 Welcome, everyone, to this edition of the Accessible Technology webinar series. Today, we're going to be talking about accessible electronic documents. As Anna Marie said, my name is Gaby DeYoung, and I am a member of the IT accessibility team here at UW IT Accessible Technology Services. And I've been working in technology and disability for about the last 20 years or so in higher ed and been working with the different campuses in Seattle, Baffle, and Tacoma on creating accessible content in the capacity that I am for about the last five years or so. All right. So let's take a look at the agenda for the next hour. I'm going to start about talking about best practices for creating accessible word and PowerPoint presentations. And then I'll talk a little bit more about what makes a PDF document accessible and the different success criteria for making sure that those kinds of documents are accessible. And then I'll also touch a little bit on accessibility in InDesign and the Google Workspace. So I know that we use the Google Workspace a lot for collaborating on certain projects. So I wanted to touch on that. And then we'll definitely cover accessibility checkers, ones that are built into Office and Adobe Acrobat Pro. And then, excuse me, now towards the end, we'll do a review of when it may be appropriate to use certain formats over other formats. OK. OK, great. So let's talk about what is included in accessible electronic documents. Well, many accessibility standards relate to content styling and layout. But for document accessibility, logical structure helps to paint a more clear picture in the user's mind. And this is achieved by using navigation elements, such as table of contents, heading levels, and lists. Descriptive body copy is often overlooked, but it plays a significant role in accessibility. Your body copy content should describe supporting materials, and that also helps sets the framework for graphics. Descriptive body and descriptive body copy also helps keep your alt text for images, short and to the point. And then you also want to make sure to include color-friendly palettes if you're using multiple colors that have a high contrast ratio between the foreground and the background. And that makes it more easy to distinguish those different foregrounds and backgrounds for those who may have low vision. And I've included a link on this slide for a free downloadable color contrast checker from the Pass Yellow group. And this tool allows you to check for color contrast and helps you determine if it will pass or fail requirements based off of the WCAG guidelines. So it's a really nice tool to have handy in your repertoire. You also want to make sure that you're providing a predictable user experience. Within electronic documents, the relationship between headings, paragraphs, figures, and page structure helps the reader to develop multiple ways to navigate and understand the document in a more reliable way. So it's really helpful to establish predictable patterns in documents. And that helps the reader gain familiarity with the content as they're cycling through the pages. OK. So now we've established a basic understanding of what should be included when creating accessible documents. Let's take a little bit deeper look at the tools within these different applications that can guide a content creator to build a more accessible word document. So headings. It's important to note that Microsoft Word is a word processing program. It's not a layout program. But with that said, it is possible to create an accessible word document that includes a nice layout when you're using the appropriate formatting tools within Microsoft Word. So when we're reading a document, sighted viewers can scan a page and use visual clues like large or bold text to find a section of a document that they may want to read. However, for somebody who uses a screen reader or assistive technology, those kinds of visual markups aren't really very useful. Instead, using predefined paragraph styles and headings allows for a screen reader user to navigate from section to section and heading to heading, rather than having to listen to the entire content from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. Now it's important to use paragraph styles to create the scaffolding that forms an outline of the content, rather than manually marking the text as bigger and bolder. And using paragraph styles provides anchor points for screen readers to navigate by. So when using styles, this provides an outline that is automatically used when initiating the table of contents tool in the references tab of Word. So for longer documents that have 10 pages or more, using styles in combination with the table of contents provides additional navigation aids that really benefits all users. And on this slide, I've included an image of the styles pane in Word. This happens to be Word for Mac, but it looks very similar in Word for Windows as well. And the style pane displays the styles included in a document. And this can be viewed by selecting the style pane icon on the home ribbon of your version of Word. Now in this list, you can see predefined styles, such as normal text, heading one, heading two, so forth and so on. And I think it's helpful to think of a style as a set of predefined formatting instructions that is utilized consistently throughout the document. And they're also used to identify semantic parts of a document. And styles can be easily modified in the styles pane and can be applied to a particular style throughout a document. Alt text for images provide textual information to visual elements. And they should provide a brief description of the image and why that image is relevant and why you included it in your document. It's very easy in most office applications to add alt text to an image just by selecting the image and then opening the alt text pane from the picture format tab that will appear on your home ribbon once you've selected that image. Now on this slide, I have a screenshot that shows the alt text pane in Word. In the center of the pane, a text field is available and that's where you would include a description of your image. And just above that text field is health information on how to construct your alt text. The information at the top of the pane states, how would you describe this object and its context to someone who is blind or low vision? And then there's some additional information that includes other hands such as the subject in detail, the setting and the actions or the interaction. Now alt text should be short and to the point about 140 characters or so or about the size of a tweet as the body copy really should contain enough information that supports the visual component, whether it's a photo or a chart or a graph. And on this slide, I've included a link to a resource that was put together by a special interest group on accessibility. And this resource provides great information on writing alt text for complex images, graphs, charts and other more complex visual renderings. Now images that are purely decorative should be marked as such as they can be redundant and often annoying for screen reader users if there's no real reason to include that image. And in office it's really easy to mark images as decorative by simply selecting the checkbox on here that says mark image is decorative. And that's included on the very, very bottom of this image in that alt text pane. Now Microsoft has also included a button that says generate a description for me in the alt text pane if you really don't know how to start writing your alt text. And it might be nice to try this as a way to see what kind of results you get and then you can augment the alt text. But keep in mind I've tested this a few times it has a lot of limitation and it doesn't really give good results so don't really rely on that as an accurate way of creating your alt text it can help you get started but really if you're including an image within your document you should have an idea of what that image should mean to those people who are encountering it and that would be the information that you'd wanna include in your alt text. It's also important to note that when you add an image to a Word document alt text will be generated automatically rather using Microsoft's AI for creating alt text. Now this can be turned off in the ease of access panel on Windows or in the preferences panel on Mac but again you should always review the automated text to determine if it accurately describes the image or if it provides a vague or inaccurate information and make any corrections that are necessary. Formatting lists are another way of creating structure in documents and you wanna make sure to use the correct list generating tool to do that. You can use the bulleted list tool to create bulleted lists and the numbers list tool to create ordered lists and the multi-level list tool helps with creating nested lists that has varying degrees with numbers and bullets. It helps you to kind of diagram that out. It can be a little bit tricky to use but it makes formatting multi-level lists a lot easier. In using formatted lists with these tools accurately conveys to screen readers how many items are in that list, where they are in the list and if the list is a sublist of another list and when they have exited out of those lists. So it's really important to use those formatting lists tools. Formatting tables. So by default assisted technology will read a table from left to right starting at the top and if the relationship between the table cells is not defined then the table is not formatted correctly. So if you're heading cells aren't associated with data cells a user can easily get lost in a sea of data. So if you have a table in your document be sure to review the table properties and assign a header row from your table. And this helps screen readers in assisted technology announce the table data in a more meaningful way in a more meaningful relational way. Simple table in office applications can be made accessible but complex tables that are nested or have merged cells or split cells cannot especially in Word and PowerPoint. You can in Excel of course as that is a spreadsheet program. So you wanna make sure to not include any merge or split cells within your tables and if you have nested tables I really highly recommend that you simplify them. And the image on this slide shows the table properties dialog box and that allows the content creator to assign the top row of a simple table as the header row. So from this dialog window you would select the row tab and then select the checkbox that says repeat as header row at the top of each page. Now doing this defines the top row of the table as a header row and that helps screen readers and other assistive technology to announce the data in a more meaningful way. You also wanna make sure to uncheck the box that says allow row to break across pages. A good table should not contain a data cell that spans more than one page. Now unfortunately the default settings for these two options is incorrect. So it's the allow the top button there allow or the top checkbox rather allow row to break across pages is automatically checked by default and repeat as header row at the top of each pane is not checked. So you wanna make sure if you're including a table in your word document to switch that to make sure that you uncheck the top one and then check the second one. To increase the accessibility of the table content creators can assign a summary of the table by selecting the alt tab rather on the table properties dialog box and a table summary should include a simple summary of how the table is laid out. Again, if you have tables that are nested or with cells that are merged or split you might wanna consider simplifying them as it makes it easier for everybody to understand the relationship of the data presented in those tables. Meaningful hyperlinks in electronic documents make it easier for screen readers or users to determine what that link is all about. So rather than listing the URL which can have a long string of letters and characters using meaningful hyperlinks helps users to know something about the destination of the link if they decide to click on it. And the image on this slide shows the insert hyperlink dialog window which is used to create a meaningful hyperlink. So first you wanna select the descriptive text that helps identify where that link may go. And you wanna try to avoid using text that says vague things such as click here or link as screen readers users can call up a list of links and if they just see click here, click here, click here it's really hard to know where clicking here is going to take them. So that's why you want to use more meaningful information when you're creating those links. Document title. So adding document properties allows screen reader users to get a bit more information about the document without the need to actually open it which can be time consuming especially if it's not the document that you're looking for. And for somebody who's using a screen reader or assistive technology this really can save time. So adding a document title, a summary and keywords are also really helpful for searching and indexing as well. And the image on this slide shows the properties dialog window and this is where a content creator can include additional information about a document including the title, the author and the keywords as well. Document language it's important to include the accurate language assignment to an entire document or to specify a block of text in a particular language. So many screen reader applications do support multiple languages and they can switch on the fly between supported languages providing they have those multiple languages installed on their system. But for most of us the default language sitting for creating documents in office is English. But on this slide I've included a screenshot that shows the language dialog window and this is where the author can assign or change the language of text within a document. Okay. So that was just a brief, brief introduction about creating accessible word documents. Now we're gonna switch gears and talk about creating accessible PowerPoint. In PowerPoint functions differently than other document formats as the content distributed throughout the slideshow is often very visual and image based. And one thing that makes PowerPoint a bit more complicated is that people can consume the content in various ways. They may be watching someone present the PowerPoint or they may be viewing a PowerPoint on their own computer or they may be viewing printed slides. So the way in which someone interacts with a slideshow is going to shape if and how they can access the content. But if you're presenting a PowerPoint presentation even if you don't intend to distribute your PowerPoint it's always important to remember that for somebody who cannot see your presentation you must explain all the content presented on each slide using built-in templates. So it's an important part of making accessible slide decks is to use the layout templates that are built into PowerPoint. And this is important because screen readers may jump over or ignore items such as text boxes that are added to slides that exist outside of the normal content boxes that are provided within the templates. So you really want to avoid selecting a blank slide and then adding text boxes to populate your slide. Instead you want to make sure to select a layout template from the new slide dropdown menu on the home tab that's shown on this image on this slide. Now PowerPoint does not use headings instead slide titles in the templates are essentially function like headings in that they provide structure for the content and aid and navigation for screen reader users. Every slide in a presentation must have a slide title and each slide title should be unique. So if you have any duplicated slide titles that can be confusing and make it a little bit difficult for somebody to find the information they're looking for. So if you have any spillover information use numbering in the slide titles such as one of two and two of two. Also individuals who have dyslexia sometimes describe seeing text that swims together on a page or on a slide. And they often see text merge or distort. So for people who have dyslexia or have low vision you might want to consider reducing the reading load of the text on a slide and use a larger font size of at least 18 points or more. And this may also benefit from using familiar sans serif fonts such as Arial or Calibri. And avoid using all capital letters and excessive use of italics or underlines as this can be really visually distracting. And you want to make sure to include a lot of space between sentences and paragraphs as that also helps with clarity. Okay, reading order. Okay, so screen readers and other assistive technologies will read the slide content in the order it was added to the slide. So when you're creating your slide deck many of us may take old slide decks and augment them. So when you do that it's really important to check the reading order of your slides as content that is added afterwards it may read out of order. And so it's really important to check your reading order especially if you are using an older slide deck and just updating it for your current presentation. So checking the reading order of a slide can be done on the Windows platform using the reading order pane. And this feature is fairly new. It's about a year old, maybe a year and a half old. And it hasn't yet made it to the Mac version of PowerPoint in Office. And I'm not quite sure when that's going to be available but the image on this slide shows the reading order pane in PowerPoint for Windows. Now each item on this list is an editable content element. And contents on the slide are arranged and read by the screen reader in order from top to bottom. Now it's possible to rearrange these elements by either clicking and dragging the element or you can use a little up and down arrows that appear in the upper corner of the pane there. And moving these elements will affect the order in which they are announced by the screen reader. So the title of the slide should be the first element announced followed by the text content and then the alt text assigned to the grouped image. You'll also notice that there are little checkboxes that appear just to the left of the elements in the reading order pane. Now unchecking those checkboxes will signal the screen reader to skip announcing that content but the content will still appear visually on the slide. Now checking the reading order on a Mac is completely different. The image on this slide shows the selection pane in PowerPoint for Mac. You might notice something a little bit different when looking at the reading order in this image. The slide title is on the bottom and then the text placeholder sits just above the title and then the group image sits above the text placeholder. So essentially the reading order in the selection pane instead of going from top to bottom goes in reverse from bottom to top. Now, excuse me, in PowerPoint for Windows there is also an option to launch the selection pane from the format tab and the reading order is reversed as well but using the reading order pane in PowerPoint for Windows makes more logical sense when looking at the actual reading order from top to bottom. Now, as I mentioned before the reading order pane in PowerPoint for Windows is fairly new and previously users in Windows had to use the selection pane and make sure the reading order was in reverse from bottom to top just like Mac users have to do now. So the hope is that Microsoft will soon issue an update to PowerPoint for Mac in which they introduce a reading order pane that lists the slide elements in the appropriate reading order from top to bottom. Now, on this image you may notice these little eye icons to the right of the slide elements. Now, if you select that eye icon which is essentially a toggle switch the text will not be visible and will not be announced by the screen reader. So essentially it just hides it from view and it hides the information from the screen readers as well. I talked a little bit about grouping images just a bit ago and I've also mentioned alt text for images and word. And the same is true in PowerPoint. I add alt text to an image. You can select the image and then from the picture format tab you can select alt text and then you'll get the alt text window. But if you have multiple images on the slide which sometimes many of us do include multiple images you may want to consider grouping similar images by going to the arrange dropdown menu on the home ribbon. Now the image on this slide shows how to group images in PowerPoint for Windows. Now, first you'll want to select all of the images you want to group together by using control quick click on a Windows or command click if you're on a Mac and then select the arrange dropdown from the home ribbon and select group images. And what this does is it flattens the image into a single unit and then you can apply alt text to the entire group rather than each individual image. Same you a little bit of time and also making your image a little bit more cohesive as well. Okay, so I wanted to bring up some common barriers to accessible content that I still see happening on occasion when remediating documents. Microsoft Office products have been around for quite some time, several decades and some folks have developed some workarounds or hacks or bad habits sometimes I call them for laying out content rather than using the appropriate formatting tools. And sometimes these workarounds can cause barriers to creating accessible content. And I wanted to point out a few common barriers that content creators still use that really should be avoided. And then some possible solutions. So first are text boxes and word. Authors sometimes use text boxes as a call out to emphasize a thought. Screen readers and it's important to remember that screen readers read and navigate information in an electronic document in a linear manner. So if a text box is inserted into a document saying the margin somewhere, a screen reader may miss that information or if it does catch it and announce it, it may be out of the normal reading order which can really cause confusion as to, is that content being read in the proper reading order? So really the solution is to not use text boxes or if you do use a text box, make sure that it is in line with the rest of the content. I still see some document creators using tabs and spaces to format text in order to make it look like columns. And this causes some very unpredictable results when using a screen reader or other assistive technologies. So if you wanna make your text flow accurately, use the column layout tool and that will reflow your content into the proper columns. And it's pretty simple to use. Non-printing characters such as hard carriage returns, multiple spaces, multiple tabs to create space between content in your Word document, in your Word document, especially if you're using many of them in succession, are also announced by the screen reader. Carriage returns are announced as blank, spaces are announced in spaces, tabs are announced as tab. And using that to achieve the desired look or to adjust the space you want between paragraphs, it really can be kind of annoying. So instead of using that, instead of using a hard carriage return to create those paragraphs, consider adjusting your paragraph spacing in order to achieve that desired look or in order to gain a little bit more space between your paragraphs. And also avoid using multiple hard carriage returns to push information to the next page. You wanna use page breaks instead. Okay, now we're gonna completely switch gears and we're gonna talk about accessible PDF. Now there are three types of PDF documents. The first type is an image PDF and those are usually created when an article from a book is scanned on a flatbed scanner, for example. And then the output selected as a PDF file. And this type of PDF is usually inaccessible to screen readers if optical character recognition was not included during the PDF process. And it essentially makes the document an image and inaccessible. So if you're creating a PDF document from a flatbed scanner and you marquee the text and it doesn't capture any of that text, that means that you have an image PDF. And on the slide, I have an example of a scan document and you may notice that the text fades in and out in areas and there are all kinds of markup on this or underlining and there are marks that go through the text on the page and there are all these little scratches and little marks. Now it's possible to convert an image PDF to selectable text using optical character recognition or OCR. But with all the markup on this page, there's gonna be a lot of errors when converting the text and the reliability of accuracy for converting the text into actual readable text is gonna be quite low and it's going to require a lot of editing during the OCR process to make sure that the text that is captured using the OCR process is accurate. The second type of PDF document is one that has text that can be selected by a mouse but there's no real underlying structure. And as we learned earlier, structure is what allows screen reader users to navigate and jump from section to section heading to heading. Now without structure, users are forced to listen to text of a document from the top of the page to the bottom without the ability to navigate exactly where it is that they need to go and to listen to parts of a section that they may or not have picked up on the first time. The third type of PDF document is one that has selectable text and the text is tagged and the tags have appropriate semantic information such as heading levels, lists and other elements that allow screen reader users to search a document and consume the information in a predictable way. Now Adobe Acrobat does have the ability to check for accessibility errors and to fix them as well. Acrobat's rarely used to create a document as it's not really made for that. And it's important to remember that the more accessibility work you do in the native application in your Word document or your PowerPoint presentation before you export it to PDF, then the less you may have to use Acrobat to touch up any errors, for example. So what makes a PDF document accessible? Well, I just mentioned that PDF tags are necessary when it comes to accessible PDF. And essentially tags, PDF tags are XML based coding inside the PDF document. And that provides structure and necessary semantic information for screen reader users to navigate a document. So if a document is not tagged, Acrobat will infer structure based on the reading order preference settings. And this can result in text being read in the wrong order, sometimes not at all, and it may not have the appropriate semantic meaning associated with that text. So on the slide, I've included an image of a PDF tag tree and you notice that it has the document as the root tag. And then the rest of the tagged elements appear in linear order from the top of the tag tree to the bottom. And this is essentially the order which a screen reader is going to announce the information. Now contained within those tags is textual information. And in most cases, screen readers will announce the semantic structure and then the textual information which provides context to the user. PDF does support complex tables which are tables that have merged or split cells. And that is true for HTML tables as well. It's possible to make PDF tables more understandable to screen readers by giving each table a table cell an ID. So you can specify which headers go with each data cell. Now tables created in Word or PowerPoint might generate or export IDs when converted to PDF. So any tables created in those native formats will need to be remediated using Adobe Acrobat Pro or another PDF editor. And that does require a bit of training in order to use PDF editors and to accomplish that semantic structure accurately. Now just as in Word or PowerPoint, meaningful images or graphics must have meaningful alt text and decorative images must be marked as such. And it's easy to artifact images within your PDF tag tree as well. PDF forms have inherent accessibility limitations compared to say Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. The process for creating an accessible PDF form is incredibly daunting for the company for the content creator. And it's equally daunting for the screen reader user who is consuming that PDF form. When a screen reader user navigates to a form field, its contents must be described to the user. So each form control in a PDF needs to be explained using the tool tips feature when you're creating your form control elements. And the reading order of your form controls is absolutely critical, making sure that the information is understandable and accurate. And once these form controls have been added to the PDF with the proper tool tip information and in the proper reading order, then they still need to be tagged so that the screen reader will recognize and announce them. So there's quite a few steps that need to happen when creating PDF forms. When a screen reader enters a form control, it usually switches to a different reading mode, often called forms mode. And while in forms mode, the screen reader skips over content that is not a form element or link. And for this reason, it's best to place important information or instructions that apply to the whole form before the first form field is presented so that the user can get a better understanding of what the entire form is all about before they start listening to each individual form control and what is required to enter within that form control. And at this point, math and STEM content that require scientific notation are not supported in PDF. The math formulas and scientific computations are not announced accurately. Instead, math ML, which is a mathematical markup language or math type for word, should be used to ensure that math equation and symbols are announced accurately by the screen reader. PDF UA validation is the first complete definition of a set of requirements for a universally accessible PDF document. It's more of a stringent standard than what the built-in accessibility checkers for Office and Acrobat Report. And it usually requires additional work to ensure compliance. Now, according to the W3C, PDFs are officially recognized as web content under WCAG. PDF UA is an additional set of standards that focuses exclusively on creating more accessible PDFs. And it's based off of WCAG. So PDF UA is an international organization standard, and that helps determine how to implement WCAG success criteria in PDFs. And I've included a link to the ISO standard for PDF UA if anyone is interested in learning more about that standard. Conforming requirements for WCAG and PDF UA include that the content of a PDF document must be tagged in a logical reading order, and the tag content must correctly represent the document's semantic structure. Meaningful graphics must include alternative text description and security settings if they are included in your PDF document must allow assist to technology access to the content. And your fonts must be embedded as well. Now, the only way to tell if a PDF document is PDF UA compliant is to run an accessibility report with a third-party application called PAC 2021. Now, this formerly, this was known as PAC 3, but in 2021 they changed their name. Now, this tool is freely available for anyone to download and use, and I've included a link if you're interested in downloading this tool as well. And it provides a report about the accessibility of the PDF document unless any errors it encounters, but it doesn't give the author the ability to correct these errors. Fixing errors must be accomplished by a PDF remediation software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro, Foxit Phantom, or Equidox, or CommonLip, those are just some examples. When to use PDFs? Again, it's important to note that PDF is well supported in the Windows environment when it comes to navigation, when using headings, table of contents, links, and so forth, but Mac users have a very different experience when trying to navigate a tagged PDF, especially when it comes to longer documents. Essentially, PDF is not supported very well in the Mac OS environment. Text to speeches, but navigation is not. So whenever possible, we really recommend that you use HTML when disseminating or presenting information or use the native Office file. You can use the native Word or PDF file instead of a PDF as those formats are far more accessible for both Windows and Mac users. However, online documents and PDF are a huge part of digital communication across many industries, and some users like to download and print documents instead of reading information online. And there are a few cases when folks might choose to use PDFs over other formats, including publishing secure documents that cannot be altered or copied. Although Adobe Acrobat Pro does allow a content creator to edit a PDF, and there are also other free PDF editors that you can Google and download that can also do the same thing. So this really is kind of a misconception about PDF. It really does not lock your information and make it unable for other people to copy the information. But what PDF does do well is it preserves the layout of the document for printing, including images and typeface, and that really seems to be the predominant reason for using PDFs. Also PDFs don't scale well on mobile devices. HTML and even Word, and sometimes PowerPoint can scale a lot better on Windows and mobile, I'm sorry, on mobile devices, rather. Okay, let's take a look at accessibility of other formats because I know there are people out there who are using other things besides Word and PowerPoint. So InDesign is a very popular document layout program that can be used to create fancy brochures and reports and manuals, long format documents, so forth and so on. And it's possible to create an InDesign document and have it export to a mostly accessible PDF. There's a very specific workflow that needs to be followed when creating InDesign documents for accessibility. And this includes mapping styles to tags using the paragraph style pane, ensuring proper reading order by threading articles and editing the tags in the export tagging menu. Now, I've included a helpful link from Adobe for those who use InDesign and are interested in learning more about the steps for creating accessible InDesign documents that export to accessible PDF. And additional training really is recommended for learning and practicing the proper workflow when creating InDesign documents. And pubcom.com is a vendor that we highly recommend and offers a multi-day training on the proper workflow for creating accessible InDesign documents. And if there are any graphic designers that are in the audience or if you know of any graphic designers that use InDesign as a layout program and then if you're interested in a training from pubcom.com, please reach out to me. Last year we had some funding available to sponsor a private training from pubcom. And we're in the process of trying to get another one set up this year. And I did have, the last time we offered this webinar I sent out a request to interested parties as well. So I do have their names but if there are any other folks who are listening today who may be interested in this training, reach out to me, we're trying to secure that funding and it looks like we may have it and we'll probably offer it in late summer or early fall. So reach out to me if you're interested in learning about that. My email is on the slide as well. Google Workspace. Google Docs is an online word processor where authors can create documents and collaborate with other people in real time. And Google uses a rich text editor to create content and it should be used with caution as source material created in Google Docs cannot be made as accessible as source material that's produced through Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. But since Google Docs can be used in collaborative basis it's important to understand the limitations of these tools. So the best practices for creating accessible Google Docs and slides includes using the built-in styles in the rich text editor. So you wanna make sure that you're choosing the proper heading and if you're using Google, if you're using Google Slides you wanna make sure that you're using the proper template to provide the proper semantic structure to your document as well. So the Google Workspace does have similar tools that Word and PowerPoint have. So be sure to look for those in the rich text editor. You wanna make sure that you include alt text for images. Unfortunately, Google does not have an option to denote images as decorative so use decorative images sparingly. With your creating lists, again, you wanna use the built-in bulleted or numbered list feature instead of manually inserting asterisk numbers or using your tab key. Some limitations of the Google Workspace are that tables can't be made accessible as it's not possible to properly designate a header row or header column. And also when exporting a Google Doc or Google Slide to either Word or PowerPoint some elements may not map accurately and it may not produce, I should say it will not produce an accessible Word or PowerPoint document especially if you have a table including in your content. And it's also not possible to export as an accessible PDF with tags from Google Docs or Slides. And the Google Workspace does not include an accessibility checker to assist document creators with addressing an accessible content. Now there is a third-party tool that can be used to check for accessibility. It's called GRACL but that's been disabled by our administrator for security concerns. So unfortunately if you're using Google Workspace with your UWNet ID, it's not possible to download and install GRACL but if you are using it for personal use you can download that and give it a try. I believe they have a one week trial period for GRACL so it might be interesting if you wanted to try that out. And I've also included a link here to Google support that provides more user guidance on accessibility for the Google Workspace. Okay, a few more minutes. Your document accessibility checkers are automated tools that can help with validating the technical accessibility of an office document such as Word or PowerPoint or a PDF document if you're using Adobe Acrobat Pro. And in some cases they can help you fix any issues that appear in the accessibility report. Accessibility checkers verify the document against a set of rules that identify possible issues that can cause barriers to accessibility. And many of these rules conform to WCAG or PDFUA success criteria for accessibility but not all of them. Now some of the elements that accessibility checkers review include checking for the presence of headings and if those headings are appropriately nested to form an outline. In PowerPoint we'll check to make sure that each slide has a title and that each slide title is unique. Accessibility checkers can also check to see if alt text is assigned to visual elements such as images and figures but it can't check the substance of the alt text until if the textual information accurately explains the image. So reviewing alt text really should be performed manually. Checkers will also review any tables that are included in a document and we'll check if the tables have appropriate headers and proper IDs associated with those headers. And with office documents it will also let you know if your tables have merged cells which can make listening to table data challenging for screen reader users since office has limited accessible table offering capabilities. Now checkers will ensure that lists are created accurately using the bulleted or numbered list tool but it can't check the accuracy of nested lists. So that also needs to be performed manually, that check there. And checkers do check to see if document properties are included such as a document title and language assignment and make sure that the document doesn't have any restricted access to content as that limits the information the screen reader can access. But also accessibility checkers make sure that the reading order of a document matches the tab order but it can't tell if the reading order is logical or not. So that needs a manual review. Accessibility checkers have a significant gap as they are focused on code and strict technical compliance not on usability design and contact. And they can't truly identify how real users understand and interact with documents. So as it is when you're reviewing a webpage for accessibility documents must be assessed for functional accessibility by manually reviewing a document either using a screen reader or using a tab key or placing the focus at the top of your document or PowerPoint slides and using the arrow key to see if information flows in a littler manner. Okay, so I wanted to review the different file types we covered this afternoon and when it may make sense to use one format over another. Now I mentioned earlier that HTML is far more accessible than PDF, Word or PowerPoint. Tables, forms and math and STEM content are all fully accessible when presented in HTML. Office documents such as Word and PowerPoint have some accessibility with stylistic features such as headings and lists and they can present math accessibility but there are limitation when it comes to tables and forms, for example. And PDF also has some accessibility with stylistic features that can make complex tables accessible but forms are awkward and math and STEM content are not supported and navigation in PDF is well supported for Windows users but not Mac users and reflow with PDF documents is also a huge limitation as well. So I wanted to include a resource slide as well that has a little bit more information on creating accessible documents. So this link will take you to the accessibility page and give you more information about what is included in accessible electronic documents rather and it also covers a lot of the elements and a lot of the things that we covered today such as headings, links, tables, so forth and so on. And I've also included another link here for creating accessible PDF from InDesign. So any graphic designers, this information may be useful to you. And that is all I have. So we are at two o'clock, which is the end of our presentation but I just wanted to open it up. I'll stick around for just a little bit, maybe a minute or two to see if anybody has any questions and I'm gonna go ahead and stop the share. And I see there are a lot of questions for you in the chat, Amy. Yes, I see that. Okay, let's see here. So the slides will be shared. Okay, so okay, this is a great question. Should the main heading in a Word document be an H1 or a title? This is a great question. So in your Word document, there is the ability to include a title. And Microsoft sometimes goes back and forth as to how a title will be exported to a PDF document. And usually a title will be exported as a paragraph and not a heading level at this time. So it would be best practice to include your title in a Word document as an H1 rather than a title and then everything else should cast K down from there from H1, H2, H3, H4, so forth and so on. Hopefully that answered that question. Okay, and then let's see here. Just a couple more questions. How does this interface with stuff being animated in? Like how will a screen reader understand things with animation which has an order but might be different from the order in the selection pane? So animations within PowerPoint are completely inaccessible and we really recommend that you don't use them. And in fact, whenever we're presenting, we ask that presenters turn off any animations. So they really don't translate well to screen readers. So best practice would be to not use animations when creating PowerPoint presentations. Okay, let's just do one more question and then I actually have another meeting right now. So, but I'm gonna go ahead and answer one more. So the question is, do the accessibility settings get removed when they are uploaded into Google Workspace or OneDrive? Example, you create a Word doc and then upload it to Google Drive or OneDrive. Now, if you upload them to OneDrive, it should, OneDrive is a Microsoft product. So if you're uploading a Word document or a PowerPoint document, it should maintain all of those features that you had originally introduced in your native document. For Google Drive, it should keep that information. I haven't done extensive testing on that to see if that is the case or not. But I can tell you, if you upload a Word document into Google Drive and then open it in Google Drive as a Google doc, make changes, and then download it again as a Word document, you're gonna lose some formatting. So there are definitely things that get lost in translation between Office products and opening them up in the Google Workspace. Okay, so unfortunately, there are more questions there and I unfortunately have to go to my other meeting right now, but I wanna thank everybody for coming. If you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to me at gaybed at uw.edu and I will hopefully get back to you as soon as I can and answer any additional questions. So thanks everyone, appreciate it, bye-bye.