EASI Webinar
September 17, 2013
Welcome, everybody. This is Norm Coombs from EASI and my computer just went to 11 o'clock pacific time. I'm going to start. I'm going to give a quick promo for EASI. I'll make it quickly. We do courses and webinars. Most of you know about those. We'll go to the next slide. We do have a membership program for individuals and institutions. If you become a member, you get all of the fee‑based webinars free, access to recordings on all of webinars and a 20 percent reduction on the courses. Beth, you can advance to the next slide. Let me say next week we have no webinar. The second week of Karen webinars will be October 1st. With that, I'm going to turn the mic over to Karen.
Well hello, everyone. This starts the first in a four week series with as norm mentioned, one week vacation, next week. And I know that there is information as to what we're going to cover each week on the EASI web page. I've moved stuff around a little bit. It says that we'll do Excel if time permits. I found some things in excel while working on a spread sheet that need to be addressed in terms of accessibility and new features. So Excel will be included. Weeks two and three are going to be a little more jumbled in terms of, I think, next week we'll do Word and start PowerPoint and week three we'll do the rest of PowerPoint, outlook and excel. The last one I'm going to spend on Office 365. It's confusing to everyone. Even though who are Microsoft MVPs are confused about Office 365, what it is, what do you get, how do you get it, what's the difference between the various versions. So I'm going to take an entire week to try and sort that out with you and give you some resources on Office 365 and exactly what it is and what it means to you. So let's start with Office 2013. There are some changes. There are some cosmetic changes and some significant changes. The first significant change is that you now sign into Office. One of the reasons that they do this is so that it will integrate with Office 365. Another reason that they do this is so that if you have family members you can ‑‑ everyone can have their own sign into Office and you have access to your templates, your e‑mail, the way you like Office to look, your Office settings. You can also use your Microsoft ID to sign into Office on multiple devices. However you sign up into one device automatically flows over to the other devices that you're using Office on. And that is the desktop version of Office I'm talking about. Everything we're going to do for the first three weeks is the desktop version of Office that you would install on the desktop or your laptop computer. We're not talking anything about the Office web apps. So it does create a synchronicity with the look and feel with Office and how it works and your settings across. You can also have a work ID and a personal ID. So your work things are kept separate. Your work storage is separate from your personal storage and your documents don't get all mixed up or cross pollinated. So that's the first significant change is that you do sign in to Office.
I do believe and I didn't see it but someone did. When I installed office, apparently there is a tiny link that says, I don't want to sign into Office and it will just install it anyway. And I didn't see that. So I'm not sure that it is there. But I would recommend that if you are using Microsoft on several devices, you just have to set it up on one device and then you can sign into it using the same ID. Because you also have to sign in to Windows, you can use the same account to sign into Windows. Which means that your Windows is synchronized across devices. You only have to ever sign in one to Office. So I used my Microsoft ID to sign into Office. I only have the one need to do this. It just sits there. You don't even notice it.
This slide has a picture where you're going to find the account information. If you were looking in the title bar area, the information about who is logged in or what account you're logged in under is over to the far right. If you're looking at the ribbon tabs, you would follow the ribbon tabs just across to the right edge of your screen and you're going to find the account information. And from there you can look at your profile. You can switch users. You can sign out of Office. And that is keyboard accessible and it will work with the screen readers. So that's one way you can take a look at at who you're signed into Office as. The other place you're going to find the same information is in the backstage area. It's under accounts. So if you go to file, backstage, I think it is D for accounts because A was taken. You'll find all of the same information. Including any services that you are signed up for. And that can be anything related to SkyDrive or SkyDrive pro or any of the service, other services that you've signed up for in order to work with documents.
So those are the two areas. You'll notice on the image to the left that there is a whole bunch of little scrolly things in the title bar. And those we'll take a look at. I just noticed I have a really nice close up of it so you can take a look at it. There are two things with Office. You have Office themes which is the background or fishbowl around your document. But you also have Office background. And the Office background are these little scrolly decorative things at the top. I said that some of the changes were cosmetic, this is one of them. You don't really need to apply a background. But if you want to, you can. And it's a way to personalize Office. Again, very cosmetic.
Traditionally we've had Office background mean the fishbowl or the area around your document. And the ribbons and the panes that open. That language has kind of switched so the Office background is sort of the decorative things up in the title bar. You can't really access them. Unless you have a visual or learning disability and might want to do that, you don't need to take note of them. But the Office theme is where you can change the way that Office looks. One of the biggest complaints about Office has been the fact that if you weren't blind already, you would go blind working with it because everything is white. And there are two areas that you're going to find the ability to change the background ‑‑ or the theme. The fishbowl. One of them is if you go under your account settings. So file, backstage area and accounts. And that is a bit larger print. So again, anybody who may have a visual disability and using magnification and wants to make these kinds of changes with a bit larger print, do it through the file backstage area. The Office background and the Office themes are together as list boxes. You'll notice on the image on this slide, I have my Office background set to spring. I'm ever hopeful. Since we're coming into winter, you know, I wanted. It's very faded. You can hardly see it. I wanted something more positive and upbeat. You'll notice that my Office theme is dark gray. I find that the dark gray of the three horrible contrasts gives me the best of the worst. You can also change the office background and the office themes through the options menu in any of the applications. Now this is the same as the previous versions where if you change it in one application it's going to be the same in all applications. My applications all have a dark gray theme to them. So again, the lists are together and they are under the general category in the options dialogue for each of the applications.
I did include some examples and I put I black ‑‑ I was glad I put a black border around it because if I hadn't you wouldn't be able to tell the Microsoft Word interface from the white background of the slide. That is how white the user interface is. They've also gone to thinner fonts, I think. And so it becomes very difficult to visually navigate the new user interface if you are using the white Office theme.
The next theme that they have is dark gray. And this slide shows a picture of Microsoft Word with the light gray theme. Yeah. The light gray theme applied to it. You'll notice there isn't a lot of difference. It looks like there might be a little bit of shadow around the document. But certainly it's not as clear as it has been in previous versions of Office.
The last choice that you have at the moment is dark gray. And I find this is the best to work with. Mostly because I have a widescreen screen monitor. And having a lot of white in front of me all day is just very visually fatiguing. And this has been the complaint from people with and without disabilities is that the lack of contrast between the document, the ribbons and the area around the document is just too hard to work with. So I don't know what they're going to do about that. But it has been complained about it. For those of you who have already moved to Office 2013 and have noticed this, first of all, you can go yay, I can change it. Second of all, they do know that this is an issue.
One of the next changes, and again, Microsoft knows that all caps is the most difficult font face to read. But they've chosen to use all capitals for the ribbon tabs and for buttons and dialogs. So there are some days when I'm really glad that I have a screen reader because if I look at something visually, it takes me a long time to figure out what it says on the button. Simply because everything is in all capital letters. There is a way that you can turn this off. But you have to do it for every ribbon in the application. Now the good news is you can then export that setting and then import it into Word on another computer. And if you like, I can look up how to do that. But what you do is you go into ‑‑ I don't have a ‑‑ oh there it is. What you do is you go in to the options for that application. You go in to the customize ribbon and you choose the name of the ribbon. In this case on the image on the left I have the home ribbon highlighted in the list of ribbons. I then right click and choose rename. And I simply put a space either before or after the word home. You can see that in the rename dialog, it is in title case. It's not in upper case. So I just insert a space either before or after. And then click okay. When I go back to my ribbons now the text is in title case. Which is awill the more readable. And that is the second most complained about new feature of office 2013. So for those of you who also have problems with all capital letters know that you're not alone. There's also a change in what happens when you first open any of the Office applications. And I'm not ‑‑ I understand why. But for people who are in business or for people who are used to working with Word or PowerPoint or Excel, having a start screen open that has your list of recent documents and then has all of these very decorative kind of community oriented flyers and templates. For example, you know, harvest time, Christmas time, those kinds of things can get in the way. We can get at our list of recent documents from the application just by going to the recent documents. So having this start screen with all of these templates on it sometimes isn't helpful.
There's also a move to change the language around document themes and templates. When you open the application, if you haven't turned off the start screen, you will see that they're now called seams. In PowerPoint, we'll get to that next week, once you choose a theme or a slide design, you then can choose some colors associated with it. So there's a combination of the themes and the templates and a combination of the language now. I recommend that if you are using Office that you simply go in to the options for that application and say don't show the start screen when I open Word or Excel or PowerPoint. You can still open the document ‑‑ open the application with a blank document. You can still press control plus N for undo document. This slide has a picture on the left. I've redacted the list of my files. It isn't white. This is the dark gray theme again. So my file backstage area is kind of a brownie gray color. The white in the middle is that I just redacted all of my file names so that they wouldn't appear. To the right of the list of recent documents is your list of templates. So there is no templates dialog anymore. This is the way that you get to your templates. If your business or organization or you have created your own templates, which I do. I have Karlen book and Karlen brochure, then you simply switch from the regular view here to personal and that shows you all of your personal templates that you've created. Your personal templates are no longer stored by default in the templates folder deep in the heart of your computer. They are stored in a folder in documents called custom office templates. So if you see that, don't delete it because that's where you, if you create templates, that's where they're going to go. Unless you go into your save and say otherwise.
So you can turn off the start screen. The other in terms of accessibility, when we had the old templates dialog, we could press, for example, K, and it would go to Karlen book or Karlen brochure, the way you navigate these templates it's not alphabetic. You can't really use the keyboard. Everyone does have a keyboard and an assignment but it's like Y 1, Y 2, Y 3, Y 4, Y 5. You have to know which one you're going to in order to use those keyboard commands. You can use the up and down left right arrows to do them. I recommend you simply turn off the start screen and you do that in word options, PowerPoint options, Excel options. The next time you start Word, PowerPoint, or Excel you will not see this start screen. I found that most helpful. You can dismiss it with the press of an escape key. But why have it pop up at all.
The other significant change and you'll notice there are quite a few is in saving documents. Previously alt plus F, A would go through the file, save as open, save as dialog. Now if you press that same key stroke or keyboard command, it's going to go to the file backstage area and it's going to open a selection of places that you can save to. Like Karen's SkyDrive or my computer or other places. So it's not going to open that file save as dialog.
I did find that if you go in to the save settings, and I think I have on the next slide an image. Yeah. If you go in to the save settings in the options dialog for each of the applications, there is a check box that says don't save or open through the file or through the backstage area. You want to check that. The other thing you want to check is to use your computer as the default place to save or open documents. And that way if you just check the check box that says use my computer as the default place, when you press alt plus F, A computer will be what's highlighted and then you can simply press B for browse which will open the old save as dialog. If you check the first check box I have in this image which is not to use the backstage area when opening and saving documents. Then when you press alt plus F, A you're going to get the old save as dialog. When you press control plus O you're going to get the old open dialog instead of this file backstage area.
The other thing that I started doing was simply using F12 to save a document. Because it was faster. And as I said, it was only the end of last week that I found these two settings. And I found them by accident. I was going in to reset the time intervals between backups. And I happened to come across these two and I thought well let me try that and see what it does. It bypassed the whole backstage area in terms of being able to open and save as documents.
So opening documents, it's the same. Instead of getting the traditional open dialog, you're going to get the file backstage area. And you can choose locations. Computer happens to be the third or fourth down the list. And when you go, for example, if you have I think I have Karen's SkyDrive, computer. It lists the recent places you've been, external hard drive or a USB drive. So it does list some of the locations that you've recently been. All of this is keyboard navigable. There are keyboard commands assigned to the first level, if you will, to Karen's SkyDrive and any networks and computer. And then there are keyboard commands for the browse buttons over on the right hand side. Once you go to computer, you can press tab and you can move down through the last few places that you have saved things. Or opened things from. And get at them that way. For opening and saving, try it, if you want. If you think this is going to work best for you. If you are someone who just wants that open or save as dialog, then you can either press F12 to open the save as dialog or you can go in to your settings and actually turn off the use of the backstage, file backstage area.
Fortunately we do still have that. I don't know how much longer we will. Microsoft is moving to deprecating or eliminating a lot of the dialogs in favor of having things in a global place like the file backstage area or in panes in the document. Which brings us to the next really significant, really, really, really significant change. Spell check is no longer done through a dialog. So if you are sitting on the fence and wondering if you should upgrade to 2013, this is one of the cons. One of the pros is that you can now open a PDF document in Word. One of of the cons that I think cancels that out and more is that the spell check is now done through a spell check pane. And while the buttons in the spell check pane do have underlined characters, they are currently not working. In order to do a spell check in Word 2013, the fastest way is to press alt F7. That has been a keyboard command that has always been available to us. It's just that F7 would bring up the open dialog. Our adaptive technology supported the spell check dialog and we could use that. What alt F7 does is to move us to the next spelling mistake in the document. It opens a context menu. The first items are the suggested words followed by ignore and or ignore all followed by add to dictionary. So it's doing the same thing without the dialog. The advantage to using alt F7 is that the screen readers will read the line that the misspelled word is in. So you still have that word in context.
In using the spell check pane, one of the things they've done and this is a picture of how it works, is that while you have the spell check pane open to the right of your document, the misspelled word is highlighted in your document. So I'm not sure that this I mean it's kind of helpful. But I'm not sure if you're using screen magnification how this would work. You would move over to the misspelled word in the document, read the text around it so you could figure out whether it actually was misspelled or not, and then move back to the right edge of your screen and decide what it is you want to do with that. That's why I say alt F7 is so much faster. You get the same effects. The word gets highlighted in the document. The context menu opens. You have your suggested words but the screen readers will also read that line that it's on. So it gives you exactly what you had in the spell check dialog without the pain of the spell check pane. I don't find it any slower. Some people have said they found it slower. I do not find it any slower than using the spell check dialog, the old one.
This is a sample of the spell check pane in PowerPoint. So you have exactly the same thing. The word gets selected in the slide place holder and the spell check pane opens to the right of the PowerPoint presentation. The only application that it's not true in is Excel 2013 still has the old spell check dialog. That's not going to last long. You also have the ability in all of the applications. We haven't even come to Word yet. All of this is available in Word and these are more global changes. So the next thing is to insert online pictures. Previously we've had the clip organizer and that is gone now. We have the ability to insert online pictures. This is not yet a completely [Indiscernible] I the other thing for those of you who use picture bullets, if you work on brochures, the best example is if you have a brochure on food or farming and instead of the traditional bullets, you want little broccoli heads or carrots at your bullets. Those are picture bullets. In previous versions of Office there would be a picture bullet gallery that were sized images and thematic images that you could use as picture bullets. That's gone now. So if you're doing picture bullets, you're going to end up in the same dialog as this insert online pictures. The first thing I did, of course, was what is it I want to do. I want to insert bullets. So I type bullets and I got a whole bunch of things about ammunition and bullets and guns. It's like no, I want, you know, so then I type list bullets. And that didn't help. And I typed document bullets and that didn't help. So what I did find was I could switch for anything if I were using picture bullets and the pictures were automatically scale. I was working on a document I wanted picture bullets for and I found a picture that wasn't too complicated so that when it was very, very tiny, it didn't look too bad.
Here are the two dialogs that you're going to look at when you are inserting online pictures. The first part of this and the dialog that's on the left is accessible. So I can go, I can search Bing. I can search my computer. I can search Office.com. I can search any one of those places for pictures. At the bottom I have two unlabeled buttons. Oops! One is for Facebook and one is for something I have no clue. Because it's unlabeled, I still have no clue. It's two blue dots and I have no idea what that means. Some of you may but I don't. So I searched for nature and Office.com. My screen reader will go through the pictures. It will tell me what those pictures are. The pictures do have alt text. I can use the space bar to select the picture and that's as far as I can go. I have tried using my most equivalent. I have tried cheating and trying to drag my thing into my document. I can only insert a picture I have found if I am not using a screen reader. And I think it's the same ‑‑ well things like zoom text, you can double click on something to insert it. It's very dependent on an actual mouse click. As long as I use an actual mouse click I'll have the insert button. If I don't use an actual mouse click, I won't. Insert online picture. My recommendation is if you have pictures or you're out looking for pictures, download them to your computer because it will be easier for you to then insert it into your picture, into your document.
Another change is alt text. Yes, I know. From 2003 to 2007 to 2010 to now 2013. Alt text has moved around a lot and has been found in different places. I think they're settling on the format picture pane. It means that you're going to ‑‑ when you choose format picture, you're going to F 6 into the pane if the screen reader does not take focus. Right now with JAWS 14, it will take focus then it loses focuses and then goes back to my document. You want to go to layout. All of this you can do with the keyboard. It takes ‑‑ I'm not sure that it even takes longer. I know in 2010 you had to go to the alt text and then you had to tab into title and description. I think the only time it would take longer is if ‑‑ and the picture on the left is from PowerPoint. I had the size options open. So that took a while to tab too. On the right, I have the alt text or the picture format picture pane from Word and the only two things in layout are to format a text box, which I never do and then the alt text. I had I think the same amount of key strokes or keyboard commands in Word as I did in the format picture dialog, the old one.
One of the hints I would give you is that if you are using a screen reader and you are adding alt text to your images is to close this pane after you've entered the alt text. It will return you to your document. Your picture will have focus and you can insert a caption. What I've been finding, and again, this is with JAWS 14 is that I can't rely on ‑‑ when I want focus to be in the pane it goes to the document. When I want focus on the document, it tends to go to the pane. So I have just been in the habit of closing the pane once I finished adding the alt text to something so that I can work more effectively.
So you can see that we're moving to panes and getting things off of our documents. Online presentations is another tool that it is new or it was very well hidden. I'm not sure which. It allows you in Word, PowerPoint and Excel to share your document with people online. So I can be working on a document. I can say I want Norm or Beth or Robert to comment on something. I'll see if they're available. I'm going to present it to them online. We can look at it, talk about it and then I can get back to working on it. It's a way to share the Document 1 of the things it does allow you to do and you go through the file backstage area share. There's a check box that says to allow participants to download the document. I haven't been able to test this with someone so that I can tell whether the document is actually accessible to them on their computers if they're using a screen reader and I'm presenting it online. I kind of suspect not. So if you know that someone is using adaptive technology, you can check that check box to allow them to download the document. You're then going to go to the button. Well you have to agree you're using your Microsoft account. You have to agree to the terms and conditions. You only have to do that once. You then do the online or present online button. You're going to get a URL that you either copy and put into e‑mail or you can simply e‑mail the link to everyone that you want to look at the document. As soon as you make your choice and continue, your document is going to be live online presented through the presentation services.
Your document will stay online until you close it. If you leave Word, PowerPoint, or Excel and come back to it, you'll have a yellow information bar at the top that says you're still presenting. And the only way to end the presentation is to close the document, at which point you're going to get a message that says, do you want the online ‑‑ do you want to end the presentation and not show ‑‑ continue showing the document to online participants. You just say okay and then you're not showing your document online.
Online presentation or present online is not a substitute for doing a slide show or things like that. It's simply a tool that you have to quickly share a document with a group that you're working on.
Resume reading. For those of you who are editing or working on alternate text production, resume reading is a very good friend and a welcome new tool. If you're using the new DOCX format for office 2013 and you close the document and you're on page 5, the next time you open your document, you're going to get a notification that says, do you want to start from the top or do you want to continue ‑‑ actually it says welcome back. Would you like to go to where you left off in the document. That is accessible using the keyboard and JAWS will snag that notification.
Now the trick to using resume reading is that you cannot touch the keyboard or the mouse in terms of doing any kind of editing before this shows up. And it shows up once your entire document has loaded. Once your document has loaded, if you're using a screen reader, you'll hear resume reading. It should have focus. So you should be able to simply press enter and it will move to the next point in your document. After a few seconds, if you don't do anything, it's going to minimize itself and the picture on the right is showing it minimized against a vertical scroll bar. So it is still there. If you hear it and you press enter and nothing happens, press F 6 if you're using a screen reader and if the notification is still there, you'll F 6 into it on that scroll bar and then you can press space bar, enter and then it will take you to the last place you were on that document. As long as you don't click anywhere in the document or start keyboarding or anything like that. It takes a little bit of a knack to work with. But it's a feature that I love. Because I do so much writing and editing, this for me, I don't have to worry where I was in the document. It will take me to the last page that I was working on and then I can continue. So this would be my very favorite new feature would be resume reading.
So those ‑‑ and resume reading is available in PowerPoint and Word. Not in Excel. Excel, usually when I close a work book and open it again, I'm in the last cell I was in. Resume reading is available in PowerPoint and Word.
So let's get on now to some of the Word specific new features and changes and things like that. So there are some things that you will want to change. This has been universally true for the last few iterations of Microsoft Word. You want to turn off the show the mini bar on selection. I haven't known it to get focus from screen readers. But I don't want to take that chance. It's not anything that's accessible anyway. It is strictly mouse dependent and it's a kind of context menu then we can get to those same tools just as fast with keyboard commands, if not faster. You also want to turn off opening e‑mail attachments in reading layout or reading mode which is in the general category. This is always been true. You will hear a lot of hype about the new reading layout or the new reading mode and how it allows you to read things better on tablet computers and how it's wonderful. You can zoom the size. You can annotate. You can comment. You can put book marks in it. Still not accessible. If you open anything in reading layout or reading mode or accidentally turn it on through the view menu, your screen reader will say this is an inaccessible tool and you need to get out of it. Actually it will give you instructions on how to get out of it. Still not accessible, not even with narrator.
You'll also want to turn off the start screen, which is something I mentioned. That's under the general topic. And you're also ‑‑ I didn't separate those points. You're also going to check the don't use file backstage when opening or saving files. That's in the save category. You're going to turn on the save to computer by default if that's what you want to do and that's in the save category. You're going to turn off click and type which is in the advanced category. Click and type allows you to click anywhere in the page and start typing. Those of you who have used dos, I don't, [Indiscernible] you can click anywhere on the page and start typing. Those of us who use magnification and screen reading [Indiscernible] we tend to want things to be associated with the left margin. So as has been with 2007 and 2010, you want it turn off click and type and that's in the advanced settings.
Under cut, copy, and paste options, which are also in the advanced category ‑‑ and again, if you are bringing things from other places, these are really good tools. The wording has been slightly altered from 2010. So if you are cutting or copying information from document to document, you want to merge the formatting. That's what you would want to choose. Or you can choose a text only so that you don't bring any formatting with it. If you are cutting and copying information between documents where style conflicts, you're going to use the destination formatting. So that will throw out the formatting from where it came and use the document that you're working on.
If you are cutting and copying between documents from other applications, I would either choose merge formatting or what I do is choose the text only. And then it will simply adopt the formatting for the normal paragraph tile. And I can format it the way that I want in the document that I'm working on.
By setting those things, then you lessen the chances of things coming into your document, unwanted formatting and you won't have as many or any conflicts in your document in terms of you start typing and all of a sudden and things are headings and bold and italic and you don't know where it came from. [Indiscernible] exists in Word 2013. That keyboard command is alt plus H for the home ribbon. E for the eraser and that will clear formatting from selected text and then you can format it the way that you want.
This is the general options dialog in Microsoft Word. Down near the bottom is where you have the check box to show or not show the start screen. You also have a check box to warn you if Microsoft Word is not your default word processor. I leave that up to you to check or uncheck. And it is also here that we have the office theme and office background settings that I mentioned earlier during the webinar. So those are sound under the general category in Microsoft Word.
The next category we're going to look at is the save. I usually do create a backup copy. Since Office 2010 we have that managed versions feature which is very nice. If you haven't information on that, I did do a blog post on it. It did keep the last four ‑‑ it creates a backup copy or a version every four minutes. And it will be there in your info tab under the file backstage area. As soon as you save the document, it clears those and it starts all over again. So you can conceivably go back four versions of your document. I like to set my save options because again, I'm writing books and articles. Instead of ten minutes, I bring it down to five or four. That's what I was doing when I found the check box to not use the backstage area when opening or saving and to default to computer. So if I do go through the file backstage area, it's going to default to computer instead of the top one. So that was in the save options, the save category under Word options. You'll find that in PowerPoint and Excel as well. So you can make that change there.
The advanced options is where you're going to find click and type. What I have here is about the middle of the advanced options. Those are the cut, copy, and paste options. The merge formatting. You can keep text only by default. If you are copying pictures into your documents they're going to be brought in as in line objects. You're going to leave that the way it is because that is the most accessible way of bringing in pictures so that adaptive technology can find them.
The other change in Microsoft Word and this is to bring it in line with the PowerPoint, with the whole sync chronicity of the user interface. We now have a design ribbon. So where we had the style sets and the themes and things on the page layout ribbon, we now have those items on the design ribbon. The keyboard command is exactly the same as it is in PowerPoint. It's alt plus G for design ribbon. So any of your custom style sets that you've created for large print or smaller print or anything like that if you were working with students are going to be found here. The styles pane you can find from here. That is so small I can't see what else you can find here. The main thing to know is this is where your style sets have moved. If you have created them for specific students or for yourself, they will still be there. I didn't have to redo mine. But they have moved to the design ribbon.
Reading layout or reading mode. I do have an example of this. It is designed for tablets. It's designed for reading your Word documents. The philosophy behind it is that when you're reading a document much like a book, you may not want to read it as you would in word processor. You may want to read it as you're reading a book or a newspaper article or a magazine article. So reading layout, the old reading layout, the old full screen reading layout is now reading mode. But it's exactly the same thing. Hang on a minute. There we go. I did something and almost cut you all off. This is an image of what reading layout looks like. You can use gestures as much as you can in iBooks or any iPad or to make the text bigger, to make the text smaller, to adjust the way this document looks so it's easier to read. There are tools to highlight. There are tools to comment and annotate. None of it is accessible using screen reader. Or text to speech. So anyone with a learning disability who is dependent on text to speech, not going to work. Still not going to work. That's a picture of one of the documents that I wrote in reading layout.
And that is our first week. If you have any questions or if there's anything specific that you want me to cover, and yes, there is more for next week. I didn't do everything for this week. There is more for next week. If there is anything specifically that you want me to cover, just e‑mail me at info@KarlenCommunications.com. I do have some settings and things you might want to change as well as an overview of new things and an article on the Microsoft Office 2013 web page on the Karlen Communications website. For those of you who don't know, I am not doing PDF anymore outside. I'm under my own business. I have merged my PDF work with Accesibil-IT at Oakville/Toronto. If you have any PDF things, I highly recommend them. I have nailed their head of quality assurance and training. One of the reasons that I decided to merge my PDF work with them is that they create PDF documents that are as accessible as anything I can create. In the case of two documents they came up with an idea of how to make the content even more accessible than I could have thought of. So I thought, you know, it would be better if the two of us just worked together. I've been working for them now since April. They are dedicated to accessibility. They get it. They understand it. And I highly recommend them if you have any PDF work or questions. And I've listed their website there. And if you wanted to contact anyone, contact Adam Spencer. But if you have anything that you want to look at in terms of Microsoft Office, go to the Karlen communications website and the Office 2013 web page will have the most up to date information. I just finished the changes and settings for Office 2013 last month so it is a fairly new article. So do you have any questions?
Karen, congratulations, you didn't run over time and we even have time for questions.
At the moment I don't have any but let me see if anything pops up. I don't see anybody typing either. Sherry says great as always. Robert Beach wants to know if you would say Office 2013 is as accessible as 2010?
Given the spell check pane issues, I would say no. That would be the only ‑‑ that would be my only concern is that if you are a heavy editor and rely on the spell check, if you can get used to alt F7 instead of the spell check dialog, which doesn't take very long to get used to. But it is a different way of doing it. Then I would say that it is equally accessible. Right now with the adaptive technology vendors, you have the issue of Microsoft Office 2013 coming out. But is JAWS 14 or whatever the latest version of window eyes is have they been testing it all along so that they can support it with any of their updates. So I ‑‑ if you need to open PDF documents and read them, then the issue of the spell check pane might be balanced by that need. So it really, for me, it really depends if you're an adaptive technology user, it really depends on what it is you do on a daily basis and whether you have need for the PDF access.
Speaking for myself there are enough changes that I think I'll sit tight with 2010 for a while.
I think you overwhelmed everybody, Karen and they're all thinking.
We have a question about the check accessibility. I'll be covering that next week. So I will look and see if there are any changes to that and how it works in Word 2013. And then we'll cover it again in PowerPoint. But that is something that we will take a look at.
I spoke too soon.
All right. Karen, I doubt there's anybody at Microsoft that understands this better than you do.
Remember, next week is out. I'll send a reminder on that. So the next webinar will be October 1st. Then we have them on the 8th and the 15th. Same time as usual. And I'll send everybody who got mail an announcement on where you can find the recording probably tonight or tomorrow. So thank you, Karen. I'm grateful for your knowledge and your willingness to share it all with us. So thank you. I guess it's time for me to get lunch.
See you, Karen. Great as always.
Okay. And remember if you have any questions or there's something that you've heard about that you want included in these webinars, just let me know. And I will see you not next week but the week after. Bye, everybody.