EASI Webinar

9/7/10 Transcript

[The introductions at the beginning of the webinar are missing from t he transcript due to a connection error with the captioning platform]

     So we really want to take the tools let you know how to use and try to use them in the best way for accessibility. As I said today it's primarily background and next week we will focus on PowerPoint, next week on Word. The third week on PowerPoint and Excel and the fourth week kind of a summary of also trying to help you find ways to check what you have done to see if it is as good as you would like it to be with the accessibility checkers. So those are the four weeks that we have available to us. So what we are going to talk about today is the bit about word or PowerPoint, get into some overview of them and then try to let you understand a bit about different ways to use them and the next week we will go into details on how to use them. And so part of what you need to do once you understand Word, Excel or PowerPoint may be a little bit better than you do is to decide which one is the best one for your purposes.

And I want to give you some experience of mine to underline why that is an important thing to think about. Several years ago I was working in directly with the organization and I needed to interact with their accountant. This was maybe 15 years ago. So the accountant sent me some attachments for the mail message was he was sending me wasn't the list of the numbers it was an explanation of something and what I got was a spreadsheet. Not filled with numbers and data, but filled with text it probably was not so confusing for someone looking at it but the screen reader looks at one cell in a spreadsheet at a time so I never got the whole picture. I got a little bit here and a little bit there and I couldn't make sense out of it all. A spreadsheet is primarily a way of providing two-dimensional display of data especially numbers but not necessarily just (Inaudible) spreadsheet to put out a class scheduled which classes or which day or something of that kind. I wrote the guy back and I said you know that has really helped if you could use a Word document. He'd never used or that he didn't know how to use Word. All he knew was spreadsheet and it wasn't the best way to provide textual information at all. I don't know if anybody would be stuck in that situation today but there is a case of somebody taking a tool that really wasn't intended for the way, what he wanted to do he made do with it.

These tools are so powerful you can probably make all of them turn somersaults and may end up getting what you want out of it but it may end long run turn out to be a poor secondhand choice. I've also been looking at some things on the web sometimes and seen some lessons the teacher put out once they use PowerPoint but each slide was maybe a paragraph's worth of textual information like you might find a paragraph in a book or in a word document and then ask instead of scrolling down to the rest of the document we went to the next page and put the next, it worked I'll often would jump around in a document (Inaudible) if I understand what I'm reading want to scroll down quickly further down the document to look for something new that I'm trying to find and that's fairly easy because you can scroll down but if you've got to go next, next, next, next with the PowerPoint slides when you could pass you got to go previous, previous and eventually (Inaudible) it's really not as convenient that may be times when you've use PowerPoint slides to show what is really one continuous document I'm not sure I can think of a good time for it, but there probably is. One of the advantages of a continuous document is that I can download it and have it as a single document. It's easier if you wanted to cut and paste and do all kinds of manipulations that she can do in a word processor nearly as easily as that she's got any PowerPoint presentation.

So if you think about what it is you are going to do and which of these tools would be the best way to do it. That seems obvious for most of the time choice is pretty obvious and he won't have to do much thinking, but it is something to make sure you've got the best tool for the job. Not only for your content, but was going to be best for your audience, we are going to be delivered who you are may make an impact on what you do. For example if I did have a document and I was in a lecture hall and I did have a document upon the electorate (Inaudible) looking at this light than using PowerPoint might turn out to be more convenient. Again just think about the tool you are using, why are you using it, is the best one for the content, will it work best for your audience and once you've done that we are going to look at planning your content for maximum accessibility for the people with disabilities and also maximum comprehension for anyone. So that you try to think through what you say and try to make it really clear. Start for communication rather than glitz.

I remember reading a general in the Army a few years ago issued a command to someone in the Iraq war to the people out in the field he had them turn in reports periodically to him and they usually were sent him PowerPoint attachments. And a lot with the attachment when a new slide came up you might see an animation of an airplane swooping down and dropping a bomb and then you would hear the bombs so they put in animations and explosions and the sound of trundling and all kind of things. Cut out all the animations and sound effects, just give me the information. He got sick of all that jazz. So we can get caught up in all that jazz and it may support what we are doing, it may strengthen it, or it may be a needless distraction. The appearance of your (Inaudible) as displayed on a piece of paper or a computer monitor or a chart on the wall, the appearance and layout should support the meeting. We are going to discuss that in a little detail later in the hour so I won't go into that. At this point.

So in the next slide we talk about access issues and essentially I just want to remind you that people with disabilities have different access issues. So a user who is blind if you have it up on the web or habit to look on his computer is going to be using screen reader and we will talk a bit about things that should be there and should be avoided to make things screen reader accessible. If you are in a classroom and you are projecting them up, while what is it going to do for the blind person, what you need to do is be sure that any visuals you have, whether it is a picture you hang on the wall or a slide you project on the wall or the old overhead projectors we use that you don't need to insult the class by turning around and reading it. But you need to make sure that all the content that is visually displayed gets covered in your discussion. And covered in a way that someone who can't see the visual will have a good idea of what you are seeing.

Usually when I go to a presentation when they are using a projector I get 95% or more of what the person is talking about without seeing what's there. I remember being at one talk or the guy did a bunch of data analysis (Inaudible) you can see the green bar down here and compare it with a yellow bar over there and I didn't get anything out of that talk at all. Make sure that you cover the content that's being displayed in a visual manner to a person who is blind and can't get access to it in any other kind of way (Inaudible). Limited edition I guess it depends on how limited. That's an ambiguous term. If you think of the average person maybe not with 20/20 eyesight, eyesight that's okay they can drive a car, the small print at the bottom of a legal document may be very difficult to read so that you want to make sure to have a normal person who may not have a perfect facilities (Inaudible) understanding. Which is kind of a relative judgment call on your point. I don't think I've heard it as much on television but on the radio often times they listen to it and at the end they want to give some disclaimer or something of that kind the license number of the plumber or something and they have it so fast and I don't know if you can talk that fast they recorded and sped it up.

So those kinds of things need to be (Inaudible) if they have very poor vision or think you have the right to assume that they come with software screen adaptation of some kind (Inaudible) but just things (Inaudible) pure location would be put on them more than everyone else. Uses of motor impairments. I think the only place you need to consider them for the most part is if the person has to click on buttons and things to navigate and manipulate the material that is given to them. If the buttons are too small, then high dexterity isn't that, may not be a problem. People with learning disabilities, I think mainly what you need to do is try not to put too much stuff into a page, not too small, and leave good I would say white space, but it might not be white. Places where the persons I can rest. I know one case where we have someone with learning disabilities complain about some of our course materials. If they had trouble tracking with their eyes, material (Inaudible) beginning of the

they would often get lost. So they wish there was someway they could widen the margin of the material and not have to track as far. I guess I won't comment any further on that at the moment. Cognitive impairments. Again, if you are, if you are displayed if your display is too condensed it may make a harder time finding a way around them so that they can clearly understand that we will talk later about using simple or simple English board have shorter sentences, modules, things of that kind would be part of what we are talking about. People with hearing impairments obvious what you've got audio you need a transcription or captioning, the other thing is if a hearing impaired person has been deaf since birth odds are that English is a second language. It is not their first language. Their first languages site language, which is not the same as signed English. So again, the simpler presentation is better in that kind of case.

Before we go to Word does anyone have any kinds of questions? Okay we will go on to talking about Word. The strengths are you can create a lot of different types of documents, one of the reasons that is a strength is if you don't know what software the person has at the other end you can put out something that they can understand. I think at present if you are using office 2007 or 2010 it will usually let you output it in any office 2003 version and I think a lot of people are still stuck with that. You may want to do that, for example you can put up a DOC file or DOC exiled file. If you put that in the version that's helpful. RTF probably can be read but just about any computer program around. So that's pretty safe. TXT files (Inaudible) the problem with the TXT file is you lose some of your layout and formatting and we will talk about that later. So I guess that's what I want to cover under advantages of different document types.

So word also include things like images, text box (Inaudible) those things we will talk about in more detail they can be good they can be bad depending on how you create them and what your topic is and your audience. Different font types and sizes. You probably don't want to go super large. But again, I don't know I usually try to do what font size? 11 or 12. 10 maybe it's passable. If you get much smaller than that, you've got a problem. Everyone says that from the people who have sight problems and learning disabilities that sans serif font is usually the best. All the fancy curly cues can make it harder for some people to decode the letters. I said earlier it provides many ways to do the same thing. That's an advantage and a disadvantage. We will talk about that later on.

So, what features are there in Word that you should avoid? I will talk about that a little bit. Diagrams, sometimes they are good and important and you should use them. They are usually an image, and the screen reader isn't going to read the image. So you are going to have to go to put in a text description of it. If it is a simple image the short label to say what it is is probably more than adequate, that's no problem. If you're diagrams is complicated electronic circuit diagram that all text (Inaudible) is going to be there to save the circuit diagram but it's not going to explain what they are very much so you may need to find ways to provide that information in other formats and there could be a link to a longer description that you don't want on the main page and then maybe you have to send somebody a handheld graphic but I'm not going to talk about that in this series. Text boxes are problematic. Sometimes screen readers miss them. The newer they are, the more screen reader is going to handle that, but sometimes if you take a Word document and a text box and exported to an HTML or webpage then you can get lost too, so (Inaudible) not to use that.

So let's get to PowerPoint. Ideal for providing outlines can be good for animations (Inaudible) depending on what you are doing but it is very good if you aren't wanting to provide outlines to a presentation you are giving. Webpages, but they came from another PowerPoint presentation. So I think Header is then things could provide structure (Inaudible) covering where we are going. So it is good supplemental information. The animations usually won't transport into PowerPoint into webpages. Most screen readers can't handle them. Transitions won't export into webpages, transition especially if it is automated so that every 5 seconds it goes to the next slide. Can be very useful in that situation my wife takes a lot of photography and she likes to take them from the camera and put them in the computer and start another medic slideshow. Watch going through (Inaudible) each one manually. I've had people send me a PowerPoint with automatic transitions built into it and I didn't know better and they click on that thing for the next page and nothing happened and I click on something else click on the next page and I've tried several different ways and didn't know what was going on or not going on. So if you send it with transitions is probably better to let people know that it's there.

The disadvantage of the transition (Inaudible) somebody with a disability or not everyone may want to linger on the slide longer so I think automatic transitions may not be (Inaudible) so because it is a very visual tool in its original conception at least that's the way I understand it a lot of these features you need to think carefully about using when you're going to make conceptual for a person with a disability and we will talk about that when we get to PowerPoint 2 weeks from now. When you export it to other formats from PowerPoint to webpages and you're probably not therefore someone with site but it's very hard for someone with a screen reader to handle so let's quickly look at Excel. It's an excellent tool to provide a compact two-dimensional display of information. Certainly that's good for spreadsheet information if you have an expense account U-turn and for your breakfast lunch and dinner on different days of the week, whole bunch of things can do in that kind of weight and an Excel spreadsheet, and other times like if you have a card catalog in the name of a course and a reef description of the course that too can be all laid out very nicely in a spreadsheet and these things may or may not work well with someone with a screen reader which is a very good compact tool (Inaudible) it is even if every of thing is there in the text there really is a visual display because you understand the spreadsheet and every item in a spreadsheet, you understand because of its relationship to other items around the spreadsheet. Usually a spreadsheet has headers across the top for each column, a double side for each row and information in a given cell, you automatically connect to the row and column of headers for it to make sense.

The next slide (Inaudible) okay the next slide what we have is the way I would look at a spreadsheet. They see or hear one cell at a time so I look at a spreadsheet with a bunch of prices what somebody paid for breakfast lunch and dinner different days of the week and I come across a $NAC dollars and cents (Inaudible) to me if I would get it out of context it means nothing. When we talk about Excel a little bit later there looks plainer couple things. It's possible for you when you devise an Excel spreadsheet to inform the software of which grow as the column headers and which column has the row headers and the software can then tell my screen reader that and then when I go to look at the cell, the screen reader is going to breed the road title, the column title, and the contents of the cell so that I would get Monday lunch, 3.95. And hear it in context like you see it in the context. If I get a spreadsheet for somebody out of the blue sometimes I've got to look around quite a bit and remember there is no way for me to quickly scan up and down the whole thing. I can't even read the road so for the time one cell at a time. I'm trying to understand what is this. It's easier if you tell me ahead of time this is Joe Brown meal expenses for such and such a week. That's a lot easier for me to kind of. We will talk about that. Later.

The second. Just a second. The next part is getting into think about the different office tools and the strengths and weaknesses for the content, the problems they may create for someone with disabilities and try to understand which is the best one you want to use. See how it fits in with your content, with the audience and particularly the which one would be easiest for the output of accessible version. Okay, let's go on to the slide about using markup. There's different ways to create a layout of your material on a page or on a slide. And one of the basic things I want to get across in this course is that you should use markup to create your layout. I would give you some examples that will try to make that clear. What you are looking at (Inaudible) you can have an item using the header command and it will come up having different font size and type other kinds of features depending on how the header was defined and we will talk about that more next week too. That's one way to have a header you can use a centering command. You can use the font size command, font type command, bold, all those things you can use to say that looks like a nice header. The computer doesn't know that it's a header. It says who cares. In a similar kind of way for a long time when we were doing math on the computer a lot of math formulas and things of that kind could be displayed could not be displayed using the normal computer display features. There was no item in the computer code to take certain mathematical expressions and put them up on the screen or in the printing it on paper so what people did was they would make a graphic with that information and use the graphic. So it looked fine. It was there.

So what difference does it make whether the computer understands what you are doing or not. If it looks the way you wanted. Isn't that all (inaudible) want? Well if we look at the math example, if the computer understands what they are then it is possible to run your math throughout mathematics program and do all kinds of mathematical operations on it. If it's just a picture the computer can't do any mathematical operation. Once the header is there as a markup header, when I'm reading a document with my screen reader as a header tool and then read me what they are and we will talk a little bit later about why that's important. If the person reading the document knows why that font is the way it is. Most people see table automatically see headers in different ways and if the display looks like a header it is a header. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it's a duck. Same thing for the header. For a visual person that's fine.

There are a lot of ways (Inaudible) the computer also notes that as an author one of the things I found that I really like about my computer knowing things is that when I run into a long document that makes something a header to have it centered, font size 14 and five pages later I need another header, and I scratch my bald head and I say now what did I make that header look like? I can't remember. The next header (Inaudible) to visually different from the next header, so I go back up and I ask the computer to tell me all its features and I say okay I go back to where I'm going to put the next header tool and I hope I remembered all of those OK'd if on the other hand (Inaudible) command for a header tool, the same as the first time. The fourth, fifth time, 40 pages sfellowtamped I just finished writing a book in which I will be telling you about sometime later and I'm in chapter 5 I think what they make the headers to in other chapters. Doing it all the same (Inaudible) worried about it.

We will see next week another advantage of using markup. As opposed to just the visual features. If you've got a long document you can pull up at the top with a couple clicks, you can make a table of contents from all of your headers. So the computer knows what the headers are and can go and find them. You can make a table of contents, and you can tell it either make the content as hyperlinks to jump to the item or you can say bigger out what the page is going to be and figure out the number. There's a lot of reasons (Inaudible) look for someone with the screen reader lets me navigate the documents much more quickly and intelligently. So part of what I want to stress during this whole four weeks is when you've got 10 different ways to do the same thing, if you try to use the computer markup features such as header, center, bold, all those things. It will serve you and your readers much better. Okay.

The next is explaining the following two slides. We've got two slides with the same information in them. Each has two columns and it, and the one is created with the PowerPoint table reader that is a kind of markup. PowerPoint notes that it is a table and when I put material in I'm likely to put it into column 1 or column 2 and the one after that is the same information laid out not using the table feature but the are so visually got the same information. Visually in two columns what the computer doesn't know that it just makes a profound difference for a screen reader the first page that we are going to look at you will see the screen reader read it to you and it will basically take all the information in column 1 and get it from the top down and it will take the kind of information in column 2 and read that from the top down as if it were one long column. And the next, it doesn't know there's columns it normally reads across a page from left to right, so they will read an item in column one and then an item in column 2, one, two, one, two and it doesn't make any sense.

So I will push these two slides and let you listen to Joss. Slide one table 1 (Inaudible) city state Los Angeles California New York, Maine, Chicago, Vermont, Detroit, Virginia (Inaudible) so because did anybody hear it? If you saw what was on the page you can imagine what job did. So the second the first one said it was two columns and then I read each column down, the second one right across each column down and in any case it makes sense. The next slide is actually pretty dependent redundant basically (Inaudible) when I was rambling guy you know by cognitive I don't really know what I want to say I know what I want to talk about but I don't really know what I want to say. So oftentimes I walk away and let it germinate in my subconscious and then I come back and I've got a clear outline in my mind ABC (Inaudible) and all of that starts to fall into place. If I can end up with a clear simple outline of what I want to say the odds I found in my experience is that the end product that I make is much simpler, much clearer than the end product (Inaudible) for the audience to understand. Frankly, when I began as an arrogant graduate student and wanted to make sure the students knew how intelligent I was and how dumb they were so I didn't mind talking over their head were talking in circles and if they did understand it just proved that they were stupid and I was smart. I'm not here to show off I'm here to communicate with the students that if they don't understand what I'm saying it's maybe it's because I didn't say clearly and not that they were stupid.

So it's been a challenge for the rest of my career to refocus on trying to say things clearly and be more concerned about getting my communication across then showing off with how great and intelligent I am. So specificity and clarity and thinking it all through ahead of time all these things are really important and from what I read about the other teachers they think that the more you can divide your time into small segments it lets the student know which segment you are going to cover and periodically stop to review to say we've done ABC, now we are going to go to DEF. Give them a roadmap periodically to show where you are, where you are going but especially depend on what you are saying online they don't have that opportunity as well (Inaudible). Cleared in the process of having to be cleared (Inaudible) comments about (Inaudible) paragraph and show them in class maybe once a week and you can elaborate on it.

Other different philosophies about captioning, some actually tried to do it word for word, the other is to try to convey the meaning and that my school focused on meeting. So they said they were going to not provide the Word for Word captioning a were going to (Inaudible) and at first I was appalled by this they were dumb down my class, I said this is a college class you're going to dumb down the class they call me down and said no it's not going to dumb it down I said well (Inaudible) make your script and send it through e-mail and we will see about that. I read it and it was clearer than what was in the movie. After that they showed three or four movies and I saw that each time it was simpler and I finally decided you know, they are right. I was very impressed that they could do it simpler and better. I often run what I write what I write something in the software different grades in terms of its grade level. And usually if something comes out about great 15 or 16 I think I should go down a little bit and I always find that every time I work to get it down it doesn't come out dumbed down, it comes out clear. So still learning it from day to day.

Okay, the next slide talks about trying to use the markup tools in the software and I think we are largely looking at that direction right now doesn't make a lot of sense. Distraction. Part of what you need to do as you are getting our software ready to think about things and we will look at this next week but your document already comes with basically a style sheet attached to it certain features for header one, Header too, Header three, paragraph and other kinds of things depending on what you are writing where, for whom you may want to use the built in one, you may prefer your headers to be in different color or size than the way it is than what they call the normal style, the normal template. So you can define your own (Inaudible) so if you want to play around and put on something different or fancy you may want to go into the software and try to affect all of those kinds of features. And we will talk about that a little bit as we talk about Word and PowerPoint in particular.

So the last thing I want to talk about is the way that structure contributes to meaning. There's three sides of going to have you looked at. I became particularly aware of the importance of the structure (Inaudible) as my wife was reading things, repeating things to meet and they may have been quite aware that had a main section with subsections and then another main section with subsections under it. She was reading along and suddenly I'm not sure of the meaning of what she's reading. If it's part of the same section that she was reading it would mean one thing to me, if on the other hand it was part of a new section with another Header it could have a different meeting. I can't think of a good example now, but I tried to ask her to clarify what was there and she thought I was stupid (Inaudible) I guess it was one of those marital things, but I finally got her to try to let me know when she starts a new heading or stubs subheading because it really helps me clarify.

 So what you have here are six items on the screen. They are New York, Albany, Rochester, Washington, Spokane and Seattle. And you look at those as those structure or layout is such and so they appear to be all one list of things that I suppose (Inaudible) instead it is a list of cities that go to the next (Inaudible) so, here we have the same six items only there's a blank line between them. Is that six cities, and for some reason (Inaudible) that's a possibility. Or did the blank line (Inaudible) it's not going to be very clear.

Then when we go to the third page we've got the same six items with a blank line between them but New York and Washington are different than the cities underneath them. But tell me what these six items are conveying if you consider the structure. Anyone? Well, I think what it is is two states, New York and Washington. And underneath them to cities in each state. So instead of being six cities I think you have to look more at to cities and to cities in two states. So then the structure and layout of information can tell us something about the meeting. And so as you are working on a document without thinking about it the already layout provides structure and help but what I wanted to let you know is that for me now on the first page the six cities, second page it looks sort of like Dick cities and a blank line (Inaudible) if on if on the last page to cities are coming at the larger font I wouldn't be aware of that it would still look like six cities to me. When actually my screen reader (Inaudible) font different screenwriters (Inaudible) different font on capital letters so I only wanted to tell the important things the punctuation (Inaudible) backdrop of punctuation and other different types of things. But if you have the head of the computer does it for header and it can say header one, Header too, Header three or whatever, then under that, Albany, Rochester and suddenly I would get that information (Inaudible) two different lists, each one with a header and that started wondering how the headers (Inaudible) then its list of two cities in each. And if you use computer markup in Word and other tools instead of just fiddling around with font size and type you would get that information. As well as I said earlier it will also let you make a table of contents and other kinds of things.

So the next slide talks about the resources. We are going to have a resource page and we will send that information to you in e-mail but you already noted, so by tomorrow to go to the resource page you should have a link to the slides and a link to the online presentation and by next week I made half before next week I may have some resources I want you to look at before next week. If I do that I will e-mail you about it as well. And for the following three weeks he will be able to find a recording of the same resource page. So, last let's look and see what we are going to do next week So, it's a busy week next week with some real information in it. And probably I will have you open up word part way through the presentation to play with some things that we are talking about inward as well.

Okay. We've got a few minutes left and as I said this was going to be a fairly broad overview. Reminding you to really think through what you are going to talk about before hand, think about it through the audience and the location where it is being given if you aren't going to be looking at this as a student online, the information on the web, you want to make one set of choices, if you are sending it to me (Inaudible) all of those things to make differences in what you do great so think about that ahead of time. Most courses now that have a lecture online audio lectures the teacher just gives an audio of the lecture he gave in class and if you are actually doing it online, live you might make it very different so that the menu of where you are giving the audience and the content all make differences about what you are doing. Try to do it as simple as possible.try to make your English as simple as possible (Inaudible) include some of the best and then reason why they had so many students that the teachers had to make it simple and clear. That helps with the disability. So try to avoid too many obscure words. I was reading about this week and the author tried in a theology but tried to make it simple for people who don't have much theology background and in it he used the word did he expect. City estate I looked at it and I said it looks like from what I know of Latin (Inaudible) but I don't quite know why. I've got a PhD. They've got my doctorate dissertation on Christian socialism and the incarnation (Inaudible) theology. I had to go to a dictionary. To look up the word. So he missed his mark. So simplicity is hard. It takes extra time and thought (Inaudible) okay I will quit and if you have some questions I'd be glad to talk about them. Sorry, I read over I went over.

   Okay my question may be answered in the next week. I'm holding onto it for the moment.

   I hope so. If it was as good as I want to be a will be answered next week. We will try to talk about Word 2003 and 2007 I haven't seen 2010 and so I won't comment on that. I'm was fined 2007 that's what I'm working on here. They had some troubles and I had troubled for a few weeks with one of the drivers (Inaudible) 2007 but that seems totally fixed now. I didn't mention it in talking but I do want to draw your attention on the second to last slide mention the fact that we have a free webinar on Wednesday, 29 September by Karen McCall about Word 2010 so you might be interested in dropping in on that webinar and you can register off the webinar page. And the other thing is Wednesday next week we have a free webinar on soft charts, the software that tries to help prepare to go online and do a lot of things for you and they claim that it has accessible output and I know some people who've used it were very pleased with it. Others have some question marks. But it's probably worth learning about. Okay, see you next week.

   Goodbye everyone. I just typed in a few clinics, webpage where you can go (Inaudible) we are having each month. Thank you very much, bye everyone.

   Thank you my soul, I will be curious to see if the captioning worked.

   Okay I will let you know, bye bye.