- [Karina] Okay, thank you, Laura. Hello everyone, thank you very much for joining us today. My name is Karina Boycheva and I'm an Instructional Designer on the Deque University team. Today with me is Dr. Paul Bowman, who is our Director of Training. And in this webinar, we're going to be taking a look at how to make Microsoft Word documents accessible. Now, if you're new to document accessibility, don't be intimidated because I promise you it's a lot easier than you may think. A lot of the steps are things that you probably already know how to do, you just need to implement them for accessibility. By the end of this webinar, you should have a pretty good idea of how to make a basic Word doc accessible. Okay, and let me jump out of this presentation here and open up our practice document. So for the record, I am on a Mac machine and I'm using Office 365. If you're using Windows, your interface will be a little bit different but the general concepts are the same. Also, I'll make a side mention of Word Online. The free web version is not as robust of an editor. Just as one example, you can't create columns. Now that doesn't mean that you can't create an accessible document using Word Online, you can, but there are some limitations in what you can do. So the full version of the program gives you more options. Okay, so here we're looking at a document with various sections. Now, the sections are not related, I'm just using each of them to illustrate different concepts. And I want to mention that I will be giving instructions from the perspective of a sighted user using my mouse. However, you are able to access all of these features with keystrokes. Okay, in the first part here we have a conference agenda. So we have the first phrase here says Conference Schedule, then we have the Day 1 Agenda, and then the Day 2 Agenda, and this is all in plain text. What I want to do is give it some semantic structure and meaning. This will help assistive technologies such as screen readers recognize the different types of content in this document, and a user can then navigate it much more easily. So I want to create some headings first. My headings are going to be Conference Schedule, Day 1 Agenda and Day 2 Agenda. Now a common mistake is to make this font bold and large and call it a heading, so say I take this Conference Schedule here and I make it bold and I make it size 18 font. That visually looks like a heading, but to a screen reader that's just plain text. So instead, what I need to do is to use the built-in Word styles up here in the ribbon, and I'm going to highlight this text and select Heading 1. Now this is a true semantic heading level 1 and for Day 1 Agenda and Day 2 Agenda, which fall under the Conference Schedule heading, I'll make them heading level 2. And keep this in mind, make sure to start with heading level 1 and do not skip heading levels, so I wouldn't want to jump from heading level 1 to heading level 3, for instance. Sometimes people will do that if they want to use the smaller size font, but you're not bound to what these styles look like, okay, so if you don't like how it looks, you can modify an existing heading style or you can even create your own. So if I want heading level 2 to look different, I'll just right-click it, select Modify, and then change what the style looks like, things like what font it uses, the size, the color and so on. And the great thing is that this will apply that style to all instances of that heading level, so you don't have to change them all manually. Or you can even create your own style entirely, click on the Styles Pane and then select the New Style button. Okay, so now we've taken care of the headings. The headings are very important, they're kind of like a roadmap or a bird's eye view of the whole document. The cool thing is that screen reader users will often navigate documents by skipping around to different headings, but this is only possible if the headings are semantically designated, just like I showed, rather than just big, bold text, otherwise the screen reader will not recognize them as headings. And it may seem like no big deal in this short document but if you're working with a big document that's many pages long, it's very important that screen reader users are able to navigate it by headings, otherwise they'll waste a lot of time trying to find content. To check if a document has real headings, open the navigation pane by clicking View, checking Navigation Pane, and then select this second tab over here for Headings, and you'll see them listed here if you have real headings. So let me close this out and go back to our Home. Okay, now let's take a look at another semantic element, lists. The Day 1 Agenda and Day 2 Agenda sections are both structured as lists, but in this case, they're just numbered as lists visually, they're not real semantic lists, and you can see, if I click into them, none of these list buttons up here are active. So what I will do now is highlight the whole list, and then I'm going to select the numbered list option because this is a numbered list and the order matters, as opposed to a bulleted list, and now we have a real semantic list. If you are a sighted user, you can glance at a grouping of items and visually recognize it as a list, but if you are a screen reader user and the list is not a semantically designated list, that is, if it doesn't use these buttons up here in the ribbon, then you'll just hear all of this read as plain text and you won't have a good idea of how the information is grouped together. If you create real semantic lists you'll also make your life easier when you export, for example, to PDF, so that this semantic structure is automatically transferred over and tagged. The great thing is that technology is always improving and becoming more accessible, so in the past, let's say that you type an asterisk and type an item and then hit Enter and repeat. Older versions of Word may leave them as is but in newer versions, the program recognizes that you're trying to make a list and it will automatically designate it as such and you'll see bullets appear and the list will slightly indent to the right. And again, to check if a list is a real list, click into it and see if any of the list buttons are selected, so you see, when I click this first list that we edited, the list button up here is active, and when I click into the second list that we did not fix, the list button is not active. Okay, now I'm going to go over two other structural elements which are headers and footers. So, here you see in the header we have the word Confidential, so maybe you're dealing with some sensitive documents that should not be distributed. Here's the important thing to know, screen readers do not automatically announce that there is a header or footer present, so a screen reader user can go in there and check deliberately, but if they don't know to do that or how to do that, then they may miss critical information. So if you put vital information in the header or footer, make sure that you duplicate it in the body of the document, and this word here Confidential is definitely something that we want users to know about. So maybe under the first heading or next to it, I could put the word Confidential, and I'll make a related side note here. Sometimes you may run into a suggestion to use hidden words for screen reader users, in other words, make the word Confidential in white text against white background. But we do not recommend using hidden techniques like this in Word docs, because if someone else is editing it and doesn't know it's there, they can easily delete vital information. And of course, this is different from web accessibility, where you can use hidden techniques that are only exposed to screen reader users. And now I want to mention another structural element, and that is columns. Sometimes you may want to have multiple columns of text, like we have here two. The accessible way to do that is to highlight the text and go to the Layout tab of the ribbon, go to Columns and then select the number of columns that you want. Don't use the Tab key to create columns, okay, because what will happen is that the screen reader will read the text sequentially across each row, spanning both columns, and that wouldn't make any sense. If you use the Column button in the ribbon, then a screen reader can correctly read the text, going down one column and then the other column. Okay, now let's cover links. Creating accessible links is very easy in Word. When you type in a URL and hit Enter, Word recognizes that it's a link and will automatically change the color to blue and underline it. So that takes care of the requirements that the link is a real semantic link and that it's visually distinguishable from the surrounding text. So now all you have to worry about is creating meaningful link text. So here we have the URL for the Word Accessibility Course in Deque University. I need to edit this so that instead of a URL, the screen reader announces meaningful text, so I'm just going to copy this little phrase and I'm going to right-click the link, select Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, and then the address here is the URL, and in the Text to Display section, I'm going to put Deque University Word Accessibility Course and hit OK. Now the screen reader will announce this meaningful text as opposed to reading the URL. And you don't have to put the word link in your meaningful text because this is automatically announced by the screen reader. Now let's go ahead and move on to the topic of images. The key ideas here are to make sure that all images have meaningful alt text and long descriptions if needed, and they're positioned in line with the text. So here we have a picture of a puppy, I'm going to right-click the picture and select Edit Alt Text, and check out this option here, there's a button that says Generate a description for me. This is an automatic tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate alt text for you. Most of the time when you insert or paste in an image the alt text will be automatically generated for you even without clicking this button, that's in newer versions of Word, but let's see it now in action. And now it says, a dog sitting on a bench, description automatically generated, and that's decent, but it could be more descriptive so I might say something like a golden retriever puppy sitting on a bench, and of course I'd want to delete this part here that says description automatically generated. The point of alt text is to provide a meaningful, succinct alternative to the image. We don't want it to be too vague, but we also don't want to describe every minute detail. So in the background here I see some buildings, some trees and some dried grass. I'm going to choose not to include these details, but use your judgment because sometimes the details are relevant. We recommend keeping the alt text under 150 words. There is no official limit set, but that's just a good ballpark to stick to. And also, don't include the words picture of or image of, because a screen reader automatically announces that an object is a graphic so it would be redundant. Okay, now notice here there's a checkbox that says Mark as decorative. Sometimes we have decorative images that add no meaning and a screen reader user would waste their time listening to a description of them, so you may think that we should check this box. Unfortunately, not quite. If you check this box, JAWS and VoiceOver will correctly announce images as decorative, but NVDA just announces it as a graphic, so an NVDA user doesn't know if it's decorative or if the content creator simply forgot to add alt text. Now this is an issue with NVDA and not with Word, but we still want to be mindful of the different screen reader behaviors, especially with such common elements like images. So when you're dealing with a decorative image, to accommodate the broadest range of screen reader users, do not check this box. Instead, just write the word decorative as the alt text, and that's it, so the screen reader will announce something like, graphic decorative. So this puppy picture is simple, but sometimes you may have a more complex image that requires a longer description. In this case, you need alt text and a long description. You can add a brief alt text and then something like read more information below, and then right below the image in the body of the document, you can type out the full text description. And the other important thing about images is to make sure that they are in line with the text. Now the good thing is that they are automatically positioned in line, so if I right-click this image and select Wrap Text, you'll see that this option In Line with Text is already selected. Don't choose these other options because you'll remove the image from the flow of the document within the text, and instead it would be moved to the drawing layer above or below the text where it's not accessible and it isn't announced by all screen readers. When it's in line, the screen reader will come upon it, wherever it is in the document, announce that it's a graphic and read the alt text and then move on to the rest of the document. And now let's quickly go over watermarks. Watermarks should be avoided. There's no way to add alt text to a watermark that will be automatically announced by screen readers. So on this page I have the watermark text, do not copy. This watermark text is formatted as Word Art and it's positioned behind the text. In other words, it's not part of the document text layer, instead it's in the drawing layer and it's not accessible there. And also, both watermark images and watermark text can interfere with readability, so it's best to avoid them altogether. Instead, I could just put this phrase, do not copy in plain text somewhere towards the top of the document. And with this watermark, let me segue into the topic of text boxes. Text boxes are another type of object that can be in the drawing layer. Text boxes are not a good idea, you should avoid these. So if I come up here into Insert, Shapes and Text Box, that'll give me a new text box here. And in the past, you couldn't add any alt text to text boxes. Now you can, which is a great step forward. If I right-click it and select Edit Alt Text, I can add alt text in the same way as I did for the image. I can also place it in line with the text so that it is not in the drawing layer, which is also good, but unfortunately that's not enough because the critical issue is that text boxes are not consistently and reliably announced by screen readers. For example, NVDA announces a text box as slash and does not read the alt text or any of the contents in it. JAWS and VoiceOver will sometimes announce the text box and read the alt text, and sometimes they won't, depending on where the text box is positioned in the flow of the rest of the document. So again, the issue is that screen reader behavior with text boxes is not consistent. Now, a user can deliberately search for text boxes and enter each one of them to read the alt text, but trust me, this is a painful process and it requires about a million keys to be pressed. And also, even if a user knows to search for text boxes, they would probably be read out of context with the rest of the document and may not make sense. So the bottom line for text boxes is just to avoid them. Now, text boxes are a type of object. The thing about objects in Word is that some are more readily accessible than others. So for text boxes, we just covered why they're problematic, but another type of object is SmartArt and this is okay to use. So if I go up here to Insert, SmartArt, and let's just choose this first one here, I'm going to right-click the graphic, go to Wrap Text, and then I see that the option for In Line with Text is already selected. I also want to go to Edit Alt Text from the same menu and here's where I would type my description. And again, if you can completely describe the SmartArt just in the alt text then that's fine, but if it's complex, you may need a longer description. So when a screen reader comes upon it it will announce that it's a graphic or object and then read the alt text and then the long description, if applicable. I want to make a key point here about objects. Anytime you're dealing with objects, the best advice I can give you is to test with a screen reader. So add your alt text and position your object in line, and then test to see if a screen reader announces it and how it announces it. The reason is because, as I've mentioned, screen reader behavior varies for different objects and so even if you follow all the guidelines, that particular object may not be accessible so it's really best to check. In my experience, NVDA tends to lag behind JAWS and VoiceOver for object accessibility, so it's a good one to use for testing those elements. Or, to make your life easier, you can just avoid these types of objects altogether if it's possible. Okay, now let's talk a little bit about tables and graphs, starting with tables. Here we have a 100% completely accurate table that shows the number of chocolate bars I consume as they relate to my mood level. I have two columns and seven rows. I created this table by using the Insert Table option up here in the ribbon. Notice that we have a Draw Table button, do not use this button, this will not create a real table, instead, it will create a graphic. So when you insert a table like this one I have here, you can click inside of it and go to the Table Design tab and designate your headers accordingly. By default, we have Header Row and First Column checked, which means I have a header row and a header column, which in my case is true, I want both, but sometimes you may have just one or the other. Whatever the case, make sure that you designate the headers, do not uncheck both of these options because then your table will not have proper headers. Now you see if I uncheck them, it's not like the text disappear so I still have visual headers, but I do not have semantic true headers, so I will check them again. The thing about tables in Word is that you can only have one of three options, one header row, one header column, or one header row and one header column. That's called a simple table, you can't have any more than that. That would be a complex table, which is not supported in Word. So things like split headers where a data cell is associated with many headers, like here in this second table, this value 30 here is associated with Day of the Week, Monday, Minutes of Exercise and Cardio, this is no good. Notice that I have visually accomplished this here and it looks like a table, but it's not an accessible table, it's no good for screen readers. Complex tables are a more advanced topic and they're best created using HTML. So to sum up, keep tables simple, use the Insert Table button in the ribbon and make sure that your table has headers. Next, let's go over graphs and charts. Here I have a pie chart showing hypothetical 2019 weather data, so how many days were sunny, how many rainy and so on. Okay, first of all, notice that the chart is clearly labeled with a title and we have a label for each pie slice. So this big yellow slice here says 250 Sunny, and that's 250 sunny days. A bad idea here would be to only have a little legend at the bottom with the different slices represented each by a small colored square, because someone who is color blind wouldn't be able to tell which square in the legend goes with which slice. So whenever you have meaning that depends on color, make sure that you also represent it in a way that does not rely on color. In this case here, we have these text labels, and you also want to add alt text to your chart here, I'm going to right-click the chart and select Edit Alt Text, and I've already filled it in here, summarizing what is being shown in the chart. And now I want to bring your attention to one other point here. Notice that the pie slices all have good color contrast with the adjacent slices. This is very helpful to people who have low vision, because it makes it easier to discern between the different components of the graph. WCAG 2.1 actually has a rule for non-text contrast and it would apply to these pie slices. So I made this chart using Excel and just pasted it in but I will say that the automatic colors that are assigned to various graphs often do not meet these contrast guidelines, so you might have to do a little bit of editing work in your graph, which is what I did here. This graph had poor color contrast by default, so I had to edit the colors. And like images, you want to make sure that your graph or chart is positioned in line with the text, which is the default option. Okay, and speaking of color contrast, let's talk a little bit more on this topic. When you're dealing with Word documents, you want to make sure that your text has good color contrast against the background. So the minimum requirements are 4.5 to 1 for small text and 3 to 1 for large text. Small text is under 18 point regular font or under 14 point bold font. And here we just have two sentences, this is size 12 font. The first, of course, is very simple black text against a white background, which has very good color contrast, and the second sentence is gray text against the white background, and this one is a challenge to read. For checking color contrast, I like to use this great free tool called the Color Contrast Analyzer. And here I've just included a screenshot of what the interface looks like, you have a very handy pipette tool, so you can select it and choose any color on your screen and then select the second color with the other pipette button, and it will tell you whether the contrast is sufficient. And this is super handy so that you can test various things like text, and I tested the pie slices in the graph above using this tool, and anything else that you want to examine. And next let's chat about fonts and text styling. The first main point is to use a simple and easy to read font. You want to avoid overly decorative fonts and stick to things like Calibri, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Arial, and so on, so that's pretty straightforward, we don't want to make readers struggle to decipher a busy font, we want to make it easy to read. Now in terms of text styling, the major idea to be aware of is that screen readers generally ignore text styling. Things like highlighting, italics, underline, screen readers will usually just read them as plain text. Of course, users can modify their settings to announce these text properties, but most people do not do this because it's really a hassle and a waste of time to listen through mostly irrelevant details. So if you want to highlight an important idea, for example, you can use the word important right before it. Now that doesn't mean that you can't use the highlight feature, in fact, you should use it for important call-outs because it helps users with other types of disabilities. For instance, people with reading disabilities may benefit, but just make sure that you also provide the call-out with text as well. All right, now let's talk a little bit about accessible math in Microsoft Word. You're probably familiar with the Equation Editor, so if I go into Insert, Equation, and let's do this first one here, the area of a circle, pi r squared. Unfortunately this is not accessible, math symbols are mostly not read correctly by screen readers when you use the Equation Editor. Just as an example, the equation here is A equals pi r squared but NVDA reads this entire equation as equals two, it entirely omits most of the symbols and reads the exponent squared as simply two. So a good solution to creating accessible math is to use an equation editor called MathType. The downside is that it's not free, but you can get a free 30-day trial if you want to test it and I believe also there is an education discount. This editor creates MathML, which stands for mathematical markup language, which is accessible, and the W3C has released MathML as a recommendation since 1998. And I'll make note also that this editor is compatible with Windows and Mac machines, which is great. So if you purchase and download it, you'll have a little add-in tab up here in your ribbon and you can easily create accessible equations. Okay, so that gives you an overall idea of some of the most important steps that you can take to make your Word document accessible. After you've done all this, let's say that you wanted to check your work. One of the tools you can use is the built-in Accessibility Checker in Word. Here in the ribbon I'm going to go to Review, and then Check Accessibility, and the inspection results will come up here to the right. There are four categories, errors, warnings, tips and intelligent services. Errors are things that you should definitely fix, warnings are things that you should probably, or in many cases, definitely fix, and tips are suggestions to make your content more accessible, we don't have any tips given to us in this document. The fourth category, intelligent services, is for AI-generated content. So for instance, the alt text that we generated, the program will flag this so you can manually check if the alt text is quality. So you can expand each of these issue types and click on them, and at the bottom you'll find some helpful information on how and why you should fix it. I want to make an important point here. Automatic tools such as this Accessibility Checker can never be a replacement for a manual human check, because they can't catch everything. For example, here we have some errors that we're missing alt text. Well, the checker can catch that but if I did have alt text there, it can't tell me if it's any good. Does it accurately and effectively describe the image? So automatic tools are a good start and they can catch many issues, but they can't get them all. To be really sure you also need a human check. All right, and then finally, let's go over exporting your Word document to other formats. The first and most important step to keep in mind is that you should optimize your source document for accessibility. So where does your starting program, your offering program, make sure to follow all the guidelines for making your document accessible. This will make the conversion much better, and if you have to do any touch-up after you export, it will make your life easier. There are several formats that you can export to and I'll mention two of them here. The first is EPUB. This file type is for electronic publications such as eBooks. So especially now, for example, many colleges and universities have digital books either as their primary format or a secondary option, and this format is very helpful for users who are blind or have low vision or a reading disability. You need a conversion program to complete the process, and one option is a free tool that's very easy to use called WordToEPUB. So if you're interested in taking what you've learned in this webinar and applying it to creating an accessible EPUB, our friends at the DAISY Consortium happen to be giving a free webinar next week on July 29th. You can go to daisy.org/webinars, and we'll share that information with you in the chat box and I'll also post it up on the screen at the end so you can register for that if you would like. And the second way I'll mention is to convert to PDF. Now the cool thing is that PDF is another very accessible format, and you don't need any PDF software such as Acrobat to make the conversion. You do need Acrobat if you want to touch up your finished product for accessibility, but you don't need it to export. So let me show you how to do it. First let me save the document, then I'll go to File, Save As, save this to my Desktop, File Format PDF. And here you want to check the option that says Best for electronic distribution and accessibility, this will convert your document into an accessible tagged PDF. And I will say that this step is a little bit different on a Windows machine, but the good news is that in Windows, the option for tagged PDF is checked by default when you export. So I'm just going to click Export. And now let me open my Acrobat and I will open this file. So now when I go into my Tags pane here, I see that the document is tagged. PDF accessibility is a whole separate topic but it's definitely worth knowing, so if this is applicable to you we have two courses on PDF Accessibility, Basics and Advanced, and you can find both of those on the Deque University website. You can also find our full Word Accessibility course there, which includes topics that we did not cover in today's webinar. So with that being said, I want to thank you again for joining us today. I hope that you feel a little bit more comfortable with making accessible Word documents, and we can go ahead and open up for any questions. - [Laura] Great, thanks so much, Karina, a really great job explaining all the wonderful content there. I'm just gonna go ahead and dive into some questions. - [Karina] Absolutely. - [Laura] So the first one we have from Ellen is asking, when do you use a title versus a heading 1? - [Karina] A title versus a heading 1? - [Laura] Mm-hmm. - [Karina] Well, I think I would use a heading 1 as the title, because I think users are able to navigate to that right away using their headings. - [Laura] Great, and just to reiterate about the watermark inaccessibility issue, would it be best to put those in the headers, the footers, or in the body text of the Word document? - [Karina] In the body text. The most accessible content is in the body, so the headers or footers, like I mentioned, are not announced automatically, so any information that you want users to know should really go in the body of the document. - [Laura] Great. - [Paul] Really quick, this is Paul Bowman, so I've been listening in the whole time, I'm one of the presenters but I'm kind of the backup personality here, but to add a little bit more information to the title versus H1. In Word they do have a concept of title and in Google Docs they have a concept of a title, but in export formats, such as PDF and HTML, there's no such thing as a title in that sense, by in that sense, I mean that it shows up inside a document as a viewable name of that document at the top. So in PDF and in HTML, it starts with H1 and it goes down through H6, so if you use the title without using an H1, it doesn't actually convert over into anything useful. So it's an option inside of Word, but it doesn't actually have an equivalent meaning once you export it to any other format, so generally it's best to start with an H1, well, actually I'd say always it's best to start with an H1 and that way, when you convert it to something else, it'll retain the semantic meaning. - [Karina] Thanks Paul for clarifying that, that's great. - [Laura] Okay, another question here, is it a good idea to use tables for formatting text? In my experience, it causes accessibility issues. - [Karina] Yeah, layout tables are also kind of frowned upon so use styling to get the effects that you want, so tables really should be for data. - [Laura] Great, thank you, another question here, is it possible to use slash edit HTML within Word documents? - [Karina] I don't know. - [Paul] A short answer, no . So it's possible to export a Word document to HTML, for sure, there are several ways of doing that, but Word is not HTML, so there's no native HTML functionality inside of a Word document, only once you export it, but then it's no longer Word, then it's just HTML. - [Laura] Thanks Paul, another really good question here, if I apply many of these practices to a Google document then download it as a Word document, will those best practices remain in place? - [Karina] Yeah, the good thing is that whatever program you're using, if you optimize it for accessibility, it will carry over to a lot of other formats that you save as. - [Laura] Great, next question, what size is perfect for a heading, is there an optimal font size? - [Karina] I don't know that there is an optimal font size, but you know, for sighted users, something that sticks out as a heading, so I think, I'm not sure what the default, might be size 18, but the default size is a pretty good one. - [Laura] Great, and for those who might not know, can you quickly define semantic for those who might've missed that earlier in the webinar? - [Karina] Yeah, semantics is what provides structure to the document, so not things like visual styling, but that which gives a structure so that screen readers can recognize what type of content you're dealing with, so, you know, an example of semantics is using the built-in styles to create headings rather than the big bold text styling. - [Laura] Thanks, another question here, to meet WCAG guidelines in Office files, do links need tool tips as well? - [Karina] Do links need what? - [Laura] Tool tips. - [Paul] Yeah, inside of Word, there's not really a way to add a tool tip per se, that's more of a concept for HTML than anything else, so it's kind of a different format altogether. - [Laura] Great, thanks Paul. - [Paul] And then, I should maybe define, tool tip means a popup bit of text that explains more about whatever that thing is, so you'd hover your mouse over that thing, some text would pop up and you can do that in HTML, it's not quite the same in Office documents. - [Karina] Yeah, you do have screen tips though and when Word auto-creates your links, if you hover over it, you'll see the little screen tip and I think you can edit that text to say whatever you want, if you want to provide more helpful information. - [Paul] Yeah, but I guess to go to the heart of the question, it's not necessary to have a tool tip really of any kind, it's an added bonus, so if you want to look at it that way. So if you do put it in, then the benefit would be for someone who's using a mouse, let's say someone with low vision and you have a tool tip that provides some sort of explanation that's meaningful to someone with low vision, sure, I mean, why not? It's not actually a requirement in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at all to have tool tips, in fact, I can't think of any guidelines that require it so, but it's certainly not frowned on, you can provide it if you want. - [Laura] Great, thank you, another question here, is it possible to edit Word documents in batches? - [Paul] Ha, complicated question, so in Word itself, you only open one document really at a time, I personally don't know of tools that edit in batches, meaning that I've never used them, I would imagine that there is some tool out there because that makes sense, I mean, I'm sure someone has invented it but I can't really speak about them. - [Karina] And everyone, I just want to mention that I've put up the website for the upcoming webinar, if you're interested, it's on screen now. - [Laura] Thanks Karina, I also posted the link in chat for anyone who wants direct access to that. We'll also send out these slides with this recording and your practice document to everybody after the webinar. - [Paul] And really quick, there've been some questions in the chat that maybe are separate from what Laura's looking at, but one topic that came up a couple of times in a few different ways that I've been answering in the chat is questions about, I guess I'd refer to it as, what is the intended final output? So is it supposed to be a digital document, is it supposed to be a printed document, and, of course, if it's Word it can be either, but everything that Karina's been talking about is based on the assumption that the person consuming the document is consuming it in its digital format, so questions about what should the link text be, should it be the URL versus friendly text, if it's going to print then of course a URL would be appropriate, if it's going to be a digital format then a friendly text would be appropriate and I addressed this in the comment. But the assumption overall that she's made this entire time is that this is going to be consumed by someone in its native digital format. So it is possible, for example, on the links topic to provide both, or someone in the comments said that you could have a shortened URL through something like TinyURL or something like that, which is totally true, so there's more than way to deal with it but if the assumption is that it's going to print and that's one of its main features, then to be honest, it's going to be 100% inaccessible, like not accessible to someone using a screen reader anyway, if they get a piece of paper. So again, the assumption's she's making is that digital is the output that we're trying to make accessible. - [Laura] Right, great, thanks for recapping that, Paul. Another really good question here, in Word, must you define a language or a title like as you do in PDF? - [Karina] That's a good question and it actually is set at the level of the operating system, but if you have language changes within your document, you should specify those, and we cover that in the Word course in more detail on Deque University. - [Laura] Great, thanks for mentioning that, Karina, I'll be sure to post a link to that Deque University course in our chat as well, for those who are interested in learning more. Okay, let me grab another question here real quick, we have a lot, so thank you everybody for being really engaged today. Okay, here's another good question, are fonts designed for dyslexia recognized by screen readers? - [Paul] Yeah, the short answer would be, if you can put it in a Word document and if it's a regular font, meaning that it's regular characters which is gonna be the case, the answer is yes. So there are special fonts for things like music notation and graphical design, which of course would not map to anything useful as far as language goes, but dyslexic fonts, if you have them in your operating system, and if you can use them in Word and you can type with them, then sure, they will be just as accessible as any other font. Now, the one caveat is when you, whatever font you have in the documents, in order for it to convey to the other person on the other side, they would need that same font in their operating system. So if you need the font to show up as the correct fonts with the dyslexic styles, then you would need to embed it probably in a PDF document to guarantee that that font will be conveyed over to the person, because in Word, it's just going to use whatever font is in the person's operating system, and if they don't have that font it'll substitute the font with something different. - [Karina] And I'll make a side mention, if you're wondering if Serif or Sans-Serif is better, they're pretty much the same, you can choose whichever option. - [Laura] Great, thank you, another good question here is, say someone is working on a software training document and it has some complex screenshots. What would you recommend in terms of alt text for such types of screenshots? - [Karina] I would recommend putting the brief alt text giving a general idea, and then say read more below and then putting the alt text, the long description in the document of the body. There's other ways that you can do this, you know, you can provide a link that leads to an HTML page, but if you want everything to be contained in the same document then just under the image, in the body of the document. - [Laura] Great, so I know we've talked quite a bit about headers and footers and accessibility, we have a question here asking, how do you get to a header or footer manually with a screen reader? - [Karina] I don't know the shortcuts off the top of my head, I can look them up and send them to you. - [Paul] Yeah, I admit I don't have them all memorized either, but there is, and it's not so much that the screen editor would have a shortcut, it's that Word has shortcuts and I just don't remember that off the top of my head either, maybe if someone knows it and you could put it in the chat? It's easy to look up, I just don't have them memorized. - [Laura] Great, thank you. So we have a question here asking, does a graphic need to be formatted in line with the text in order for it to be example, or for it to be accessible, for example, if a graphic is formatted in front of the text will the screen reader not be able to read it? - [Karina] You know, this is a really good question because I recently did some testing with various screen readers and they're getting better, some of them can read them even if it's not in line, but the safest bet is to put it in line so that all of them can read it, otherwise you run a risk. - [Laura] Great, thanks Karina, and then a question here from Eileen, not a Word but Google Docs question, do we offer any resources and accessibility tips for that, for that document, for Google docs specifically? - [Karina] We don't have any right now, but we have plans to develop a curriculum on accessible Google Docs, and I think you can probably find some information just on Google as well from them. - [Laura] Great, another question here, someone is working in a Word doc with multilevel lists and headers, and it seems like a header style is having an impact on the consistency of the numbers, is there something that might be able to help them with this issue? - [Karina] I don't know, I would need to take a look at the document, if you'd like to send me the document, I can take a look. - [Laura] Great, here's a good question, are footnotes and endnotes accessible, and do you have any tips for making them accessible? - [Karina] Yes, they are, so there are buttons in the ribbon, so use those to create them and they are accessible. Footnotes are not automatically read, so I think the screen reader will announce just a number like one, and then a user can choose to go into the footnotes area, and then endnotes are just read as plain text. So again, the pattern that you're probably seeing is basically use the tools in the ribbon, because that's how you give semantic structure, rather than trying to kind of fabricate something on your own. - [Laura] Great, thanks Karina. Can you repeat quickly for those who might've missed it, what do you use to check the color contrast between the text and the background? - [Karina] It's called the Color Contrast Analyzer, it's a very nifty little program, I really recommend downloading it, just search through Google and you'll find it. - [Laura] Great, and I think we have a color contrast tool on Deque University as well that I will post in chat here shortly, okay. Just scroll through all these questions here, let me grab another one. - [Paul] There was another question while you're looking it up, there's a question about exporting as HTML, whether using the filtered HTML is the best format or not. And that, I typically will use export as filtered HTML, so the answer for me is yes, but in honesty it really depends on where you're going to end up because the filtered HTML is still chock full of styles and all kinds of things that I personally don't usually want, but on the other hand, if the end goal is to have a bunch of styles that represent the document faithfully, then maybe filtered HTML is not the best option, so it's one of those it depends types of answers. There isn't really, to my knowledge, a significant difference in accessibility, unless Karina has found otherwise, but whether it's filtered or not filtered, I don't think it really has an impact on accessibility, it's more on how clean and easy to edit the HTML will be on the end. If it's not important for you to edit the HTML then it really doesn't matter, I don't think. - [Laura] Great, thanks, and I have another question here, can a complex table be added to Word via HTML? - [Paul] Via HTML? - Yes. - You mean like, well, I don't know what the person was asking but if it's copy and paste into a Word document, I'll be honest, I haven't tested that, but I would be surprised if it retains the headers correctly, that seems highly unlikely, but I don't, I admit that I don't know, Karina, have you tested that? - [Karina] I also do not think so, Word just supports very simple tables and the next step up is PDF, which can do complex tables but they're also a little bit tricky so the best tool for complex tables is just plain HTML. - [Paul] Yeah, and I just have to back up, so it depends on what the original question meant about complex because you can have headers, for sure, if you just simply copy and paste into Word, I don't know that it retains any of that information, it might, but if you're talking layers of headers, so one like male and female as categories and then maybe subcategories underneath that as headers and then the data, that's not even possible in Word, you can't, Word doesn't allow it so even if you had it perfectly created in HTML, it will not convey over to Word no matter what you do because it's simply not set up to handle that unfortunately. - [Karina] I'll make a note also that complex tables can be troublesome for sighted users as well, so for all users, so whenever possible, try to break up a table into multiple simple tables if you can, that's a good solution. - [Laura] Thank you, Karina and Paul. Okay, another really good question here from Thomas, is it okay to create an equation as a graphic and describe the equation as an alt text? - [Karina] You can do that, but you have to describe it with only words, so, you know, squared, if you want to put something, for example, underneath the picture, in the body of the document, and you want to write, you know, r squared, then you'd write the word squared. Not all symbols are read correctly, and in fact, many of them are not, even if they're just in the text. - [Paul] Yeah, and just to add onto that, if it's something simple, like in the example that Karina used where it's just, you know, a couple of variables on either side of an equation, writing that in a text description is probably fine if you create it as a graphic to begin with. But let's say that you're creating a scientific paper where equations are all over the place and they're rather complicated, that's not so fine because then it would all have to be written out and what you really would want is for it to be written in a format that is navigable with a screen reader, and by that, it means that you can go up and down and around using the arrow keys and other keyboard shortcuts to navigate all through the equation in any direction you like, in other words, you want it to be discoverable and understandable and readable from a true perspective of being able to get around the equation. If you write it as text, you'll get it all in one string, you know, one long description, and if the person is able to comprehend it, that's great, but if it's complicated enough, trying to kind of reverse engineer that into a structure that you can navigate in your head is cumbersome to say the least. So you'd want to have it in a native math format, Word is not even the best format for equations in general, the end product would be best in a MathML compatible format. So yeah, the answer is yes if it's simple and if it's not simple, not a good idea. - [Laura] Great, thank you. Another question from Nikki, they're asking, is there a way to use in-page links within Word documents, such as a table of contents or a legal document that references other parts of the document and will that still work when transferred into PDF? - [Karina] Yes, so that's also one of the benefits of using a hierarchical heading structure because you can automatically insert a table of contents, and yes, you can have it linked to different parts. When you export to PDF, I do believe that you need to do a little bit of touch-up, it may not be completely ready to go, and this topic is covered in Deque University in the Word course and in the PDF course. - [Laura] Great, and I put a link to the Word course for those who are interested in the chat, and if you navigate to that link, you'll also find links for other online courses including the PDF course that Karina just mentioned. Let me grab another question here, we have a few more minutes left, so thanks everybody for your engagement again. Mikayla's asking, should we be adding a title for the document under properties and summary? - [Karina] Yes, that's the short answer . - [Paul] And someone asked about bold versus strong, so those are HTML terms, that would be for text that is bold with a b tag or a strong emphasis with a strong tag in HTML, those concepts don't really exist so much in Word, it's more just visual styling. And even in HTML, it turns out that screen readers kind of ignore the difference between bold and strong anyway, I wish they wouldn't, but bold and strong are essentially equivalent as far as screen reader interpretation goes. - [Laura] Great, thank you, Paul. I see another question here, will an accessible form created in Word be exported as an accessible and fillable form in PDF? - [Karina] That is a very good question, the easier format is PDF, so you kind of create the form visually in Word and then you export to PDF and that's where you finish adding all the accessibility features, and we have a separate class on that, that's Advanced PDF, and that's forms and complex tables. - [Paul] Yeah, so the initial export would have accessibility features in it, the final result would have to be touched up, it's not just gonna be done by exporting. - [Karina] And it's easier to do it in PDF, so if you're trying to insert, you know, radio buttons and all that kind of stuff, that really belongs in PDF rather than in Word.