TRANSCRIPT - Accessible Documents

Hello! Everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you. Nathan. How's everyone today? Hope we all did well with the storms. I am excited today about word accessibility. So those of you that. Missed our Google. Hi, Christy! Hi, Cindy! Those of you that missed our Google accessibility, session check it out. It's logged. A lot of the things that we're doing today are going to be review of that with a little bit of twist. So they really build upon each other, cause some of the some of the things we do are the same. They're just not done in the same way. And hey, Debbie, from Spring! Hope you's weather was good down there. Alright before we get started. Our goal is to build a community of practice for technology that will allow us to support each other. So I love how in our last session lots of folks were speaking out, sharing information. Love that would love to have more so in the spirit of that goal. These sessions are interactive, and you are welcome to stop me from talking chime. In, put it through the chats. I'm Deborah. I'm so glad you guys just got a little noisy rain and not any of the yuckiness our session today is recorded and posted on our website for view afterwards, and by registering for this session, you grant Us. Permission to publish any contents of the recording that may include audio and image of you as the registrants. So let's get started. So our open discussion today is going to be on Microsoft accessibility and creating documents that are accessible for our students. Oops. Okay? So the first they're in the chat is creating accessible Microsoft documents. Information directly from Microsoft. So they have. Some are. Excuse me, this one is actually from the State of Texas. So they do have creating Microsoft office documents that they have created some tutorials for. These are a rather nice set of trainings. I'll click on one here. If it will open, there it goes, and they have. So you know they have neat little videos here, and then they've got their documents to support them. What's on this website that I really like, and I mentioned a couple of times on, here is this prototype. So you're able to download it for free and install it into word, and it will look like this. So if you have your Microsoft word, then your productivity ribbon will appear right here, and it has a lot of the items that you need without having to go hunt through all of these ribbons to find your accessibility items. It puts it all in one place. So that's rather nice. So here's the link to all the trainings from the State. And it really does cover training by the numbers, the productivity ribbon download. It has installation directions right there. If you read as you're going through, you'll click to download. And then the next link. I believe it is. Let's look here. I've lost it now there it is, the accessibility ribbon, and then the download instructions, and how to install the ribbon itself. It's pretty easy the way they wrote it in the document makes it very, very simple. It took no time at all to install that. So those of you that just get in. If you are interested in kind of streamlining your productivity and your accessibility, then this ribbon is available for download for free in the site that I linked on the first page. Alright so accessibility, resources. Well, I just updated this and had my links on it. Okay, so we have quite a few accessibility webinars available. If you wanna sit down and really watch somebody go through different small tasks on how to make things accessible. So those are available for view. They have handouts or transcripts, or and or transcripts. So those are available at Edinburgh. So introduction to accessible Documents. This is a webinar done by. I think it was Jim Allen that did this, and it is a very, very in-depth and wonderful little webinar to be able to get your creating accessible documents introduction. So they have some tools that are available. In windows, and Microsoft itself, that are some of them, are not very often used, and that's the immersive reader, because it's for the Microsoft products only. So it would be for Microsoft edge, outlook, word. Most of our kiddos that would need that kind of reader are already using some alternate form. But it's available. So the accessibility checker. This is a big one that I wanted to show everyone. No, Alex, I have not posted this on the website yet. I had everything updated to where I can give you all of the links. I mean what I'll pull those for you. Oops! Sorry. Excuse me. One. Alright. For some reason my links for these didn't come, so let me. Put those in the chat for you. The first one is going to be the webinar. The second. Is the training. And the last is to the Microsoft tools. So this part that I want to show you is the accessibility checker. Now, as you're writing your documents. If you have this open, it's going to check your document as you go so to open that you would go to your review. And then you would go over to check accessibility and then check accessibility, and it opens this panel to the side. You can make it bigger, smaller, smaller as you like, because I have nothing here. It's just gonna tell me I have nothing. Sherilyn, you absolutely love the checker. I do as well. I keep it up all the time as I'm working with the things. So I'm gonna pull up another document here in a minute and let you see what an actual report looks like. Alright! So here we go. This is the document made by the State of Texas about installing the productivity ribbon. I have no idea how this is going to check out, and as you know, I have a grammarly panel over here. If you've never used grammarly, it is lovely. It's not really happy with their document here, but I use it constantly. I use it for emails. I even have it on my phone for text messages. So let's close that we go to our review. Tab, check accessibility, and we're going to run. And then a check, and we'll let it run there for a second. Well, that's running! We'll go here. Cause. Sometimes it takes a few minutes. If if the document is a bit long, it may take a minute, so we will come right back to that. Microsoft has some accessibility trainings on how to make your day's accessible after you've made the document, and those are really based on every single element of their platform. So if you want to make accessible Powerpoints, or if you want to send how to make accessible Powerpoints to your sa instructional designer who is making those Powerpoints for your district, then you could send them this and say this is how our document, are accessible, if you're looking at accessible worksheets in excel. That is a can of worms, but they do a nice job of setting that up. Alright. For some reason, my! Microsoft word is not oneing to run my results. Hmm! That's new. Okay. We'll come back to that. Okay. Our next one is your cheat sheets. I love these so your cheat sheets for word. And again it did not show my links. Alright! Sorry, everybody. I'm having one of those days. Here's your first link that we're going to look at. And what is really nice about the center for disabilities of access and education has broken things down by Microsoft Office Powerpoint excel adobe acrobats, adobe, indesign, all is divided up for you. So if you wanna go to Microsoft office and Microsoft word whether it's windows. Mac. You can get your cheat sheets. So in here you can get it as a one page. Pdf. And that gives you your how to do the basics of an accessible document in word, including, if you forget how to open the accessible checker, the accessibility checker, how to do data tables lists, hyperlinks, alternate text columns and heading styles, so all in one page. When I found this, I was like, oh, we can lemonade this and have this right there, for whoever is creating the documents to know what to do in each case. And your next link. Goes through as well. Just show you kind of how to make things accessible by headings, lists, links. Really, I wanted to give you guys some alternatives if you didn't like the first checklists. Maybe you liked this better. So you would have multiple things to refer to. I apologize. This this checker is not wanting. To run for me, it may be because I keep clicking off of it. Alright, so web aim accessibility gets really deep into creating accessible documents. This is a little bit deeper than just your checklists, but it definitely goes into exactly how to do things. It's just not as. I say user friendly, because the others have pictures and ways to check off. Penn State did a word Tip, and again, there's is. Just the basics. If it was me. These cheat sheets up here that are the one sheets are my go-to. Alright! And in our library again we have some videos. If you just want to do videos instead of a check sheet that's that same video. Okay, do we have any questions about how to do something in word, while I minimize this for a second and see if my accessibility checker will run the rest of the way. Cheryl, since she loved the checker. Would you like to? Share your opinion. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I kinda am, since mine won't run today as someone who's used it. I've never had this happen. Oh, my! I mean we oh, I know so what I like about it is changing large documents. Especially was that graphics in it and running it and making sure that all of the titles are there and headings are correct, and that I have hit all the picture descriptions and alt text needed so that's what we use it for. And right? Now I'm training a new vision pair of and she's gonna be converting all of my students documents. So she thought. This was amazing that she and she also is having it running the whole time. That is awesome. She's moving things over just a in her head. Well! So, and I don't quite frankly, Don. I just found it like 2 weeks ago. So I was like, Whoa, this is amazing. So. It is awesome. And if you didn't see, did you see the Google session that we have it a couple of weeks ago? No, I missed that one, so I've been trying to hit as many as I can, and then going back and watching the videos. And then I also assign the pair of it's starting training with this time to watch the videos, too, like here. This will explain everything line by line, detail by detail. So. The the Google one. I shared grackle, which is the Google Google Accessibility checker for Google Docs and Google sheets, and Google, all of those. That I'm struggling with that because we're trying to get things converted so that the used with refreshable braille displays. Umhm. And I had a braille edge, and it was not happy with Google. Docs. It had to be. In a word, Doc, so and now we've had to move on to the Chameleon to give that one an opportunity. So I'm most of the kids. By the time I get them know how to do all this stuff. And they're showing me. And I have a kid who's just starting out everything. So I'm like swimming, trying to keep up with everything. But I'll give that a. Yeah. Well, there! This is a great group to come to. I'm hoping we'll get some folks chiming in. But yeah, I love this accessibility checker when it runs for me right now. It is not wanting to run at all. Aha! There we go! Well, it did yesterday. You know what I figured out, what it was, instead of going to my productivity menu, and hitting accessibility, I was going the old way, which was here. So there's a possibility. Oh, so once you so are you telling me once you put in the thread, you have to go the new way as opposed to the old way. I am concerned that that may be the possibility, because I did it twice from review, and it didn't work. I did it just now from the productivity, and it did. It should not make a difference. It shouldn't be that way. Okay, well, that's good to know, because I mean, that was on my list of things to do. Tomorrow's add that to her computer. So. So this just checked this document, and no surprise being that this document is from freedom, scientific. We have a good document, the only errors it brought were that there are 2 images, and we can click on them and see that we needed to either add a description or make it decorative. And because this is something that actually might tell us something. Yeah, this is a title. They tell us not to do this. Okay, in accessibility. They tell us not to put important information in this. But if I look down here and I go to my home screen. And you start sharing your screen again. Your screen is not sharing. Oh, sorry! I am so sorry! There you go! I forgot I had not stopped sharing it to get it to work. Thank you. Oh, thank goodness, thank you for reminding me so. I'll repeat that it shows us there's only 2 errors on the whole page, and when we click on them it tells us what is the error, and it will even suggest a description. To you now, those are not usually very accurate, but you can give it a shot in our accessibility. They tell us not to put important information in an image like titles and things like that. But if we look here and see what this is, this first line here is actually set as title. So we can actually make this image, then decorative, and then it will not be recognized. By the screen, reader, as anything it needs to read. Does that make sense for everybody? We wanna try to avoid putting titles. Authors, names any of those items that are important in images at the top of the page. It looks good visually, but for screen readers this would have to be done. In a. In a alt text. So they did a really good job at setting this up. Let me put my Powerpoint back! Alright! Oh, now things are all out of place, and in the way. Sorry. I'm a little disorganized tonight. Alright. Let's see if we can find another document real quick. Alright, this is a very let me get this over here. Oh, figures, no issues. Huh? Okay, nice. So then I would be able to check it and look at my Alt text. And it has already been filled in rather nicely for me. Since it's a short one. They didn't use. They used only the one heading instead of mini headings. I might have if I had created this document. Oh, they did do a heading to, and maybe a heading 3. To me that makes a little bit more sense. And my formatting is a little bit different than theirs. So I may have added little headings there, but as of general accessibility, we had no issues with that document. Sorry, guys, I had a document up here for us to review, and it is missing. Okay. So if I find it, I'll come back to it. Okay forms, in word, how many of you have used forms in Microsoft word? So it would be check boxes. Anything of that nature. Do we have anyone? No! Alex, you say you have. I know a lot of us are using Google forms now instead. So not a whole lot of of that happen at Linux using Google. But if there is a time where you would like to use forms within Google, then there are specific examples of how to make checkboxes and drop-down fields and saving the form, I put this only as an alternative to Google if you need a form to go out. Alright Powerpoints. A lot of us use Powerpoints. So this checklist for Powerpoint is one of my favorites. If you'll notice on the first one, it says, use the built-in slide layouts when creating a new slide. The first 5 is usually what I record. A lot of our teachers go, rogue, and start inserting extra pictures and extra text box decorative stuff. That is, those are considered floating objects. When you add them outside of the the standard layouts. So anything you add would be floating. The reading order would not already be assigned, and you have trouble with jaws even recognizing those floating objects so. And we'll talk about that even more in a little bit, keeping your font size at no less than 32 point. Your background and your foreground color should contrast. Last time we talked about the color checker. Use text that conveys the information in the pictures. So, for example, or in the colors. Excuse me, for example, if you have something in red that's important, make sure you make a note of that somewhere else, and say the text in red. Or this text was in red. That is important. Don't depend on the color to convey the importance or the meaning. Keep animations and effects to a, to a a minimum. I know I was guilty of this when I first started using Powerpoint and all those programs, I'd have slack. Hiing in and shading out, and you know it was all this movement going on. But use that to a minimum. Alternate text everything simple table structures, remember, tables are for data, not for organization. Okay, we wanna keep those. Keep those tables just to conveying data because they are not as accessible as other things. Make sure. Videos are closed, captured, or have, or if you have any audio or transcript that is closed, captioned, provide text descriptions to your hyperlinks, we'll talk about that more in a minute. Run your accessibility, checker the accessibility checker that we ran in the word document is also available. 4 all Microsoft products so use that accessibility checker. It's in the same location, and make sure you're giving your presentation a title. And that sounds funky. You're like the first page is the title. Well it may be that you put it on there as a title, but it hasn't been assigned to the presentation as a title. Your accessibility checker will check, will catch that for you most of the time, and you're able to then title your presentation. Alright, and if your student is you accessing a Powerpoint on a brown note touch, make sure they open that in key slides, and not the Powerpoint. App he slides, will strip it down for them, and if you're all texts are correct, they will show up as part of the slide information and the Powerpoint will then be indexed so they can jump from slide to slide. So be sure you have all of those in place, and if your kiddos open it with the brown note he slides. Is their friend. Alright! Now we get down to the nitty, gritty when we're talking about styles and formatting, let me make sure I've got here. Okay, we want to do Sarah, or so any with those added, because if you see your font and it's got fancy little things on the ends of it. We do not want to use those phones. Simple Sarah, for fonts. Your font size on your Microsoft word won needs to be a 12 point minimum. Okay, 12 point is usually our minimum. If you're using Google a lot of times, the default, if you're to kind of dip back into that Google Docs portion and you pulled over a doc and are editing it in word, or downloaded a doc and edited in word. a lot of times the default for Google is 11 point. So make sure you check that and bump it up to that. 12 points. Underlines are used for links only. So if you wanna underline something, cause it's important we use it for links only because our students are trained to jump to those for links because they go blue and underline line spacing. It's suggested for accessibility that we keep our line spacing at 1.5. Some of your students may need a little bit more, but at a minimum suggested 1.5 that way. We've got some distance just that little extra bit of distance and color needs contrast. Make sure that you're using that color checker. Okay. Full justification is hard to read just about everybody. How's a hard time reading full justification? Is there anyone that doesn't know what full justification is? Just in case somebody watches this later and doesn't know that is this button right here justify. It, takes everything and pushes it evenly from margin to margin. So some of your lines have weird spacings. It's just really difficult to read. So avoid this setting whenever possible. Stay over here on this side. All caps is hard to read. Especially when there's a lot of text plus we're teaching etiquette here to our students for digital use. If we're using all caps, we're screaming at somebody. So no, all caps, let's avoid that. Italics are also hard to read. We can use it sparingly. You know, there's places where it's required. But we're gonna use that sparingly alright alt texts. So text for images. There are 2 different things you do with pictures, options, and alt text. There's very different things you're putting in them. Your caption is going to be your title of the picture. Your copyright, your author, those type, that type of information that's statistical data type of thing. Your alt. Text is going to be the image in context. What is that picture conveying? So we've got that picture that is on the star Prep. That's I've seen a bunch of them with one of them's the George Washington in the boat, with the flag, or there was one with Gandhi walking down the streets with a bunch of people behind him. What is the context of that? That picture? We may not have the context of that picture. So that's where our teacher of record is important to give us the context and write up what we need to have in that description. Field, a hundred 20 characters. Max. So if that picture is portraying so much information that it goes over a hundred 20 characters, we need to look at a different way to give our student the information, then, that picture it could be paragraph. It could be a description in in another way by the teacher, but 120 characters. What is that information convey? I candy? Now they have the description where you can check it off. So! You don't even have to worry about putting any kind of description. It used to be that for decorative objects or eye candy, we would just put decorative in the description, and that got to where it was taking up too much time and information. So we have a little checkbox now that says decorative, and it completely takes it off your accessibility. Check. If the text is an image, all text in the alt is in alt. Oh, okay. So yeah, if if there's text there, make sure that goes into your description as well. Alright. So Penn State did a nice little accessibility rundown on a good roll of thumb about descriptions, for example, which would we prefer as you're reading over this section here, which would we prefer alt text one or alt text 2 let's get everybody to weigh in? Which would be the best. I should have done a poll for this. Okay, what do we have? So everybody see the poll? Here we go. Alright! Good job. Awesome. Okay? We have, if you need to know which credit card is accepted, which would be the better alt text. It would be alt text to cause. It conveys the specific cards and their information awesome. Alright, artistic example we've got George Washington at Valid Forge. If you consider this painting. What we would need to know, why the image is included. Is it within a history course, of course, on climactic history is the point of the image to show how the soldiers are dressed or that Lafayette was at the valley fort. The answer could affect. How you write that all text? Alright, we're gonna have another vote here in a minutes. What do you think? Is it going to be alt text? One. I'll text 2, or I'll text 3. Awesome. We're 50 50, with 2 and 3. Both could be right, depending on what you need for that. Remember if it's too long to get that description in there, add it to a text to the main body of the text. To give that reader the information they need. So then, caption versus alt text, if you look here, this is a caption. This painting was by John Dunmore in 190. 7, and shows. Both George Washington, d-da-da-da. The alt text. George Washington Horse back in winter and Valley Forge, so you can see how the difference in information between a caption and an alt text. They don't necessarily unless they're in an art class, need to know what the caption that who painted it and when it was painted. But they can go into the caption and get that alright, if complex. If images are complex, or have a long description again, keep it concise 120 to a hundred 25 characters. If it has to go over that, then there are complex examples for you to look at, and they have some different examples. There! Okay, meaningful hyperlinks. This is a big one and a lot of folks are getting it right now. So I'm so happy we are going to use words on hypert hyperlinks, not the website. Okay, so, you're gonna use words. So instead of typing out this you're going to do Tsbi homepage and link that make it active to the homepage. So when you are creating your documents, Tsbi, hold the page. You highlight it. You can either go above here and final link. I always forget where it is, but down here is Link. You add it, and it's going to be a web page. G Oops! And now it is active. Well, it should be active. I obviously didn't put it in there correctly. Things. Don't wanna work tonight? That's right, because I didn't put the Tsbi Web page correctly. You would think that I would know we are an Edu, and not an org. So now you have an active link. And we can open the hyperlink. Okay, so that's an incorrect hyperlink. Again. Anyway, you guys get the way to do it. Remove the hyperlink. Oh, my goodness, okay, I promise you. That is the way to add a hyperlink. But my mine is not working correctly right now. Okay, so be sure they're and meaningful. Our brown note users can navigate them through links. Our voice over. Folks can navigate through the links list, and so can our jaws. Folks avoid these phrases, click here or here. This link. Okay, follow this link. Why am I following that link? Where is it taking me? Place the URL in parentheses without the the Http. I don't always do this anymore, because a lot of our cause this is for aprint. Our current users most of the time when you hover over a link it will give you an active dropdown and show you where the link is, or give you an ability to see the link. So I a lot of times we'll avoid this, and it's not something that gets marked off for. If we put a plane URL in there jaws, or the brown note is going to read exactly what that is and with some of the Urls that are a million miles long, it will read everything. So we want to avoid that. Alright tables in tables. We need to designate a header row. So in your Microsoft word. You will want to. Set up a table, using the insert table. We don't wanna draw tables, because then they will not have the accessibility that other items will. Of that. Let's turn our accessibility back on. And we're gonna draw our table, our insert our table. And it is there. It's going to prompt us. To. Let's see. Name. Result, one. To have a title. And all of the other items. I don't know what I'm giving results for, but we've got some major results here for John and Sue. So we'll let our accessibility checker run, cross our fingers that it will work today. It's not working. Wow, technology wants to just say, no to me today. Alright, so to designate a header row. If your accessibility isn't working, you are going to select your table right? Click, so you'll select your cable right? Click, go to table properties. Select the row, tab! Make sure that you report the header, row on each page, and that you select. The rows allowed to break across pages. You say, okay? So that's how you make your header row captions on a table. We wanna make sure that we caption our tables. Now keep in mind. We should not be adding a whole bunch of stuff to our table. That's not data. But if you have to, you need to make sure you caption it. Remember these floating objects, we need to make sure that we have our layout options set correctly, so that with tech wrapping on, we don't have objects that are floating around on the page. If we have multiple items, we wanna make sure we group them. And that is again a right click. To get to this group. You select them, and then right click them. So if we have a document here and say we've inserted a picture. Just setting the apple. And we have a caption for it. This is the one time where we would insert a text box. Because if we're putting in information that goes with . Then we would make sure to group those items. Oh, come on, thank you. And that would be over here. First of all, I need to take it out of. That! And then we're able to group it. There we go, and then your caption and your picture will be together. And you're able to caption. And that's different. Than this caption, but you're able to caption, and I'll text it outside. So this is a nice little sheet from Microsoft for captioning, and then sell margins. If you're formatting your table, make sure you have your margin set. So we want to keep those in a normal set so that our table doesn't go all wonky all over the place, as happened with my last documents. I didn't have my margin set correctly, and when I adjusted some accessibility feature my table, went half off the page and it was not pretty. Alright, so to wrap this up, remember, we need to avoid floating things like text boxes, watermarks drop taps. Those pretty text arts, with all the shadows that are in Microsoft word that make all those pretty banners and things like that. They're not accessible. If you create text and text box and don't. Get that in correctly. Then the cursor can't move into it. So it won't allow screen readers to see it. So be very judicious in your use of text boxes like there. I just used it as a picture caption, because it was for the visual person and not for the screen reader, because I attached it to the object I could then alt text the whole thing. So be careful with your text boxes. Screen readers just can't get to them, and for those of you that use math type that is very different. Those insert into what looks like a text box, but it is picked up by the screen. Reader, and it's picked up by the brown note. If it's been processed correctly, but that's a whole number lesson. Alright! So. Some resources that I used. I just wanted to let you all know some of the presentations stuff for today is from Jim Allen. Most of the videos that I've linked are his as well as in the Tsbi Webinars. The. My websites is still available for y'all, and let me link that again. We have. I've updated quite a few sections on there, so if you haven't been there for a while, go through and check it out in preparation for next week's session. There's some handouts there's with what we're gonna be talking about. And speaking of next week's session next week, is going to be 80 assessments for Tsvis or Tvis. I'm old school. I still haven't switched over to the Tsbi yet. So it assessment for TV eyes. If you're coming to next week's session on my website from that link, there is a section on assessments. Specifically the I believe it's Michigan. That's is the document I'm thinking of. That there are checklists for a assessment that breaks down by grade level. So, if you want to grab those before the session, we're gonna be digging into those as well as several other resources. That's May fourth May eleventh document accessibility for mathematics. We're going to specifically be talking about making documents that can be converted and sent directly to the brown notes, or can be done in Microsoft word and be read by jaws. So look forward to that on May eighteenth, or May eleventh, May eighteenth is technology for students with multiple impairments. So we're looking at. What can we do past that cause? And effect. If we've pushed to switch so long on the same toy that we have now become bored and stop doing what we're doing, what can we do next?