 Everybody, people with disabilities is much less present. Austria is a small country, so networking works quite well. And a few years ago, the network for repository managers did an Austria-wide survey of repositories and also asked about accessibility and the result was disappointing. The association of Austrian librarians has a working group on the topic of digital accessibility libraries, in which Andreas Jaidler, who is the disability officer at the University of Frankfurt, is also involved. Together we have already issued guidelines for the creation of accessible content. And today we will talk about tools and accessibility. And I would like to say thank you very much, Andreas. Thank you. Okay, this was the introduction. Okay. Yeah. Then I think we will start. Yes, when Susanne asked me to talk about accessibility at this format, I thought about, hmm, I talk about accessibility all the time, what would be a nice topic to talk about. And then I thought on what makes me most frustrated when I'm doing accessibility work, when I'm creating documents and so on. Oh, I forgot to share my slides. So, sorry, I will start this now. Start the presentation first. And then I will share it. Okay. So, okay. You should see my presentation now. Yes. And yeah, this is another accessibility feature that I don't know if everyone knows that exists. This is just a built-in feature in PowerPoint where you get live transcriptions of your presentation or captions, if you can call it. This is a nice feature that are built in several Microsoft applications nowadays. You need Office 365 to use it because it uses cloud services. But if you are talking not with a dialect, then it should understand you quite well. And I hope it understands me. And as I read my text when I'm speaking, it looks like it works quite well. Yeah, even if I'm stuttering a bit, it does my phrases. And I like this feature. And I turned it on to show it today. This is one of the cool ways how tools can support accessibility. So, today's topic is it's all about the tools. So then let's go to the next slide. So, today when we are talking about accessibility, we have guidelines that tell us how to create accessible content. We have standards. For example, the guidelines, for example, everyone knows the web accessibility guidelines and web content accessibility guidelines. And yeah, these tell us how we make create accessible content or better how the content should look like to be accessible. We come to the problems later. Yeah, and we have standards. For example, we have in PDF, we have PDF UA nowadays that stands for universal accessibility. And it would be nice if we write an office document, a web document, and want to publish it as a PDF file, then it would be really nice that this file would be a PDF UA compliant. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this topic today, because that's not that easy to achieve. Yeah, and we have laws, at least in Europe and in the USA and in the UK that rely on these standards and guidelines and public services in most cases should produce documents that are conformant to these guidelines and standards. But yeah, nevertheless, many of the documents we find on the web are still not accessible. So we can ask us the question, why is this the case still? So from the practice, from practical work, I observed some reasons why this may be the case. One of the reasons may be guidelines and instructions are not read or understood quite well. The web content accessibility guidelines in the latest version has about, I guess, 78 checkpoints to apply to. Scientists from other fields, for example, if you are from physics or medicine, they don't have the time at the internet to read and understand accessibility guidelines that have tens to hundreds of checkpoints that they have to apply to. This is something that will never happen that people read or understand quite well. So in the current state, we have the guidelines, but imagine there are guidelines but no one reads them. In most cases, the guidelines are not the right media to transport how accessibility works. Often it would be easier to have a short, yeah, a movie training video about, for example, why you should use alternative text in your documents. So for pictures, for animations and so on, why there should be alternative texts. If you are not involved in accessibility, maybe you do not understand why, because no one told you. And if you are not reading the guidelines, you don't get the information either. So some short notice, some, yeah, to-do lists or something like that would be nice. There already are some floating around in the net, but the problem is, yeah, not everyone gets them because they don't know where to find them. So not the right media. Yeah, one of the big problems is the lack of personal involvement by most people. If you are not blind, normally you are not using a screen reader. So you do not know how these tools work. So it is hard to understand for most people why they should use alternative text or why they should use style sheets in words to, yeah, to get headings and so on. Yeah, this is one of the problems. Accessibility, accessible documents cannot be created automatically. Yeah, there is not just a button. Please create an accessible document. In most cases, you have to get a basic knowledge on a few things, what you just need to know when creating documents. I talk about documents because for today's presentation, I choose Microsoft Word as an example because it's the tool that most of us use to produce texts and several documents. Yeah, tools make it easy to create non-accessible content. I will come to this later. But for example, in Word, you can choose your own colors. You can choose your own phones as you like them. So if something looks quite fancy, quite nice, it may be some people will not be able to use the document because your phone is just a night hand written phone, for example, then some people may not get the content of your document. On the other hand, tools make it difficult to create accessible content. I will come to this later as well. As we will see, it is not easy to achieve several goals with the tools we everyday use. And another big problem is in most organizations, there is no big plan to accessibility. I began to study and to talk about accessibility maturity models in the last months because this is a quite interesting topic for organizations. Because most organizations do not have a plan how to deal with accessibility on an organizational level. So most organizations do not have plans how new employees get in touch with accessibility. There are no training programs. There are no information materials and such an implementation of such a model would be a good way to start dealing with accessibility in small or bigger organizations. But this is not the topic for today. But, yeah, it is an important thing. Okay. Let's take a look at Microsoft Word as I said in the introduction. Where are the problems with Microsoft Word? If you produce scientific data, if you produce papers or other document types, you have the problem, no, you don't have the problem, but you just need to use tables. And the problem with Microsoft Word is you only can use simple tables. So that means a simple table has columns and rows. And in Microsoft Word, you can only make column headlines. So if you have a table with a first name and last name of persons and age, then you have the column headlines, first name, last name and age. And in each row, you have the person's first name, last name and age. And a screen reader would read this in the way that it reads, for example, for my data, it would read first name Andreas, last name Geitler, age, something. And yeah, you need this relation of a cell to the column heading. And in Word, it simply isn't possible to shift these 19 degrees around so that you have headings for the rows. In some cases, you need this direction in a table. Yeah, this is one of the biggest drawbacks of Microsoft Word in the current state. And it gets even worse if you wanted to make more complicated tables. If you have sub-tables, sub-paths, it gets really, you just can't do it with Word. You need to rely on other tools. If it comes to table, I'll tell everyone the best way to use, to represent tables is using HTML because in HTML, the language websites are created in. There are mechanisms to create more complex tables. For each table cell, you can get an individual ID. And this ID, you can relate to column headings or row headings, and there you can combine them and make really complex tables. And yeah, in HTML, this is possible. In Word, it is not possible. In PDF, for example, it is possible to create these more complex tables. But yeah, you need the tools to do it. You need Acrobat. You need the knowledge to do it. And most people do not have this knowledge. So if we are talking about, yeah, okay, if you are talking about ways to bring scientists to use tools, then we need to give them the tools how to do it. Because yeah, it's not, no one will learn how to HTML to produce their files. And if there are no tools existing to make these tasks, then tables will simply be not accessible by, for example, screen reader users. Another problem with MS Word is there is no simple workflow to create accessible PDF forms. PDF forms are one of the most asked feature people asked me to make training courses for. And I have to tell everyone there is no simple workflow. So if you want to create a PDF form out of Microsoft Word, for example, you have to, yeah, you can, it's just, you print it, you re-scan it and let Acrobat identify the cells of the form fields and so on. And this is a process that is related to many errors. You need to know what to do. And there is no quite automatic procedure. It is, in some cases, automatic, but you have to error check and therefore you have to know how all this works. For me, as a computer scientist, it's simply not understandable why huge companies like Microsoft are not able to implement a simple transformation of, for example, a form field in Word to a form field in PDF. It's just a simple transformation from one format to another. And why these huge companies that with their major, with the huge resources are not able to implement something like this is not understandable for me. The public sector in each country invests extremely big amount of money in these two office tools. And I simply can't understand why they are not able to implement accessible formats with these tools. So, yeah, with Word, for example, it is not possible to be sure that the CDF you create from the Word file isn't corrupted. Even I, as an accessibility expert, get frustrated or yeah, it's annoyed when I create a document. And later on in Acrobat, I find out that things I did right in Word were created the wrong way. One of the examples is if for some reason I have a table and I combine cells in the table. This works quite well if I combine two rows in one column to row cells. Then the exported PDF works quite fine in Acrobat. But if I'm doing it in the other direction, if I have two cells in the same row that span over more columns, then there will be an error in the CDF document. The first time I realized this effect, I couldn't believe it. I had to Google around and I found out this is a bug that is known for years now and hasn't been fixed by Microsoft. So yeah, things that you would expect that should work out of the box are simple. It's simply not the case that they work. Another thing is table of contents. In Word, if you create a table of contents, export it to a PDF and then I want to evaluate this PDF for a PDF UA, then you will see that the create table of contents has errors or just doesn't meet the conformance of PDF UA because Microsoft just does not do it the way it should be. And this is one of the biggest problems for me at the moment. There is no simple way, at least with Word itself, to create PDF UA conformant files. You need to buy additional software, for example, Access Word from Access4 is one of these tools, but the tool itself costs more than the office site of Microsoft. So I have to buy expensive additional software to do something that should already be done by the software. At least about Austrian law, public services should not buy software that produces non-accessible content. So normally ministries or universities should not be allowed to buy Microsoft software because the software out of the box could produce accessible content. So this is another thing we could talk about. These are just some examples on how a correct use of a tool results in non-accessible or not so good accessible documents. Let's take another thing with tools I identified is there's too much functionality in the tool. For example, in Word, you can choose the colors as you like it. If you, for example, want to have your heading in a light gray on a white background, the contrast between background and foreground is just too small for some people to read it. In Word, it's possible. Maybe it shouldn't be possible. Another thing is you can choose your phones as you like them. You have the freedom to choose them, as I already talked about. Maybe in some cases it shouldn't be possible to do so. You can, but don't have to use document structure. So in Word, for example, if you want to make a heading, then not so small amount of people just select the text, select a bigger phone, select a different phone, different color, and then you have a heading. Usually it's the heading for you, but semantically the screen reader will not use it as a heading if you haven't chosen a heading style for this. Why do screen reader users need headings? Because if you are, for example, reading a book and you wouldn't have headings or something like that in it, just only the text, then you could read the text, but it wouldn't be a pleasure. So because you just don't have the structure. And the screen reader uses these hints on headings to jump from one heading to the next, for example. So you can jump over chapters or sub chapters and so on. And so you need this structure. In Word, it's just easy. Just use heading level one, heading level two to structure your documents. But still it's just possible to don't do it this way. You can, but you do not have to add text alternatives to non-text content. This is something I already talked about as well. If you have a picture, a screen reader, a blind person cannot see what's on the picture. The screen reader will not read what's on the picture. With latest developments in artificial intelligence, this gets better because Microsoft or Apple supports auto recognition of images nowadays. But these recognitions work. In some cases, they work quite well. In other cases, they are not quite usable. So in newer versions of Word, for example, if you add an image, then Word will create an alternative text for you. But it is on you to check if the text makes sense. For example, you could have a text of a cat and the alternative text would say dog. But if no human checks this, then it may be that the content isn't told right to a blind person. These are just some examples on how too much functionality gets worse for accessibility. So what do we need to... First, after the slides, I will show you some example in Word. So what do we need to come over these things that I told you about? We need simple rules for content creators. Simple rules does mean no really long guidelines with a tenth of checkpoints that we have to meet. For example, at Clangford University, we defined... This is not standard compliant, but we for us defined 10 points that in Microsoft Word, everyone can simply check to get, let's say, more accessible Word documents. So in our view, if we are using these 10 points, this is 10 tips, then the document will be quite good readable by at least screen reader users. Okay. Yeah, as I told about the functionality in the last slide, we need to reduce the functionality of tools. In preparation for this talk today, I thought about what could Microsoft, for example, do to make this situation a bit better for authors. And I came to the conclusion, why can't Microsoft and other companies not just implement an accessibility mode for their documents? So in the current state, if you use a color-contrast combination that is not readable, that isn't quite good readable, then there is a way I will show you later. In Word, how you can check this because Word has an accessibility checker built in that checks if the color combinations, for example, are readable. And yeah, but you have to activate this and Word doesn't tell you, so this combination isn't good readable, so don't use it. It tells you don't use it, but it should not allow you to use it. So if you activate an accessibility mode, then such color combinations shouldn't be possible. Or if you are using a fancy phone, then the system just shouldn't show you the phone at all would be a nice idea. If you are adding an image, then yeah, then there must be an alternative text to the image. Otherwise, the document will not be saved, for example. But in my experience, even these hints or in some tools, there are just wizards that show you if accessibility is met or not. In some cases, they help to produce more accessible documents because people want to do their documents right. And if there are some red alert signs, for example, then they will think about what they did wrong. For example, if you have your text corrections, then yeah, you get your red lines on the words. And if you see a red line, there's something wrong. I should do it another way. Let's check it. And these hints must be more visually or at least in an accessibility mode. Such combinations shouldn't be possible. So yeah, this is another thing I already told tools should point out accessibility issues. This is what I just talked about. Documents created by tools must be standard compliant. There is no reason why Microsoft can't implement an export function to PDF UA on board on the tools. It's just they don't want to for what reason ever because it's a format not created by Microsoft, possibly maybe. But if they are selling their tools to public services, then I think we can expect that files exported from this format should be standard compliant. Or much better, tools should only generate accessible content, but this is a dream. I don't know if that comes to be true in some time. Okay, this is my input from the slides. I just want to show you in Microsoft Word how you could use the accessibility wizard or how you can call it or the accessibility checking function. So I will go back to my Zoom where I was. Okay. Where is my Zoom window? Please let me so I don't want to leave the meeting. I just want to find where my screen sharing option is. When you have the screens or about that and it's very useful. Thank you so much. Okay. Oh, so it's my second screen. It's the second screen. You're right. So, yeah. So this is a problem when you're visually impaired, then you often don't get what's happening around you. Okay. That's what I was asking about Zoom, because you would imagine that they would also have a little bit better built accessibility tools. Yes. So, oh no, this is wrong. This was my slide. So where is my, so, okay. Just phone it and so, okay. Okay. This is a simple document where I had a document heading and an image, not quite much more. I just activated the accessibility browser here. You may find it in if you go to, yeah, review and activate check accessibility. Then you will get this dialogue in my case. I just added the image. This is a nice image that tells us that you cannot go down the stairs by wheelchair or with your baby bag. And yeah, I just added it. And as I told you, word just adds an alternative text and the accessibility feature just tells me review auto-generated description. So it's just picture one. So I used the picture one. And if you want to check the alternative text for a picture, then you, oh, sorry. Okay. Okay. I had to search it because normally I work in German and in English I didn't know where the menu items were. So in this case, I pointed at the image and just select few alternative text. And then there I get the description, a picture containing outdoor signs, sign, cartoon. Okay. Yeah, it's somehow what there is on the picture, but in relation to the text, I normally had some reason why I chose this picture and then I would describe it in more detail. So yeah, it's good that I checked it. So I just can delete the text and replace it with a better one. Yeah. This is for the images. In general, there are no rules to define alternative text for images. It really depends on what information is important for the text. I tell my students to, if they want to decide what the description should be, then they should just close their eyes and imagine when they delete the image what information for the text will get lost. So in most cases you then get the idea what you should write to the alternative text. Or in some cases you don't need the alternative text if the information is already in the main text. So the picture is just, yeah, an eventual representation of what's already in the text. So there are different ways how to use images. But this is stuff for another lecture. This about the images and the second one here if I choose another color combination. So please don't be irritated. I use the dark mode in Word because it's better for my eyes. So if I use a light gray, for example, for the text, so then in this case you already see it's much worse to read. And if I go to the accessibility panel, so let's go to review again, check accessibility. And then there is another warning on hard to read text contrast. So Word tells me that in this case if I select it, then it gets selected here in the text too. And yeah, I get some information what I should do to collect this error. In this case, just use another color combination. Yeah, these are just two examples on how Word can assist you to make more accessible documents. Another thing that you see on my Word settings here is that I activated these symbols, for example, for paragraphs and so on, these blue symbols. They show me how much spare paragraphs I added to the text, for example, because in some settings screen reader will read you spare lines. So it may be quite annoying if you read the text and you hear space, space, space, space, space when you are going through the document. There are other ways to make room if you want to have it, but just hitting the Enter key in most cases isn't the best way to do it. Okay, yeah, this is it for now for me. Some feature I wanted to additionally show you if you go to Views and activate the navigation pane. This is something many people already, I also don't know. In the first pane you get a minimalistic view of your current page and the second one is the content. So if I change the title, this text was a title, so if I change it to heading 1, you see in the navigation pane my heading 1 is shown. So if I make a subgraph and I add it to heading 2, you see I have a tree, I have my heading 1 and heading 2 per headlines and if I click on them, it just jumps. So it's some kind of bookmark. This setting also helps you to check if your document is well structured. Okay, now we talked about what in the first place about tools, how they can make it harder to produce accessible content, but also how they can help you in producing accessible content. Thank you for listening and I hope you have some nice questions and I'm filled to answer them. Thank you so much Andreas, that was very useful. I was wondering about open office or liberal office. Are they doing a better job on accessibility? Should we recommend them instead of Microsoft tools? In some cases, it allows to export in PDF UA, but it's not, for example, it's not usable for exporting PDF forms. It does a better job than Word in this case, but it still isn't what you would expect. So it's no better choice in this case. Thank you and I have a question to you and maybe Suzanne as well and I'm dropping once again a link in the chat for guidelines on preparing accessible content for repositories that Suzanne and her colleagues produced and I was wondering were the US repository managers check documents for accessibility when they are deposited? Is it part of the repository curation workflow or not really? Maybe a question to Suzanne. It would be nice, we could do so, but for us it's not possible because we are so huge university and have so many different objects in our repositories, so we can do it, but it would be fine. I agree with you. The problem with automatic checks is that in the case of accessibility you cannot check everything automatically. For example, as I showed the image thing, you can check if there is an alternative text for an image, but you cannot change, you cannot check if it really makes sense. Maybe in some years when artificial intelligence does a quite better job then maybe it will be possible, but in today's state it just isn't possible. And there are other fields like easy understanding and so there are already algorithms that check how easy a text is, but in the end these algorithms rely on... For example, for people with learning disabilities it may even be not possible to read or understand the text in the way it should be. What I wanted to say is automatic tools are nice for some tasks, but are not the way accessibility experts would tell you how to check accessibility. Thank you. Any other questions to Andrea? And Andrea, you shared the link in the chat. Do you maybe want to tell more about your work? Andrea shared the link to guidelines they produce as part of the field. Yes. Hello. Hello. I mean it's more about digitization when you do the scanning of the books for example and we produce some guidelines to pay attention to during the scanning and after doing alternative formats for post-processing when you try to adapt for the people with special needs and we also pay attention to different kinds of formats not only Word files but also EPUB and HTML and so on. So if you take a look maybe it's something that would be interesting to others. Thank you so much. I will surely take a look. Thanks a lot. It was very useful and very practical session and thanks a lot for sharing new experiences so I hope we'll continue this conversation and we'll share slides and recording and maybe we'll have another session and look at other tools. Thank you so much and there's a lot of thank you messages and a chat saying that it's... Thank you for your interest. It was a pleasure and if you want to talk about the subjects just contact me I'm in-house every day. So please don't hesitate to ask. There is one more question what automatic tools would you recommend Andreas even if they are not 100% accurate in repositories with intensive submission rates it would be very time consuming to check manually. Very good session. This is not such an easy... It depends on what you want to check if you want to check just web pages for repositories I don't know if there are even some automatic tools to check accessibility available. Yeah it's not that easy to tell but if you want I can take a look around and send you some sources I found but as you saw I'm not a huge fan of automatic accessibility tools so I don't use them and therefore yeah I haven't the big overview on automatic tools at the time. Thank you still reading the chat yeah good point Andreas saying check what to EPUB tool by Daisy Consortium makes creative parts of the file prepared what files yeah Isabelle is saying it would be great if you could check some tools to connect you and then Isabelle is also saying maybe this is a topic for repository softwares to explore more yeah absolutely I just found an interesting word to EPUB tools from the Daisy Consortium this one just works quite well but you have in this case you have to keep in mind that your original document has to be in some condition that it may be translated to the other forms for example EPUB another thing I see in the chat is Exit monitor was used yeah the exit tools are quite broadly used because they are command line tools and you can use them on servers quite well if you want to start with something then this would be a good starting point thank you so much everyone I don't see any other questions so thank you thank you once again and have a good day see you next time I think we should keep in touch on this topic thank you very much