Hello, everyone. I'm Marisol Miranda. And I want to welcome you all to the webinar using LecShare to create accessible content. Our presenter here is Norm Coombs. Hi, Norm.
Hi, Marisol. And hi, everyone. We will have archive of it and other people can read the archive. I do want people to know we have a free‑base webinar starting on October 19th. It's going to be on various popular learning management systems. And we'll be looking at meudal [ph] desire to learn, Sakai and Blackboard.
So the last Tuesdays in October and the first two Tuesdays in November. Those who are annual webinar members will get it for free. The others, it's $225. And this time you're going to get a bonus. I spent the last couple of years writing a book called Making Online Teaching Accessible being published on jausy [ph] base and publication date is October 10th.
And anybody who registered for the paid webinar will get that free and those who are annual member will also get a copy of that free. Otherwise, you can buy it. It will be $28. I'm not sure how soon but it should be available on Bookshare for those of you who are Bookshare user. So give you a heads up on that. I'll be sending out announcement on it.
Give me one second. I want to get in my PowerPoint. Okay. It tells me little beep, I've got the mic locked so, really want to talk about make PowerPoint accessible on the web. Talked earlier about making PowerPoint accessible. Excuse my voice. If you hand your finished PowerPoint to someone, if you keep the slides fairly simple, use mainly text, have good contrast between the foreground and background and don't crowd too much on a page ,probably anybody with a screen magnification or some of the learning disability will be able to use the PPT or PPTX file if you hand it to them.
The trick is when you go to save it for the web, the web pages that Microsoft PowerPoint puts out have a lot of access problems, and they're very difficult for screen reader user to move around and work and often times, scene magnification cannot always magnify what is there. And what we have found is the easier and most simpler way to come up with more accessible pages is a tool called LecShare.
You can get the light version for $39, the pro version for 60 something. Actually when you look at the slides we show in this room, they are all produced by LecShare. And they have "next" to the previous button on them. And they are really fairly easy to use on the web or even if you have them on the drive.
The light version will let you put out the accessible web pages, the pro version will let you have audio to the slides or make a movie of the slides, even includes caption. So we'll walk through how to import a PowerPoint assuming you have a decent clean Powerpoint. If you have translation animation, they'll get lost in LecShare. They'll get lost on the web anyhow.
You can, in PowerPoint, add text to image. If you have some accessibility problems, LecShare will find them for you and let you repair them. So that's what we want to demonstrate and walk through.
Oh, you can also get a demo version of LecShare. And it will work exactly like the paid version except a little thing across your slide saying this was made by LecShare. So you can take it and see how it works, but you probably don't want to use it in a classroom or somewhere professional.
We'll let you look at it and play with it and see how hard it is, or easy to use, and if you want to spend money or not. It is available through colleges and you can get it through the web at LecShare.com.
And there is, there is a video tutorial by the designer of LecShare Greg Kraus, and it's quite clear. Only 20 minutes long, and it's worth using. I'm blind, I'm a screen user and it took me a while. I was able to do everything that I want to in LecShare. I find that quite accessible.
Okay. So what does LecShare do? Converts PowerPoint into accessible web pages. It will make QuickTime movies. And you can make video podcast of it, and you can make Microsoft Word hand out. Why would you want to do that?
If you're giving a lecture somewhere, people often like it if you give them handout with slides on them and a place for them to take notes. And the other thing that's useful if you have text in the notes, Powerpoint notes part ‑‑ one of the word option is it will put there, and in some cases, can be useful when you're doing a live presentation.
So how do we get started on the next slide? LecShare's assuming you got a decent PowerPoint to start with. So that's a given for everything we'll talk about. We'll let you make some repairs to them and we'll show that making the Powerpoint something you know how to do, and that you've done. The PowerPoint ‑‑ and actually opens up PowerPoint, in the background so you can go over and look at that if you wanted to. So import the slides, gives you some places where you can look at them. And there is one place where there's a slide trade where it gives many little pictures of your slide and comments and whether it's accessible and whether there's any accessible problem.
A friend of mine told me, who can see LecShare ‑‑ at the picture of the slides of LecShare isn't terribly good. But that doesn't mean what your output is going to be a problem. It's just the picture that LecShare is showing on the interface. It's not that the actual picture of the slide got distorted.
So, the next slide is a screenshot of the opening where you have the different areas where your slides are going to be shown. 'Cause it's a prove, what you really see when you first open LecShare on the next slide, so you can see you've imported a presentation now and the interface now has actual content put into it.
And we'll go to the next slide. This focuses on the slide trade. So you can see, we just got three slides of our slide trade. You could have 20, 30, 50. We might have to see them all. Tells you if they're accessible and if there's a problem.
We can already see that one of our slides is missing a title and there's an image that's missing an image and while LecShare was importing your PowerPoint, it was analyzing them looking for potential accessibility issues and then giving you a slide trade with that information all set up before you. So you don't have to go through and check for this and check for that. It's done it all.
Just in the few seconds that it takes to import and analyze the slides. Okay. We'll go do the next slide. So we mentioned that one slide had a title missing. And so we go over and click on that. And you can see the title's missing.
If you want to add the title, you go to the edit menu in LecShare and go down the menu, and I'll find an item where you can add a title. Click on that and you can see whether you're looking at the correct slide. You see the edit box where you can click the title. And tab over or mouse over and click on "okay" and the title will be there.
One reason the title can be important is that LecShare will, if you ask it to put out a table of content for the slides. And if you don't have a title there, it's just going to say slide 2 or slide 20, include when you look at it in a table of content, it's not informative.
So especially if you're going to say table of content, which is an option we're going to look at later, it's good to have a halfway meaningful title.
You'll also find that if you use the same title in more than one slide, which sometimes you may do, and so it will let you go in and modify those and so you might want to say, let's say the topic was preparing a document in Word and you have three slides with the same title. The different information in them, you could leave the title the same, but add number one after one of them, and two after the other or you may find a more meaningful title.
And so let me see if anybody have questions on what we've covered so far, including adding the title. Okay. I've given up the mic. Anybody have any questions? Use the mic or type in the link. Okay. I'm going to assume you don't have any questions at this point.
So the next screenshot deals with the slide where there was image and no text in it. So click on that. It's going to open up a text field. You don't have to go through the edit menu like I did before. This mean open up a text box where you can open text for the image and if you had alternate text in the original Powerpoint, you could do ‑‑ it wouldn't we here and it wouldn't be asking for it if you don't.
One of the choices that we ask you is to put in old text. Probably most of you understand that, but let me just clarify it. If screen reader looks at image and there's no ALT text, it's going to say "image" or "graphic" and it won't understand what's there.
And if you put in ALT text, it's going ALT text while I go around with the screen. If what you have is a piece of eye candy and they look pretty but isn't giving any information, and frankly, I may not care, then you can put essentially, if you were doing a PowerPoint, you'll just do a space bar. And I wouldn't even know there was an image there.
Technically, I guess what happens, it reads "space" but it doesn't say "space" so looks to me nothing is there. In some cases, that might be the thing to do. Again, it depends on the page. If you go low, if the page is there for the sake of what it looks like, then I may need to know all the little image that are there, even if they don't carry any content 'cause the point of the page is maybe for me to understand what it looks like.
If, on the other hand, it's just some piece of eye candy, then you can hide it from me. I remember when in the early stages of going to a disability site, something would pop up that really tried to be jazzy and tried to look great, and then tried to tell these blind person exactly what was happening, and so I remember opening the page and it say, "lightening bolt reaching down right side of page" and a bunch of other jazzy, eye‑candy thing. And I said "oh, that's sexy" but I had to go back there 2 days later and guess what I had to listen to the next time and the next time till I have more yellow and blue lightening bolts I had to do it.
And the web designer was shocked when blind people started complaining. Or sometimes I may be just as happy to be left in the dark. Ha‑ha. But that's a judgment call. And you may hide something from me and I may find out and be angry or you may tell me something and I might find it a bother.
In our page, in the early days, instead of a, but we had a red cube and we all had text flashing red cube used as bullet for link such and such. Boy, I got tired of listening to that too. So no, ALT text tag can be very helpful and useful. So it's a judgment call you have to make, and sometimes somebody might not like your call but that's the way it is in life.
Next slide. Okay. Here's a screenshot of adding the old text tag to the image. And, at some point, before you start exploiting the LecShare file, if you don't save it, then the repairs you make won't be kept. So what's in the LecShare, whatever it is that's going to save may not show the changes you make till you actually use the same button of LecShare.
So next slide remind you that you can add notes. You could have added them through your original PowerPoint. And now you could also, if you didn't add them, you can add them into this page. Now, what I remember from when Karen talked about Office 2010, if I understood her and I may be wrong, I think it's possible for the presenter to be showing slides up on the screen but on his computer display, the speaker notes would also be there.
In the earlier version but that's not the case. Once she was talking about the speaker notes, she was talking about seeing them on the cell phone. So I'm not sure if they show on the computer monitor or only on the cell phone. If it's only on the cell phone, it's not going to help me much. Although, let's see if I could remember ‑‑ I.
Think for screen reader user, if you hit the F‑T, you get a bunch of choices. And I think one of them is to display notes. So it won't display for the audience but I think it will display them for me. I haven't used them, to be totally sure of what I'm talking about, but I remember seeing it there.
Okay. So we've done our Powerpoint. We've prepared and now we're ready to export. Next slide talk about exporting. So one of the choices is export. Click on export. And you're going to see a bunch of option. We'll show them to you in a minute.
One of them is HTML web. QuickTime movie and sort of, at this point, is we're going to be lock at the saving your HTML version of your PowerPoint, and you'll check on that. And the choices that you're looking at the places title for the presentation to add the author's name, other kinds of things, a lot of data stuff are going helped search engines find what you're putting in there and so on.
I'm sloppy. I usually go tab and tab and leave them blank and click on the HTML choice and the option window pops up. And we have a couple other options they want to do. So after you click on the options, one of them is probably table of content.
Final choices you make for that you click on export again, and it does now finally export the end results. Push the ball in. Well ask you to find a place on your computer to put them. They'll ask you for an empty folder which you don't have to do. It's when you find the folder and click on it, it's not empty and it's not going to tell you it's not empty. You're going to go ahead and save it.
When you go to that folder, you're going to find a subfolder entitled HTML and you're ‑‑ is a CSS folder for cascading style sheet and web underlining data folder, which is where all the slides are and a couple of other things.
When we finish making these slides that we've been showing you now, we put them up on the server and we pointed the gloves are in the room at the first index of HTML page, pointed to browser to the page and pointed to the HTML page. And we clicked on that and we started seeing the slide that you've been looking at now.
Next slide. So here's a screenshot of the export option that I was talking about. And a lot of QuickTime movies and different things are irrelevant at this stage. We'll come back to those.
If you're just putting out HTML web pages, the next screenshot shows some more of the options that are there. And try to understand. Go ahead and click on a couple of different options I could have saved them in an HTML version or MP 4 version or QuickTime version so you can click on more than one and have it saved in different versions all at the same time. I don't know that it slows down the export much or not 'cause I haven't done that.
And the next shows the table of content. For our purposes, I usually don't put the table of content up, I clicked on mouse. And that's an option depending on what you want and where you want it. I find it clutters the page for me so I don't bother. Apparently, a lot of people like it 'cause it is already checked when you go to save your stuff. Okay. Let me ‑‑ okay. I've taken off the lock mic.
What we'll go through next will be adding audio to the terminal pages or doing QuickTime movie. So we've finished part one of the presentation, which is importing the slides, repairing the slides, making the choices you want to use for saving HTML and saving them.
And basically what we've done in all of our webinars will be showing you stuff that we output through LecShare following the stuff I just went through. So if you have comment or questions, you can put it through LecShare window or share your mic.
Okay. I guess I'm taking over again. I am start looking at adding audio, which is on the next slide. So have you been your PowerPoint, you import your PowerPoint, like we did before. And have your focus on the slides you want to at audio to, I'm assuming, in most cases, that's one 'cause you may add it to the whole presentation.
And you click on the audio button, and ask do you want to create an audio. Not sure you mean it and click on yes. Then it gives you a dial‑up box and says it's going to make an MOV folder in the same place your PowerPoint is, and it's going to save a lot of audio‑related information in the MOV folder. So it's a working folder where LecShare keeps things that it will use later on.
Next slide. So once you've click on doing the audio, say yes, you want to do it you have simple screenshot of several ‑‑ play button, record button, you have to click on audio again to make sure that it knows you really do want to do an audio. Seems to me a little redundant, not necessary. I have impression my playing around if you don't click on this menu before you.
And to the side of that menu, you see again the tray with the slides and you want to make sure you've got the slide highlighted that you want to talk about. And there's a place where it shows the notes will be displayed when you use them and you can't use it as a transcript of what you want to talk about. When you ‑‑ I will go do there next slide.
Okay. This is, explain what I have talked about from the previous so when you're ready to record, assuming you're there, you click on "record". And automatic ‑‑ helps if you got a mic plugged in. I have a mic in my computer so I don't have to do anything.
Oh, way back at the beginning when you first clicked on the audio menu in a basic interface, there's a place where you can set, change the settings for your audio. How many hertz and modo and stereo. And those kind of audio things, I didn't touch them. I figured out they were already adequate but if, for some reason, you have to do something more, you can do that.
So you click on "record" and you start talk when you're finished, or when you click on "record," the record button goes away and? Stop button pops, so ‑‑ so from John's point of view, that seems to be what happened. So when you stop recording, you click on the stop button, it may take a second. But then it's done. And you are back to having a play and record button. And you probably want to click on play and listen to yourself.
If you have too much "um", and "ah" and stumble around too much, you click on record again and it tells you it's going to record over the previous recording. So automatically, it's going to erase the previous one, make a new one. Click on "stop" and "play". You can sit there and make a recording for a given slide several times depending on how much of a perfectionist you are. Next slide.
So then you go all the way do the list of slides. Put your focus on slide 2. Come back and click on record and make another recording, stop it, play it. Go over, put your focus on slide 3. Come back, click on record. Stop. And play it. Go over and click it on slide whatever until you're all done.
And let me take a pause again and see how we're doing. Okay. So if you want to ask questions with your mic or put it on the text chat window, here's your chance.
If you're reading the notice that are in, if you're reading exactly what the notice, are you'll basically have a transcript when you post it then?
Good job. I paid you well. Ha‑ha. So it'll be a transcript, not captions, 'cause they're not screening like three lines at a time, but you will have a transcript there. If you only have a short amount of audio with the slide, it probably would show very nicely. If, on the other hand, you talk for 20 minutes, you're going to have to do some scrolling for a bit. Yes, that's one of the very good features here. Anybody else?
You said it's a movie format. Is that something you can up load to Google and have it generate caption?
I don't know. Marisol, you've done a little more stuff with Google. Do you think it's a possibility?
Sorry, Norm. You were holding the mic. Yes, I think, well, it is possible because you can save it as an MP 4, and you can up load it to YouTube. And it will generate the caption. But if you have the notes here, you can also have it in captions. They're not as accurate as probably they might be in YouTube, but you will get the captions with the video.
Yes, if you see the actual notes, it seems those would work more accurately, accurate caption using the Google captioning service. Thank you.
You're welcome.
All set up to take care of my lock. The mic is not working, so I have to do it manually. Just a second. Okay. So we'll going do the next slide. Give me one second. I'm having problem with my PowerPoint. Okay.
So, we finished make our recording and then we go over to export. And you can fill in the data and things of that kind if you want. And what we chose to do this time was to save it as a QuickTime movie.
Excuse me. I'm having trouble with my PowerPoint. Okay. So we have a slide of the options for saving in QuickTime. And depending on what you want, there could be other ones. You could also choose to save to MP 4, and this is same thing we saw save to HTML. This time we're choosing QuickTime.
When we choose that, we have option and you can choose your image size and sound quality and a lot of things like that. And one of there things you can do is save it to embedded web page, which is what we did. You may not have to. You may not want to do it that way. And I tend to do the things I like to do, and I haven't checked all the options. But that's the one that we use here.
Okay. So you can pick your QuickTime choices and get ready to save it. One of the other choices there is caption. And we already heard if you save your notes and they will be there as part of a caption. Even in the QuickTime version. But it's really a transcription rather than captions as such.
Next slide. You can also save as captions. That's one of the choices and LecShare with try to synchronize the QuickTime movie the text, depending on how fast you talk and how much text is there and all of those kinds of things. It may not work well or it may. But that is a possibility. Okay. Sorry I got screwed up.
Before we go on to the final slides, if you click over save it to QuickTime it's like saving your audio with your HTML, couple things here. When you save the audio, when the HTML slides, when you click on HTML slide, it become as web page and across it, there's some buttons, one's play, record, fast forward, rewind. And you can click on "play" and you'll get the audio. And then you hit the next button, goes to the next screen. If you got something like a movie you're watching, this is sort of a pain. If you got course material that you want to analyze and study the ability to play a little bit at a time, to sit there and look at the slides content, to back up and go forward ‑‑ I think this is a very good teaching format if people are trying to learn step by step how to do something so they can progress.
So far they play the audio five times if they want to. Back up the slide. Go forward a slide. So that's good. When you get QuickTime movie, which will show you in a second, save it as embedded what comes up is a web page, you click on the button then watch the whole movie. And we're going to see some of that. Any other questions?
Okay. Next slide. Just remind you where we had our resources and the recording for today will be on that page probably within a day or two. And then I guess, Marisol, you can click on "next" and go to the next page.
Now, depends on a bunch of software, how movies and audio works in the [inaudible]. And the way this works is you can click [inaudible] let's click on the movie demo. Can you do that, Marisol? Bring up the movie?
Now, each of you is going to have to click on "play." Before you click on it, it's not going to do anything you want. So you're each going to have to click on play and there audio should come out of your computer. [Inaudible] okay.
There is a button return to the LecShare menu. I don't know. Did Marisol do a little work for everyone? And on this one, there's a demo of the HTML version.
Marisol, if you'll click on that. You gotta see a slide at a time. I think all you gotta do just to get a feel of it is click the play button and you'll hear this stuff for [inaudible]. Yeah you can click on there next button go to the next slide, or else if you're on the next button, you can go back to previous. So you can see how it works.
It's not a great click time. You'll see but gives you a feel for how it works, include what you might want to use and which situation for your work. And we will have a direct link to these demos off the resource page. You can get it after the last slide or else there would be a direct link to let you go straight to it. That's the presentation. So wide open for questions, comments our whatever.
Oh, one other thing I didn't mention it. One of the choices you could get when you're saving it is to save it to what do IMS package or something? Special sort of ‑‑ like a zipped thing but it's different from interface is you could up load that fairly quickly through the CourseWare system.
I'm not sure about the 3rd second button. I haven't used that much. Sorry. But anyhow if you save it in that package form, it's very helpful when you're up loading stuff to the course where ‑‑ okay, I'll let go of the mic.
Well, let me summarize what I wanted to show. If you make a halfway decent PowerPoint, you want to put it on the web, you put into LecShare. It will show you the repairs you make, you make those, then you export, then you want to take the HTML web and decide when you want to make the content or not. Then you export again, then it will give you the folder with HTML folder. Then you open that, and there's index and there's the first slide to your PowerPoint. Then you can add audio to it. And it will save. The whole thing will look about the same except when you click on the index of HTML, or you can add the audio and save it as the MP 4 and QuickTime and give a movie.
No. I didn't have notes. Ha‑ha. You caught me. Again, you can get a free demo that will do everything I did and all the stuff I didn't show you. It will stick the ugly text across the middle of the slide, but it will be fully functional. And you can decide if you want to buy it or not. I think the price is 39 for the light, which is no audio, or 69 for the pro. And it's LecShare.com.
Cathy, I would like to answer this. Cathy's Sims could post a slide and then also YouTube with captions to meet different used. Preferences and night software. The thing you could not [inaudible] the MP 4 video because they are saved in different folders. One is for the text, and the other one is for the video. Okay? Thank you.
And one thing that I would like to add more is that if we have links, you can click to the link in the note section. It will appear before the slides in the LecShare presentation.
I'll say everything about links. You can put a link on the PowerPoint slide and click on it and go to somewhere. For the last several years, the link on the PowerPoint slide I'm using just can't find it there as if there's any link, so that becomes a problem.
But you can save them other way, places. What I do if I'm giving somebody a Powerpoint, I might have a little video clip I want to include along with it. I embed there video clip into the slide and when I click on the next slide, the video plays. If you're happy with it, you go back to the previous slide and it's automatic response.
Norm, Erica is asking if you have any recommendation for software or web tool for use with online learning?
Couple weeks ago, we had a thing, product called "soft shock" [ph]. And if you e‑mail me, I'll get you a link where you could go and look at that.
Learning some basic HTML is always helpful when you're going on the web. If you create a document in Word, the HTML that it saves, web designers page, there's usually ‑‑ oh, thank you. Ha‑ha. There are usually two versions of saving to the web. You find in your Word Document one of them is filtered. If you save it as filtered web, the code is better than otherwise.
But for most of you, if you're not looking up the code, it's probably not bad so save it as filtered web. What's important is in a Word document or on the web, the ability to move around and navigate is important. You can quickly glance on a web page and see where a paragraph ends or a new header or division on a page. Those things can be difficult for a screen reader.
I may have to arrow down line by line by line to find where the next header is. However, if you use real headers, not just putting in bigger font and different color and underline but if you use the header markup, HTML code it will be H1, H2, H3. And in Word, I think it's alt, Control 1. Make text header 1. Alt control 2, alt control 3.
That means with my screen reader, I can, say, jump to the next header 1, place where I use it all the time on the web. I have two online library Bookshare and a national library system, and they both use headers. So the title of the book is on a different header.
If I go through using the tab key, gives me title and author and all kind of things and the arrow key tells me more if I hit while in book share. It's usually the two key I'm thinking, national library service. Or maybe the 3 key depending on what side of the header they use.
If I'm looking up the last 50 books they put up online, I can go through them with yes, yes. So I can go through a list of 50 books just by hitting the two keys 50 times as opposed to having to hit the tab keys 200 or 300 times. So that really helps me to skim and scan through content the way your eyes does for you. So that's one of the big accessibility features was to use proper markup both in a work document and on a web page.
Norm, Kathleen is asking when we were talking about the link in the PowerPoint, she ask but the link works in the notes.
If you mean in the notes in PowerPoint, I don't think they do for screen reader. If save it to the web page, I don't know what happens to the link. I put links in by going in and using HTML to the web site. I suspect, yeah, that might work. Anyone else?
Well, we've run over as usual. And hope you ‑‑ output can be accessible. The author and tool isn't for self check. So we're going to be looking at learning management systems, I'd like to say the online learning is a three‑legged stool. One leg is the interface of the management system, how accessible it is. The second leg is the content, the faculty member put up. Whether it has any problem or not. The third leg is the screen. Adaptive technology.
How good is it? Fairly new and more than that, just as Word has, you know, a thousand commands on it. Something like John's got just as many ‑‑ and I only know or use 10 or 20 percent at the most ‑‑ but the more a user understands the tricks and trade built into the adaptive technology, the better you can use the web and the course material.
So sometimes a student complains the course isn't accessible when it really is because he doesn't know how to use his software really well.
Okay. So hope you'll think about coming in next to the next series, and I'll be sending out announcements about that. Hope to have a series on Flash end of November into December. Flash is a problem. Well, it's under negotiation. Let's leave it there. Thank you for coming.
Thanks for coming in. I'm Marisol Miranda from EASI. I will see you in the next webinar. Bye‑bye.