Hey everyone I am Marisol from EASI equal access software and information that want to welcome you all to the EASI webinar on accessible content with tools you know and use. Our presenter today is Norm Coombs. Hi Norm.

   Hi Marisol, hi everybody. Give me a minute to figure it where I am between a PC conference and my PowerPoint so I will be with you in a second. Okay, I will see if I can... then we will get started. Blocking the mic doesn't seem to work so I will probably have to hold the key down. Give me another second. Okay I think I've got it locked down. So we are picking up with week two and I thank you for being patient with the last week when I had to leave town and go all the way out to almost the East Coast, Rochester New York for funeral of a longtime friend of mine. And his wife and my wife were very close friends. So if a funeral can be a good thing we really had a good time. They took us in as part of their family and their children and grandchildren were there and it was really a loving and warm kind of reunion. So thank you all for being patient. We will pick up an extended week beyond the scheduled. But we will talk about that later.

What we are going to cover today is structured and how that affects the meaning of a document. We talked a bit about that last time, different ways to create structure and why is one better than another. We will talk about how to create a style in Word 2003, 2007. The style is basically a set of commands that governs how the appearance of your page looks. We will look at how to alternative text to a picture in Word must be taken to it in the web you may not know you can do it in Word or PowerPoint or Excel. You can do it in all of those. Say we are going to do at table with an accessibility... we are going to leave that till next week I should have taken that out. We will talk about making a table of contents and why that is so useful for everyone. We will talk about exporting a document from Word to other formats. And how it works best and so on. Using styles we will make your documents more consistent and easier to format to other formats and keep all your appearance and features and certainly it also helps with accessibility. So we will move to the next slide and I will look for a cough drop.

Okay, before I actually talk about that I do want to remind us that last week we did talk about the fact that Word, Excel, PowerPoint are there, we've probably used all or most of them and each one of them has its strengths and its weaknesses. So you need to, before you make a presentation think about what it is you're going to say, who you're going to say it to where it's going to happen and which of the various office formats are the best and do some planning ahead of time. This week we are going to be focusing on Word. And I want to talk about structure in a document. What we have here in front of us are or what probably, it's a list, undifferentiated list of six items. And when you look at them they are all names of cities and see that they are treated here on an equal level I want you to know that New York is both a city and state and Washington is both the city and the state. But seeing as all of them are undifferentiated, appearing to be the same instead of figuring that it is a mixture of apples and oranges, you figure it's all Apple or all oranges so it looks like a list of cities.

Now we will go to the next slide. And we have the same six items except New York and Washington are in as headers. They are different than the others. So because they look different, the structure of the page is going to lead you to think that New York and Washington are on an equal level and what is below them are different. And the way he that automatically pops into your mind is what you are looking at is two states with lists of two cities in each state. But one is New York State and under and is Albany and Rochester the other is Washington state and under it is Spokane and Seattle. So that the structure and layout of information often times conveys information and meaning. So you got the same items in both slides and yet the meeting the meeting that they automatically project you as you look at them is different. What I'm trying to drive home is that the structure not only is nice and shaky and beautiful or whatever it is but it also can be part of the information. We normally think the information is in the content and the words but the information also may be in the structure.

So what?  When someone who is blind is looking  at the list, when, unless  the structure is conveyed to them they may not know the difference between one slide and another. I believe I mentioned last time there are times my wife has been reading something to meet and I was aware that there was some divisions and structures on the document but I may not always know whether the next item she's telling me about this part of one structure or whether it's part of a new structure. And I can make a big difference in how you understand things. If these two slides said indicate, there would be times I would stop her and try to ask some questions to clarify for me to understand whether they she was reading. She said what I'm reading is clear how stupid can you be? Then you probably all are married and know how little picky things like that can escalate in a marriage. Or any friendship, I guess. So that at times it can get a little prickly when trying to clarify something and she thought it was obvious and that she had told me. So that finding ways to convey the structure to all of your audience is an important aspect of your communication. It's not just so that they'll both have a nice, a nice view of the page. But it is important because if the structure is clear to everyone, the meaning may not be clear either. The reason I'm focusing on that is when you make a header like a New York or Washington you can make it either with markup, markup in a Word document and markup in a webpage that says it's a header. In which case, the software knows it's a header. Or you can use font type, font size, color, center, all kinds of attributes and get what visually would look identical, but the software would know the font size, font size, center, all of that, but it wouldn't know whether, why you did that. It wouldn't know that it was a new header.

So what difference does it make as long as the appearance is right? Well, the difference is that the software knows. That it's not just a different font and all of that but knows that it's a header. Screen readers, browsers, any piece of software can have that bit of markup information passed along to it and it can treat it in different ways. So that when I go into, let's say this was a Word document and not a webpage well, either way if I'm going up and down with my arrow key reading it in Jaws, it's going to say New York headers three. Because it is a header three. Item then it was a Rochester Albany. It was a Washington header three, Seattle Spokane. So that the markup is conveyed to me. Now I will be honest with you, I can put a command in there that will make it tell me the font size, font type, center, left aligned for all those things about every word on the page and I go insane. I can have it read every punctuation mark in a document and I'd go insane. So if they really wanted to ask for that information I can get it, but it's not realistic. So here it will help me one, understand the meaning and secondly, if you've got a long document you can use your scroll bar and zoomed down quickly. Not reading the words. Just looking at the appearance. And you can find the next header whether it's a real markup header or just a visual header. You can easily move down and find it. For me, I'm going down the line at a time, and it takes me a lot longer to go down and find the information. Whereas if I'm in word or a webpage I can use a keystroke  and tell my adaptive technology, my screen readers, look for the next header and it will jump right to it and I will get there maybe even quicker than you would scrolling down. So it is important for two reasons. It helps me with getting the meaning and it helps me with navigation.

Now, for a long time on the web the way that you move through a document or in word, the way you move through a document is you were scrolling. The scrolls were now at the Middle Ages when we came out with the printing press. If you were scrolling, you could go a lot faster than I could do it. But you still were scrolling. Whereas using a print book, you flip through it and look for page 20 or whatever it is, the table of contents may help you do that. So that if you get it didn't help that Kindle or a similar device and you're reading the document you can scroll down a little bit at a time or a page at a time. But most of them will have the ability for you to jump to a particular page or to the next chapter so that a lot of this navigation is becoming useful and important for people without disabilities when they are reading large documents so that using markup rather than just the visual appearance to get your structure into your document is useful for you and it's really important for me and is useful for you as an author. And I've only started learning about it and using markup in word maybe two years ago, maybe longer downtimes going past. But if I was writing a 20 page document and I got halfway through it and I was putting a hat or two I would say now geewhiz what were the actually be used for header to buy think it is such and such but I forgot but I forgot. Find the header to, see that it was a certain font type and size, hope I remembered it till I got back to where I was and put in the same features. If I'm using markup the software has a standard thing that it is doing for header two. And I don't need to remember the features that I use. I just click on an icon or... put it into my document is consistent, clean and helps me out as an author. So it's taken a long time to make a simple point, but it's really crucial and one of the basic things we want to get across with this series is the more you can use  the markup features  of your software to accomplish various items than the software knows why you are doing something makes it easier to interact with all kinds of browsers, screen readers, screen magnification. When you export it to a PDF or a webpage it is easier for you to be sure it's taking all your features and exported them well. So if you learn anything in these four weeks, learn how to use various markup features that are built into your software and use them. Next slide.

So we are going to do assignment one and if you can open the assignment a document that we have, open it in Word. So, you've got the same list of six items that we were looking at, slide. And what I want you to do is take the items New York and Washington and make them into a header. I don't care whether it's header one, two or three. There are two ways to do it. You should have a toolbar with icons that you can click on to get there. You have to select the item you want to apply the header two. So, select your item, go to the toolbar and click on one of the headers  or a few selected the item you can use called control one or all control to board three to get header one, two, three. So take a minute and make New York and Washington in the headers. Now, if you haven't done things that wait it's always a little tedious and a bother to learn a new way to do something  even if the new way is better. So if you haven't worked this way already know, you could do it pretty fast if not it may take a little time especially to remember to do this in all the documents you create. But whether it is for people with disabilities are just for any document you are writing, use markup features rather than just the after beats. Attributes. And as you can see, it's not hard. I can assume you all have done it or know how to and we will move on to the next slide. So, we usually refer to this as styles. Some people refer to it as a template. So, you may not have known it, but your Word documents all had a style attached to them. He may not have used this markup features, but they always were there. All the time. So it is basically a set of comma, all those kinds of things that govern a whole bunch of different markup features,, including margins and other kinds of things. They are there already. And the set of commands or the style that comes with word is called normal. We are going to talk about how you can change the edge beats of your style that should beats so that the header will be a different color may be centered or bolded, or there are a bunch of features you can do, but you can pick that particular ad should beats that you think you would like to have in your document but let me give you one warning. I learned the hard way. If you make the selections and save them as normal then from now on your normal template will have those features and that may be fine but I recall I played around and made some changes and then decided I didn't like that that a normal template that came with word was better but I didn't remember what the features were. So I didn't know how to get normal back. And there is no feature that I know of in 2003 or 2007 that says restore defaults. So I was up a tree. And I had a lousy style and one of the worst, wanted the first one back and didn't know how to get it. I found out how and I'm not going to tell you because I don't remember how. I had to go down a whole bunch of layers into the guts of my computer and find normal and delete  it and when I opened word I created a new normal one and we were back to the right kind of thing.  But it wasn't easy. It was tricky. So that if you are going to make any changes to your normal style breakdown what was there in the first place or you can create a new style with a new name and that's probably the best and safest thing to do. Let me give you one other piece of information. Before we do that. The style that you have in your computer is not just in your Word software. But, whenever you make a document and save it to style that you are using actually goes with your document. So that when somebody else pulled the document into their words, the style is going to be there and active as the one that came with the document.

I learned this the painful or bothersome way. I worked a lot with a friend, and we edited a lot of things together and he sent me a document and I went in to put in header one and do what it should look like and it was different than my header one. And I said what's going on? How did that get wrong? And a whole bunch of the features work my normal I finally found out that the document brought his normal into my document this is advantageous , hitherto, header three. if you are working with somebody that you modify the document and can easily use the features as he had that came with the document and be consistent so it should end up with your header one and his header one and a messy looking document so that it is they are, it helps with consistency, but if you don't know that is the way it works you might get confused. Okay we move on to another slide. I've already kind of covered this, so planning a style if you are going to make a style that's different than the normal one. And we are going to show you how to do that whether you do it or not is up to you. But you do need to see it. So you need to think before you do it. What might you want a header one to look like in terms of you can even (inaudible)... before using the headers that are already in your normal, using a header one, hitherto, Heather three and see how they look differently.

So those are the headers built into your normal style. I will give you a second to do that and again, you can find one, two, three off the toolbar or else... so I will give you a second to get that done. So that is the header structure and appearance that is in your normal template. So if you are ready to document, if you are happy with those, fine, just run with it and everything is good. The number of people who really get into writing a whole lot of different documents for different purposes actually save two or three different stylesheets if they write a lot of articles for a particular journal they may have a stylesheet that meet certain requirements that it wants. If you are, I just finished writing a book and it's going to be out shortly and the editor wanted me to turn the document into Word and have specific things they wanted. If you are doing it for a class he may want a different appearance. If you are writing a letter you may want a different appearance so that some people who really get into this have three or four different style sheets.  Okay, so we can close out word and the next slide, open the next assignment which is going to look the same as the one you did. But here's where we can play around with creating a new style. So what we are going to do is mainly show you, talk about how to change your style, show you some screenshots of it, whether you do anything or not is up to you. But I want you to see what is involved at least to know how to do it later.

So we will go to the next slide. We are going to talk about Word 2003 and 2007 and creating a style and each is just a little bit different the concepts are the same, but Microsoft seems to like never to leave anything the same way or in the same place or with the same name. They shuffle it around and maybe what's under the hood didn't get changed much but they like to make it look like it got changed. And give us all a headache in the process. So, you select styles and formatting, select the format menu so what you are going to find when you get in there is an item for header one, two, three, body and when you look across your tabs you will find a whole bunch of features that are already active they are. You can give your style and your name and then go ahead and change whether you want having one, certain size or not, whether you want it in capital letters, whether you want it in color or bold you can go through, select a lot of those things and save it and you can do the same for two, three and four the body. I'm going to move on to the next slide. If you are using 2003 you could go up into the browser you are looking at and click on previous and it will bring you back to the slide. 

So we will go to the next slide. There's a picture of 2003. I'm going to go to 2007 if you want to go back to 2003, just go to previous. So here we've got to go to the ribbon, the style ribbon and there is an icon at the bottom you can click on for the new style. And we will show you a picture of it for 2007. So you can click on new, and you could go and look at the current settings for heading one, two, three change them to way you want and save it with a new name, and you're all set. So, I hope those of you who have different ones can do this and let me undo the mic format for a minute. Okay, if anybody has questions you can use the m or you can type them in the text window and Marisol can read them to me.... I am now going to add in a picture. I suspect most of you have already put pictures into Word. Open the document open in the next document MSF you got should hopefully make it easier. You can copy the image and just paste it into the document up near the top summer. To get it into the document. He's probably although my before and that's very simple. All done that before. So pasting it in this is pretty much the same for 2003 and 2007. So, you can see how with 2003 you right click on the picture and you get a menu and find the Web tab and there will be a text field and into the text field you type easy diner or whatever you want to type in there, click okay and the text will be there.

The next slide will show you how to do the same thing in 2007. Again you have to right click on the picture. I think you go to size in this case. The thing is the same. I don't know why they changed it around. It just confuses you. But you will find and edit view for any altered text type what you want in there and click okay. The problem for you if you put a dot text into the webpage usually can hover over the image and the text will pop up. If you don't have a screen reader, you haven't got any way to note whether what you did worked or not. I'm sorry. I suppose you could save it to a webpage. You might find it that way. But here's how you can put an image and an all text tag into a Word document so that when I'm reading it because of just the image, but it will have the FORM. That's a useful thing to do if you are sending Word documents to students. Also if you are preparing a document you're going to change them into an HTML file. You are going to save everything in HTML it will take the picture and the all text tag with it so that you won't have to do it later. So we will move on to the next slide. So in 2003 you go to reference insert reference table of contents. Once you find a table of contents, you have a choice either for it to make a hot link so that when you are in Word you can click on it and it will jump to a point, or you can put in the page numbers. You're going to print the document it's going to know how the pages will come out in printing and it will take the page number for the table of contents.

So you can pick either one depending on what you are doing. And the next slide will show how you do that in 2007. So again, you need the blank line, reference tab, the table of contents, and you choose whether you want it to be a hyperlink or page number. So, good. And once you click on the okay you should find where you had the blank line, the table of contents will jump out and let me take a break and see if anybody's got trouble. Okay I have unlocked by Mike you can either use your mic to talk or you can type in the text window. Anybody have trouble? Well I'm going to guess that it worked and we will go on to the next slide. So, you can easily save a Word document to a TXT or a 90 F. RTF all kinds of operating systems and computers should be able to open and RTF without trouble. It is a fairly generic format. It will take the pictures, the text tag, and most of your styles and things should go with it. Let me just check on something I missed. Did I miss something I need to comment on, merry soul?

   No, Norm, Nadia just commented that it works... you cannot check without a screen reader. I wondered if there were any other way.

   Okay. Now let's see where was I.? Okay. So if you save to the TXT, that's pretty generic to. But you need to remember all the formatting you put in, centering and all of that stuff is gone. You've just got to, a plain vanilla text file, soap the formatting and that is really important for understanding the document, you better not use it. So you just need to know you're going to lose all that. If you think it was vital information purposes is going to be gone. If it wasn't vital for information purposes and it will carry the information. So we will go to the next slide.

You probably know that 2003 puts out a Word document that ends in.DOC and 2007.DOC ex. If you've got 2003 and someone sends you a DOC ex file you cannot read it. If you're using 2007 and you don't know who's going to read your document and your choices for saving it, you'll find that you can save it as a 2003 DOC document. And so that is sort of a kind and safe thing to do. If you've only got 2003, what you ought to do just to make your life a little safer is go and look for the file, Microsoft filed, Microsoft Word file compatibility pack. It is a free download if you load it in, you can read 2007 documents and you can save a document in 2007 format. There may be some 2007 features you won't be able to use. But I haven't found what they are so, if you are if you have 2003 and you are going to stick with it for a while the rest of the world moves on, go get the file compatibility pack. I would recommend that to help you keep current and be able to interact with a lot of people on a lot of things. The other thing that we are not going to talk about here, well maybe we will. I won't comment on it.

Okay, the next slide. So, you can save to an HTML file. The HTML code that we are working with is notoriously cluttered, clumsy, awkward though it may look okay on the screen, but if you need to get into it to make changes you've got yourself a mess.  It's so messy that Dreamweaver, one of the web authoring tools has a feature that says clean up Word HTML. So the best thing for you to do is, you will have another choice that should say filter HTML and that's a long way from being perfect. It's a little cleaner than the other one. So I recommend you use that so that your document if someone needs to modify it is somewhat easier. So save to PDF is the next slide. Now if you look at your file types that you can save from Word and PDF there you are home free. If you have Acrobat on your computer it will put the same thing as PDF in there. I think 2007 may have save as PDF in there too, I'm not sure. I've downloaded enough things that it's one of my choices. But if you don't have it there, you could delegate Microsoft Word save as PDF get another plug-in  that you can get and it will give you many choices for saving your document as a PDF document. Okay, soap Sherry said that says it comes automatically with 2007, so when you're working with enough different things you no longer can quite remember what generic is like. So, what you can do is take the document assignment asked, select...  the PDF that is produced is theoretically accessible depending on the document. PDF Acrobat will let you made a document with sidebars and all kinds of fancy things on it. And some of those obviously may not save but if you are saving a document as PDF, the first thing that is important that it not only saves an image of the document which PDF likes, but it does save the text. And so the basics are there depending on how fancy your PDF document is. It may not follow the flow as well as a kite. My church puts out a newsletter and it's in PDF and I've downloaded it and saved it and it is designed for printing so that if I'm reading along on what would be page one, reading and art article and at the bottom it says continued on page 6, I don't go to page 6 next, go to page 2, three, four, so that it doesn't have the feature to follow the flow of that information what you really should have for properly accessible document. So it is accessible, yes, but not as well as it should be.

So you can take the document I gave you and use the save as PDF and look at the feature you get. And it should be reasonably accessible as a PDF document. If you want one that is fairly accessible that can be more complicated depending on the document. I will be giving the webinar in the next month probably from a group in Canada called net centric they have eight wizard that they put out called popPDF accessibility Wizard. But it will connect your document and look at it and if it needs special things done to it to make it totally accessible it will give you a wizard that will walk you through how to put the features and then I suppose it comes up with a totally accessible document. I've used it but I haven't used it with any complex document to know whether it might have problems. We might have a webinar on not so watch out  and it might be worth your coming to. So the next slide time is running out. I have explained the reason that style is helpful for accessibility so, the more you use markup features in any document the more the information can be passed on to a screen reader and the more the matrix of the screen reader can make it to interact with the document. So we will go to the next slide.

Resources are going to be up on the web where they are ready each week we will add information act and the last slide, so we will deal with tables in Word. We will deal with Excel and a beginning overview of PowerPoint. And let me undo the Mike okay. So if anybody has comments, questions we will be glad to talk about it. I haven't worked out the details of what I'm doing next week I may or may not have some resources as a homework for you to work as we go along and I will if so I'll put it up on the resources page. By Thursday...

Sherry says, Norm, that it's nice to have the examples to play with.

   Good. What I gave you was sort of super simple but I felt like it was kindergarten but no matter how simple it is if you could click on things and see what it does that reinforces the learning if you just learn the concepts then it's hard to remember them. Learning by doing. I guess. Well I was going to cover a lot more. I'm glad I cut it down. It let me kind of be leisurely and not Russia. Seeing as nobody has questioned by guess I will give you enough time to understand what you're doing and that's good. So we will see you and maybe some other folks next Tuesday at the same time, same URL. And thanks for coming.

Bye, Norm, bye Sherry, I Should see you at the next webinar.

Thanks Marisol, Mary and Sherry we will see you all.