently do you participate in a webinar? Okay. So let's see, the question is read. The only way to reread the question is to unfocus and refocus. So this is where you do a Control‑F6 and then a control shift F6 to move back to the pod to reread the question in case you forgot it. Okay. So tab cycles us through the answers. JAWS: Tab, edit button to -- tab edit poll button to activate press spacebar. Jim: Oh, I'm in presenter mode. That's why I'm seeing these extra buttons. So, because I'm in presenter mode, I get the edit and the edit poll button. As users you shouldn't be seeing those. JAWS: Tab, [indiscernible] radio button check. To change the selection press up or down arrow. To change the selection press up or down arrow. Tab broadcast results check box check, shift pad, [indiscernible] radio button check to change the selection press up or down arrow. To change the selection ‑‑ Jim: Yeah. Be quiet. I'm going to hit the up arrow. JAWS: At least one or more times [indiscernible]. At least one or more times -- seven dash one zero times [indiscernible] radio button checked. To change the selection press up or down -- three dash seven times [indiscernible] radio button checked. one dash two times [indiscernible] radio button checked. To change the selection press up or down arrow. To change -- Jim: Okay. There. So I'm -- I'm done with my poll there. And so even though the directions say tab cycles through the answers, that doesn't work for radio buttons and JAWS tells you that. Check boxes and other sorts of things will cycle through, but for radio buttons you use the up and down arrow because you only get one choice anyway. When there's a short answer field, the edit field is presented when the question's asked and you're already in the edit box but it doesn't tell you you're in the edit box and you can just start typing. And then you tab to the submit button. JAWS: Closed caption and graphics. Kate: You want me to pull that-- that poll up for short answers? Jim: Sure. Let's pull up a short answer one. Kate: We have a question. Can you start and end a recording with JAWS or another screen reading software. So that's something to get to in a minute. Jim: Okay. I don't know. I'll have to figure that out because I -- I only ‑‑ JAWS: To activate press spacebar. Jim: Shhh. I've only -- when I was working on this I only did it as a user. Maybe we need to do another one as a presenter because there's a whole other host of keystrokes and functionality that goes along with that and then I thought for this session being able to do the presenter part was quite enough. It filled up my head. So we had a new poll pop up and I didn't hear the question because I was busy talking. So let me get off of this pod. JAWS: Control‑F6, file share pod files graphic. Jim: And I'm going to get it back to the pod. Control Shift F6 JAWS: Control Shift F-6, poll pod one, what systems have you used in the webinars you have participated in during [indiscernible]. Jim: Okay. So let's see. Oh. Again, I'm in the presenter -- can you make me a participant? Kate: Let me make you a participant, Jim. Jim: Because nothing is functioning right. I have all these extra buttons of edit and end poll and view votes. And we may have to pop the poll up again. Kate: Okay. You are now a participant and see if it makes any difference. Jim: Aha! JAWS: Control‑F6, control shift F6, poll pod 1, what system have you used in the webinars you have participated in during [indiscernible]. Jim: Okay. JAWS: J -- Jim: No, hit tab... JAWS: Tab, type your answer here. dot dot dot edit. Type with text. Type with text. Jim: Okay. I'll have to edit that in my directions. Okay. So now I can just type my answer. JAWS: a-o-d-o-b-e space c-o-n-n-e-c-t Jim: There. Then I hit tab. JAWS: Tab. Send answer button. To a-- Enter. Space, to activate press spacebar. Jim: There. So I submitted my answer. I suppose I -- I could go back, do a shift tab to get back in my edit box. JAWS: Shift Tab Adobe Connect edit. Type with text. Jim: And I could type in anything else I wanted. JAWS: t-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e. Tab [indiscernible] Jim: Then I hit the spacebar to submit my answer. And then tab again will read me all of my results. JAWS: Tab answer list box row one of 12 answers left pair and 12 right pair and go to meeting. Jim: Then I'd use down arrow. JAWS: one of twelve answers Left pair and 12 right pair and go to meeting. List box row two of 12 answer left pair and 12 right pair and telephone. Jim: What's happening is -- is -- people are still answering, so every time I hit the down arrow it's sort of resetting itself... JAWS: List box row one -- List box row two -- Jim: And it takes me to the top of the list again. JAWS: List box row three of 13, answers left pair and 13 right pair and [indiscernible]. AdobeConnect, W-B-X, [indiscernible] Blackboard Collaborates. Jim: Now there's someone who used a lot of stuff. But, so if someone answers -- types in a new answer it'll -- for me it pops up to the top again and then I have to start all over scrolling. So I don't know if there's a way for the presenter to say, you know, I'm -- we're done with answering or we just close the poll. Kate: Well, usually what we do is we end the -- we end the poll and then we'll go through briefly and discuss what's in the poll. Jim: Okay. We may not necessarily read every answer as it appears, but, you know, depending on what the question is. Jim: Right. Okay. There. And then when the presenter closes the poll the pod goes away. So, close that... JAWS: Close pod. Use tab to navigate through the video feeds. Press P to pause or play a video feed. Jim: Okay, and since that pod went away, it didn't -- it didn't say anything that strange noise you heard was actually me. So it didn't make a noise when it went away, but then Jaws had nothing to focus on so it went and focused on the next immediate pod that was available, which in my case happened to be the video pod. And so that's why that was your hint that the polls pod closed because something else opened. All right. Kate: Do you want to do the multiple -- multiple answers. Jim: Oh yeah. Check boxes. Sure. Why don't we do that. Kate: Doing all the different pods. Jim: Kate will pop up a ‑‑ JAWS: Poll pod three. What are your top three types of music? Jim: Nice. So it automatically -- it made noise. It read the title of the...question, thank you, poll, that thing. And for me the -- the first -- the immediate first answer, which is a checkbox called alternative is immediately highlighted. But it didn't say alternative, it just is there. So I'm going to hit tab. JAWS: Tab, [indiscernible]. Jim: You have to do shift tab to -- [ Laughter ] where is rock‑n‑roll? Seriously? [ Laughter ]. So you have to -- You might tell your users that, you know, they -- they're not going to hear the first one, at least I didn't hear it, and so if you want to know what the first one is you have to tab and then shift tab to get the one you want. And then you would hit the... JAWS: Space... Jim: Spacebar to pick the one you want. JAWS: Press spacebar. Space check, to check press spacebar. Jim: There. And as far as I've been able to -- you know, if you were a really, really good JAWS user you could probably get out of the basic interactive mode and turn on the JAWS cursor and wade through all those results. That's not for the faint of heart for even a really good JAWS user. So as a presenter you're again going to have to sort of review the results of what shows up there. Kate: I would say that most times we would not select a multiple choice that had quite that many options. Jim: Right. You would just do four or five. Kate: Well, we'd just try to -- to rethink that question. [ Laughter ]. Short answer maybe. Jim: Okay. The discussion notes pod, if it was up, is so you can -- you can jump in -- really? Nicely done Andrew. Let's see if I -- if it works for me. Nope, mine hitting up and down. So Andrew just said arrowing up and down with N-V-D-A reads the percentages. That's cool. Okay. So the discussion notes you can get in and take notes for yourself, but it might be easier to do that in your own note pad rather than in -- in the notes window. Because the only way to read the notes is it -- is to jump into it and read the entire thing as a chunk, which is pretty tedious. JAWS: Compile discussion notes. Jim: Can you access information in this pod? Sure, let's go see. JAWS: Control‑F6, note pods discussion notes graphic. Tab, can you access the information in this pod? Read only. Jim: Yeah, read only. So that would be up to the participants or whatever to be taking special notes. Then if there were a lot more text in there it would just read it all out to you. So it might be useful for the presenter or co‑presenter to be taking some sort of notes and then ship it out to the participants at the end. And there is a -- JAWS: Control‑F8 read only. Menu to move through items press ‑‑ Jim: I was just seeing if there was anything fancy under the...the menu, the control menu for that. This is another one of those where it's -- the notes pod is important since the user doesn't have any control over the size of the text that the presenter sets it up as something that's relatively large so that everyone can read it. Okay. So now I'm in the web links pod and I would hit tab. JAWS: Tab. List box link one of W-W-W dot tsbvi. Jim: Okay. tsbvi, that's T-S-B-V-I. It' special. JAWS: Tab, browser button, to activate press spacebar. U-R-L W-W-W dot tsbvi dot edu. Jim: Okay. Then if I wanted to go to that because a presenter said this might be something useful to you would shift tab back to the browse button and hit enter and it would fire up your browser and pull up that particular link. JAWS: To activate... That's another one of those things that would be useful to send out the list of things to go, unless there's something in your percentage that you want to do that for. JAWS: Accessibility for individuals... Jim: Okay. What else do we have? Oh! So sometimes you might want to take a quick poll rather than having a poll. Did that make sense? You want to survey the crowd. So you would say everyone raise your hand and rather than having all the videos up, you can raise your hand in -- Kate: The attendees? Jim: Yes. There will be an indicator on the participants list to show whether you raised your hand or not. Generally your hand is down to begin with and the quick way to do it is you do a control E. JAWS: Control E. Jim: And my hand is raised. And if you look in the participants -- Samantha johns just raised your hand. But notice that JAWS didn't say anything. It just indicated it. And let's see, Krista raised her hand and Joe raised his, right. And then I can do control E again JAWS: Control E Jim: and it brings my hand back down. That doesn't provide you a whole lot of feedback. So the other way to do it is you hit the control spacebar and it takes you to the top menu bar in AdobeConnect. Jaws: Control space application menu. To navigate press left or right arrow menu bar. Jim: And then you would tap -- JAWS: To navigate -- >>Jim: Yeah, be quiet. You would Tab JAWS: Tab, leaving menu bar. [indiscernible] speakers drop down. Tab, connect by audio -- [indiscernible]. Tab, stop [indiscernible] Tab, set status button, drop down Jim: Okay. So, it says set status button. You can't. I haven't been able to get in to that menu to -- because there's a bunch of other statuses that you're away or you'll be right back or whatever. But if you hit the spacebar JAWS: Space Jim: it raises your hand. And then if you get off of this particular button -- So I'm going to do a shift tab. JAWS: Shift tab, stop [indiscernible] button drop‑down. Jim: And then I'm going to hit tab to go back on to the button and it's going to tell me what I can do. JAWS: Tab, lower or raise hand button drop down. Jim: It says lower, raise hand button drop‑down. So what it tells me is my hand is currently raised. And if I hit the spacebar it will lower my raised hand. So it's a few more keystrokes, but at least you know sort of what you're doing JAWS: Space. Jim: even though it doesn't --you know, when you hit the spacebar it doesn't say your hand is now down. No, it just says nothing. Kate: So, Jim, we have a comment, or a question from Michelle. She said I tried using control E and it didn't do anything. Is there another screen reader special feature? Jim: It -- it might be. The -- One of the things I noticed earlier today is I forgot to have the AdobeConnect plug‑in installed on my computer, so AdobeConnect opened right inside my browser and every time I hit Control+E it took me to the address bar in the browser. And I know in my notes it's like I know this worked, I tried ths before. Why is this failing? And then I pulled out my laptop and tried it and it worked fine, and then I noticed that I was in the AdobeConnect application as opposed to the AdobeConnect thingy in -- whatever it's called, room inside the browser. Because the Control E is a browser command. So it may be another one of those -- I haven't tried it. N-V-D-A always reports lower or raised hand. Is my hand up or down? I don't know, Andrew. It starts down. You're just going to have to keep a tally sheet. I'm on my Macbook and command arrow pulls down the menu item at the top. Okay. That's useful, Sara. Try it with voiceover and see what you get because screen readers tend to change the behavior on these things. Anyway... Kate: Jill says I think my question got lost in the chat shuffle. Do you have any experience with WebEX's platform accessibility? My organization is looking at both Connect and WebEX for online classes. Jim: Did you guys experiment with WebEX? Kate: We did not. I have been to things with WebEX, but I don't know about they're accessibility. Andy: We can refer her to Mike Moore. They -- they did experiments with WebEX. Jim: There's -- across the street we have the Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services for adults and they did some experiments with WebEX, five different ones. And we can see if I can -- I know Mike. I'll see if I can get his presentation that he did at a distance learning conference -- what last week? Where he shared the results of their stuff. So Joe, you said control down arrow worked, huh? JAWS: Link menu, Search box edit... Jim: No. On my window, control down arrow opened up my start button. That's weird. JAWS: Alt tab, [ indiscernible ] alt shift tab... Jim: Okay. Where was I? Raised hands. And that's about it for me. There's some resources in the handouts on how to set up the closed captioning. There's a list of keyboard shortcuts and I think what I may do when I put this up on the website and we'll send that out also, I have a couple of weeks to do it, I'll make a nice little table of keyboard shortcuts for per -- users or participants. Because the -- the keyboard shortcuts for the presenters is four or five pages worth. There's keyboard shortcuts for everything. Users don't have that much, and I -- and when we conceived of this presentation my thought was -- is there's probably a lot more users who are participating in a webinar who are screen reader users than they are presenters just because of the nature of the population. Because there's a lot fewer people who are screen reader users. Anyway, this is our Texas Closed Captioning service. Thank you. And then there's the AdobeConnect troubleshooting page that's also useful for when things go wrong. So now I'm going to hand it over to Kate. Chapter 3. Accessibility Workarounds Kate: Thanks, Jim. As you can probably tell, Jim and I and all the folks here at T-S-B-V-I are still trying to sort of figure out what's going to work and what's -- what workarounds we have to come up with. And I just have to say that on my part I am by no way any kind of expert on this. We've just tried to think up ways to mitigate some of the problems with accessibility. One of the things I always do is I send out the handouts in an electronic format by email prior to the event. And then like Jim said, we always post them in the files pod so that if for some reason they might not have gotten it, they can at least get access in the room once they get there. The images on our PowerPoint, we try to encourage all of our presenters to avoid images unless there's something really, really important in that image. And then we insist that they give us captioning information so that we can give detailed captions about what the image is. That way our viewers can get a description of what's being shown on the screen when they come to it in the handout as they go through each slide, it will appear as an image and there's a detailed caption about what is there. We talked about the polls a lot. We've had a lot of -- not a lot, but a number of individuals who are visually impaired who were not really great with being able to get into the polls. So we always tell them what is in the poll and then let them know that they can respond in the chat because most of them seem to have no problems getting into that chat pod. So that's been a kind of workaround for that. [ End slide: ] [ Start slide: ] Of course, Jim mentioned that we always have a live captioner. And that is -- is really -- has proven to be not only a wonderful accessibility feature for our colleagues that are hearing impaired, but we've actually had a lot of our non‑hearing impaired individuals appreciate the captioning pod because for a lot of our teachers, they're often times on cell phones, maybe in their car, pulled over on the side of the road joining the webinar, and so that they're not always getting the best signal through the audio and so they can kind of make sure what's going on through the captioning pod. And that's worked out pretty well. The share pod for our low vision users, we try to really minimize the clutter and use the san serif font. No busy backgrounds. We usually go with a white or a cream color. We try to limit the number of lines on each slide. Like I say, we discourage the use of unnecessary images or clip art, and so far the feedback we've gotten has been pretty good that our low vision readers have appreciated that they can see this screen better. And I'll tell you as a presenter and also as a participant, not having so much stuff on the screen has been my preference as well. And I know that kind of goes against a lot of people's desire for -- for flash. Now, I will say this, that when we've been able to do PowerPoints and that have a lot of animation, for example, if we're -- we've done a couple on -- certain tutorials on different technology, and what our presenter has done is used animation to point out different features on the PowerPoint and then we capture it in Camtasia and put it up and it seems to work pretty well. We are experimenting with other types of software to do things, but we've not really -- really figured out exactly what's the best thing to use. I'd be real interested in knowing if others of you have found good workarounds for that. As Jim said, we really try to organize the room in a consistent way and we always put the chat pod in the upper left corner. Since that seems to be the one that is the easiest for people to get in to and for us to interact with them. So that's worked pretty well. And then ultimately for a lot of our participants, they have preferred to just view these as they've been archived on our website and just go in and access the information that way. But again, on our website when we put up the webinar, the recorded webinar, we try to -- on the same spot, and we're working desperately to try to rework our entire distance learning site so this looks better so that people can go in and get the handout and they also can get the caption -- the transcript of the presentation as well. And that seems to work pretty well. So those are basically the workarounds that we've found, and I don't know if you have any questions about that or you got any other ideas that you'd like to share with us. It's -- it's been very interesting and somewhat challenging for us trying to ensure as much as possible that we have accessibility for these webinar events. So Jim, any last thoughts? Do we have questions or comments? Chapter 4. Questions and Comments I'm going to unmute the mic so people can comment if they'd like. All guests have been unmuted. You will now rejoin the meeting. Norm: Hi, this is Norm. I want to make three or four quick comments. Kate: Sure. Norm: On the archive for this probably won't be available until mid or late May. But what I'm going to do is if you go to the easy homepage, easi.cc, they've got webinars and at the top of that page when I have the recording it will be listed at the top of the webinar promotion page or on the homepage, easi.cc, way down -- (Background noise). I usually list a recording of the previous webinar and leave it there. So my plan would be to put this webinar up there as well. Second thing I want to underline, you have to decide when you're doing a webinar are you wanting to entertain or communicate? And if you're wanting to communicate, then I'd say have as little flash and jazz as possible. Use as few features as possible. Make the interface as simple as possible. Be clear about what you're doing. And the key to accessibility besides the system is better. You can get an accessible system and present it in ways that screw it up. You can have one that's not very accessible and still do pretty well. A lot of it depends on the presenter. Make sure you want to communicate, keep the interface and the content simple. And before anybody else runs away, I want to do two things. I want to thank everybody for coming and I want to give a special thanks to Jim Allan and Kate Hurst for this excellent presentation. I'm going to shut up and let other people state their questions or comments. Kate: Thanks, Norm. A quick comment if I can. Kate: Please. We use AdobeConnect at work quite a bit. I'm by no means a fan of it compared to the [indiscernible]conferencing that Norm uses, but I have to say and I haven't quite worked out why yet, but this session has been so much easier to navigate using a screen reader than what we get at work. (Background noise). I will have to chat with the chaps at work. They do -- they do lots of visuals and very often changing pods and all sorts of stuff. It gets very bewildering. But this is working much more nicely. Jim: Well, it helps too that we had a bit of a navigator and I -- I was explaining what was coming up and what was going down and what we are actually doing. Okay. It's --it's really amazing when everybody is unmuted all the keyboarding and the -- and the heavy breathing and everything else that's going on. Are there any other questions? [Indiscernible] Okay. I think we're done. Kate: I'm going to let our caption ergo at this time and -- but we'll stay on for a few minutes more if you want to visit on the audio or through chat. Thanks, Texas Closed Captioning. There's an interesting one coming up on June 18th [indiscernible] Kate: that will be quite interesting. Thank you Kate and Jim. Jim: You're quite welcome. Kate: Thank you.