 Welcome to the next installment of the Accessible Technology webinar series. Today we have Gaby Dionne talking about accessible documents. Gaby? Alright, thanks Annemarie. Hopefully everyone can hear me and you can see my title slide for my presentation today. I'm going to be talking about accessible electronic documents. And as Annemarie mentioned, my name is Gaby Dionne and I'm a member of the IT accessibility team where my focus is working with folks across campus on collaborating and creating accessible electronic or digital documents. And this is our agenda for today. We're going to start off by talking about some principles of electronic documents. What makes electronic documents accessible, essentially. And then I'll talk, I'll go into best practices and techniques for creating accessible word documents and PowerPoint presentations. And I'll do some demonstration on those two applications. And from there, we'll switch to talking about PDF and what makes a PDF document accessible. And I'll show you an example of a tag tree and I'll explain what a tag tree is a little bit later on. And then I'll also talk about accessibility in InDesign and also in the Google workspace. And I noticed I have some question marks there, so we'll talk about utilizing the different tools that are available in the applications to create more accessible content and kind of contrast that to office applications. And I'll talk about accessibility checkers that are built into Office and Adobe Acrobat Pro. And then we'll review when to use certain formats over other formats. So I also want to mention that a lot of the demonstrations actually of the demonstrations that I'll be performing today will be using Office 365, the most current and up-to-date version of Office. And I would implore you that if your department does not have or if you do not have access or not currently using Microsoft Office 365 to talk to your IT administrator and ask that they update you and potentially your entire department to Office 365, there really is no reason why anyone should be using older versions of Office. We have enterprise licenses for the most current version. And if you're using older versions of Office, it may be some of the tools that I'm going to show you might not be in the same place. Some of the steps might be a little bit different and some options might not even be available at all. So it really is more advantageous to you as a document author to make sure that you're using the most current version. And we do have access to that on campus. So there really is no excuse to be using older versions. So just something else I wanted to bring up as well. Okay, principles of accessible documents. So many standards of accessibility relate to content styling and layout and for document accessibility. Logical structure helps to paint a more clear picture in the user's mind of the layout and the outline of the document. And to create that logical structure it's achieved by using navigation elements such as headings, heading levels which can be used to build a table of contents and other things such as lists and links. So those kinds of elements help kind of create that logical structure that we're talking about. Descriptive body copy is sometimes overlooked but that also plays an important role in accessibility. Your content really should describe any supporting materials and the content really sets the framework for things such as graphics or other visual elements. A descriptive body hop copy can help keep the alt text for those kinds of visual elements short and to the point. And you also want to make sure that you're providing a predictable user experience for someone who's consuming the information. So the relationship between headings and paragraphs and figures and page structure. All of that allows a screen reader users many different ways to navigate the document reliably and consistently. So establishing those predictable patterns in Word documents or PowerPoint presentations or PDF documents really helps the reader gain more familiarity with the content. As they're circling through the different elements, the accessible elements in their pages and the content of those pages as well. So I wanted to start off with an exercise. This is an example of a syllabi. You know, many of us have seen other syllabies before. And this syllabi has all the information that you need to get started with introduction to physics class. So I'm actually going to play an example of a screen reader announcing this syllabi. And you can do one of two things. You can close your eyes and you can listen to the screen reader announce the information or you can read along. But then I'm going to have some questions to ask you after this announcement. So here we go. Reflection and refraction. Emission chapters 15-187 review. Final exam grades. Grades will be assigned on the 10 point scale. Left parent 90 to 100 is an A80 to 89 is a B, etc. Right parent. Homework exams. And projects will be weighted as follows. Column homework exams. Projects 1 to final 1 to final 15%, 15%, 15%, 20%, 10%, 10%, 15% C program. Disponderable ed France served evidence. Okay. So that was the recording. Sorry. I did not realize how quiet that recording was. So if you weren't able to listen to it or to hear it, you can read it. It's up on the screen here. So it's essentially the exact same announcement of the text that is on the screen here. So with that, I do have a question for you. And I'm going to need your help, Annemarie, because I'm not able to see any of the chat responses in this view. So my question to you is, how many course objectives, rather, are there for this introduction to physics course? Any guesses? I'm sorry, Gabie, could you repeat that? Yeah. The question is, how many course objectives are there? We have question marks. A couple answers of seven. Okay. Six, three, seven, a couple more threes. Two. All right. That's a that's a pretty good sample there. So we got some folks taking a stab at it. Two, three objectives. Some people say seven objectives. So my next question to you is, what would be helpful? Because we have so many different responses. We don't have consensus on how many objectives are included for the syllabi. So my question, my next question is, what would be needed in order to make this syllabi more usable to you to help you understand how many course objectives there are? Any guesses there? We have structured, numbered list, structure. The document isn't formatted in an easy way to read using list and bullet points help. Headings and numbered bullet points, bullets or numbers. Sections, chart, punctuation and structure. Excellent. All right. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, excellent. So that's exactly what I wanted to hear. So what's missing for this particular syllabi is structure. So the next slide is actually going to show you the exact same syllabi. Text is exactly the same, but in this situation we have a lot more structure here. You can see that we have different headings that are a different color and bolded. We do have bullet points in this particular, on this particular syllabi. We have some tables as well. And visually we can actually have a better idea of what is expected of us with this structured course syllabi. So I also have a recording of the screen reader announcing this document as well with the additional structure. Hopefully it's a little bit louder than the previous recording, but it might not be. I want you to listen more closely this time and see if you can tell a difference between the previous recording and this recording. So specifically what you're going to be listening for are some more structural elements that kind of frame the content of this syllabi. So here we go with playing that. Syllabus underline accessible.docs-word. Syllibus heading level 1 introduction to physics course. Syllabus heading level 2 textbook. Our sole text for this course will be link introduction to physics. Second edition authored by the instructor. Heading level 2 course objectives. Level 1 bullet to offer students exposure to basic principles of physics. Bullet to provide students with rich. Thought-provoking discussions during laboratory sessions. Bullet to provide students with experiential learning opportunities during laboratory sessions. Shape class schedule heading level 2. Week topic reading assignment. 1 course introduction. Chapter 1. 2 inertia equilibrium kinematics. Chapters 2-3. 3 Newton's laws vectors. Momentum energy. Chapters 4-7. 4 matter elasticity scaling. Chapters 8-10. 5 wave kinematics. Sound electricity magnetism induction. Chapters 11-15. 6 light reflection and refraction emission. Chapters 15-18. 7 review final exam out of table. Heading level 2 grades. Grades will be assigned on the 10-point scale. Left parent 90 to 100 is an A80 to 89 is a B etc. Right parent. Homework exams and projects will be waited as follows. Table 2 non-uniform table. Homework exams. Projects. 1. 2. Final. 1. 2. Final 15%. 15%. 15%. 20%. 10%. 10%. 15%. Out of table. The program is also available on the page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Page 2. Change reasons to be digits. Partial structure being announced before content announced. Heading level 1 before introduction to physics. County level 2 before textbook course objective grade were announced because these were clase schedule grades were announced. Note that for course objectives, those leftover. The bullets were announced for those voted items. the simple table under class schedule, that's pretty easy for screen readers to kind of navigate because it's a very relational table with three columns and eight rows. But when it came to the more complex table underneath the grade section, I think it announced something like malformed table or something like that. So it gives the user a little bit more information about those kinds of structural elements as well. So a lot of information, a lot more information is included in a well-structured document for screen reader applications. So with that, I wanted to talk about best practices for creating Word files, Word documents. But before we get into that, it's important to note that Microsoft Word is a word processing program. It's not a layout program. We do have a question. Yeah, sure, go ahead. Regarding the last thing. So on the table, wouldn't adding week before the number like week one instead of having it just as a header? You could do that, yeah, absolutely. But having week as the header is also acceptable if you included week within each one of those cells, it could be a bit redundant, especially if you're gonna export that document to a PDF. How a screen reader announces PDF information of a table is a little bit different than how it announces a Word table. So if you included the word week in front of each one of those numerical weeks, then it would duplicate that Word when reading the table in PDF format. So you wanna be consistent when you're creating the structure within your document. So really good question there, yeah. So anyway, let's go back to the practices for Word files. I mentioned that Microsoft Word, it's a word processing program. It's not a layout program, but people use Microsoft Word to create long form documents that have a lot of layout kind of elements to them. And it is possible to create a Word document that has that nice layout, providing you're using the appropriate formatting tools. You wanna make sure that you're using headings and defined paragraph styles. And this allows screen reader users to navigate from section to section or heading to heading rather than having to listen to the entire content from the top of the page to the bottom, like we did in the first exercise with no structure. And it's really important to use headings that create that scaffolding to create an outline of the content rather than making the text bigger and bolder. That doesn't make a heading, it just makes it bigger and bolder. When you're using the heading styles or the paragraph styles, those provide anchor points for screen readers to navigate by. And when you're using those kinds of headings, this can also be really useful for longer documents. You can initiate the table of contents builder in the review tab and it will take all of those headings and it will create a nicely organized table of contents based on the heading structure. So that's an additional navigation aid that's gonna benefit all users, not just screen reader users. Alt text provides textual information to visual elements such as images, charts and graphs. And alt text really should be a brief description of the image and why that image is relevant to the content. Alt text should be short about 140 characters or so and that's just enough text to communicate the idea without burdening the user with too much detail that can kind of bog you down there a little bit. And simple images such as photos and logos should have alt text as should more complex images such as charts and graphs. But images that are just decorative or provide no additional information should be marked as decorative. And it's pretty simple to do that in most office applications to add the alt text just by selecting the image and then opening the alt text pane from the picture format tab. And I'll show you a demonstration of that in a little bit. Lists are another way of creating structure in documents. You wanna make sure that you're using the proper list generating tool to do that. There are tools to create bulleted lists and tools to create numbered lists. And there's also a multi-level list tool and that helps with creating nested lists with varying degrees and can also include numbers and bullets. So talking a little bit more about tables, those are useful for communicating relationships between data, especially when those relationships can be expressed in a matrix of rows and columns. So I mentioned that screen readers use table headers to announce the column and row information and that's particularly true in PDF format. And that makes it a lot easier for users to understand the data's organization and relationships. So if heading cells aren't associated with those data cells, then the table is not formatted correctly. And we did hear an example of that with the more malformed table. We heard that the screen reader actually announced it as a non-conforming table. And if you have one of those, with a lot of data, a user can quickly get lost and not really understand the relationship of the header and the data information if you have a more complex table. So we really do encourage you if you have complex tables to break them down into maybe a series of smaller, more manageable tables. And headers and tables contribute to the semantic structure and data integrity of the document. And they convey the relationship between different parts of the table, such as the column and row headers, and making sure that the content is presented in a more meaningful way. Meaningful hyperlinks in electronic or digital documents make it a little bit more easier for screen reader users to determine what that link is all about before they decide to click on it. So rather than listing a URL that starts off with HTTP colon slash slash, blah, blah, blah, blah, usually a string of letters and maybe, you know, characters that aren't related. Using more meaningful hyperlinks, our actual text to create that link helps the users to understand a little bit something about the destination of the link before they decide to click on it. Now screen reader users, they sometimes navigate documents using the tab key and that allows them to jump between links or buttons or other interactive elements in a Word document or a PDF document. And they can also generate a list of links and navigate them in order on the page or they can sort them out alphabetically, so they have options there. When they land on a link, the screen reader will announce link and then it will read the link text and we actually experienced that during the second exercise. So you wanna avoid using ambiguous text such as link or click here as that can become really redundant and meaningless if it doesn't have the proper context. Including metadata such as document properties, title, author, keywords, those things allow screen reader users to get a little bit more information about the document without the need to open it because it can take a little bit longer or if they have multiple documents that are open, they can access the metadata and determine which document there actually has focus. So adding document titles and keywords is also really helpful for searching and indexing if you're going to place those documents up on a webpage. That extra information will also be utilized during the search features. It's also important to include the accurate language assignments if you have documents that are not authored in English or have multiple languages included in that document. So you can specify a block of text in another language as many screen reader applications. They do support multiple languages and can switch on the fly between them instantaneously. And we also experienced that as well during the second example, there was a line of French there that was actually announced with the proper French pronunciation. Okay, so those are just your basic top, what is that, top six tips for creating word files. And so I actually wanted to go ahead and do a demonstration on adding some of these or looking a little bit more deeply at some of these elements that we talked about. All right, so I have, hopefully you can still see this. This is a Word document. This is an example of that syllabi that we were listening to being read out loud by a screen reader. And one of the items, one of the things that I mentioned is to make sure that you are using the proper heading from the styles pane. So I'm actually demonstrating Microsoft Word for Mac desktop. There's also a little bit difference between Microsoft Word for Windows. And then you can also access your documents using OneDrive, so Microsoft online. So all of these tips are going to be similar in all three of those different applications. But again, you wanna make sure that you're using the most current version. If you're using older version, the location of some of these tools may be different. And they may not work as consistently as I'm showing you during this demonstration. So here's the styles panel. And I can actually extend that by selecting this icon in the home ribbon called the styles pane icon. If I click on that, you'll notice that I get the styles pane that pops out on the right-hand side here. So I have a bunch of different styles that are included, not all of the styles in this particular template, but ones that are being used right now. So I can place my cursor anywhere in the document and it will tell me up here in the ribbon what that heading or what that style is. And so this is a heading level one. I can also see it here in the styles pane. And if for some reason I wanted to change this particular style, actually I'm gonna choose this heading level two here. If I didn't like the look of that or if I wanted to brand it, I can actually modify that style and it's gonna change globally in the entire document. So I can do that by looking at the styles pane and selecting this dropdown here and select modify style and I get a modify style pane or I can right-click in this ribbon here and select modify from there as well I get the modify styles pane. So this is where I can make my changes to, let's say I can change the text to something different. Let's choose Albatica. Let's make it a little bit bigger and I don't want that blue color. Let's make it, let's make it purple. What else do I wanna do? I can probably, if I wanted to, I could center it. And so this is gonna change all heading level two styles within this document. So when I click okay, you'll notice that all my heading twos have updated. So it's a really quick way to make global changes to a document. I'm gonna undo that because I don't want it to stick. Okay, so that's using the styles pane. I also wanted to show you the alt text panel and to do that, to get to the alt text panel there's a couple of different ways. You can click on the image and when you do that, you're gonna get a picture format tab that appears here and I can select that and from this ribbon I can select the alt text panel or I can right click on the image and from the context menu I can select view alt text and that's gonna do the same thing. It's gonna pop out this alt text panel here. So on this alt text panel, you'll notice there's a text field where I'm gonna include my alt text here and this is a logo for accessible university. So that is acceptable alt text for this particular image. There's also a button here that says mark as decorative. So I mentioned earlier that if you do include decorative images in your document that you must mark them as decorative. So that will notify to the screen reader that it's just a decorative image and it will ignore it, skip it and move on to the next element. There's also a button here in office 365 that says generate alt text for me and I'm gonna go ahead and press this button and see what kind of results I get here. So it's thinking and it says a closeup of a logo, description automatically generated. So it does a pretty good job of really basic alt text but it also gives you this disclaimer here that this description was automatically generated. So and I have noticed this is kind of a newish feature that to automatically generate button, kind of a newish feature in office 365. And I've noticed that over the last year so it's gotten a little bit better at kind of making up the alt text. And it is based, it does use artificial intelligence to create those, that alt text and it's getting better. So I think the more we utilize that I think the better it's going to get. But for now, I'm just going to, oh, I can't undo. So I'm gonna go rename that accessible university. Okay. We talked about utilizing lists to create structure as well. So we do have a three bullet pointed list here. And you wanna use the proper list generating tools to do that. So we've got our bullet library here. We've got our number library right next to it. And then at the very end of that of those options we have the multi-level list tool. And this is what you would use to create more nested lists or lists within lists. And there are several different options here but if you select define new multi-level lists this is where you can kind of choose how you want to format your multi-level lists. So it gets a little bit squirrely but once you get into there and figure out how to use it it's pretty good at creating those types of lists. Okay. For tables, I mentioned making sure to include a table header for simple tables. So we've got our simple table here. And I can check to see if this table has a header assigned to it by selecting the entire table. And doing that gives me a couple of different more a couple more options rather here on the home ribbon. I have a table design tab and a layout tab that now appear. So if I select the table design tab I can look here in the upper right hand corner I've got these check boxes that are checked. And this is the default. When you add a table into your document you're going to get this as the default. It's always going to check the header row as a checkbox that's going to be checked and that's going to automatically make that top row your header row. You can select banded rows and that gives you the different color between the rows there. And first column also is more of a branding feature as well and that also just includes more colors in the different rows and columns of your table there. You can leave them or you can uncheck them however you want to. I leave them checked because I do like to have the visual demarcation between those rows and columns. Another thing to check is if you are having a table that spans multiple pages you want to make sure that that header appears at the top of each one of those pages. And to do that you would go to the layout tab and from the layout tab from the ribbon there you would select properties and that's going to open up your table properties dialogue. Go to the row tab and you want to select the option that says allow row to break across pages. So I want to select that and that's going to include that header row at the top of each one of those pages if you have a table that's going to span multiple pages. On the alt text tab there you can also include a table summary in the description field. I would not include anything in the title field I don't think that that's going to enhance the table at all but if you include a table summary in the description tab such as this is a simple table with three columns, I'm sorry three, yeah three columns and eight rows that gives a little bit more information to the screen reader user and then that information will be announced as well. Okay, so I also talked about including metadata. So down here we have some French language that's included in this document here and we can make sure that that French language is actually assigned accurately by highlighting it and then going to the review tab and then selecting language from the ribbon there. I've got a bunch of different languages that we can assign to word documents and in this case it is assigned as French and this checkbox here for detect my language automatically that's by default. So in many cases if you just have one or two lines of texts that are in a different language it may pick it up by default but I wouldn't count on it. So you definitely want to make sure that you are assigning those language attributes accurately and then for including a document title for word from Mac the steps are to go to the home tab, oops, actually to go to the file menu, my mistake go to the file menu and then select properties and then from there you would select summary and this is where you can include that title, author keywords and additional comments. For word for windows it's different steps, you would go to file and then info and then you would see the document properties from there and it looks a little bit different than what we're seeing on the screen right now. So let's get back to our presentation and I wanted to bring up some barriers that I see that relate to accessible content that I still see some authors using when remediating documents. So Microsoft Office has specifically word has been around for quite some time, a couple or a few decades I think and some folks have developed some workarounds for laying out content rather than using the proper formatting tools and sometimes you workarounds can cause barriers to accessible electronic documents. So I wanted to point out a few common barriers, excuse me, that crop up and that really should be avoided. So first up is text boxes and word, sometimes authors use text boxes as a way to call out or emphasize a thought and screen readers read and navigate information in an electronic document in a linear manner. So if a text box is inserted into a document, let's say in the margin or in the middle of a page or something like that, a screen reader might miss that text box or if it does pick it up, if it does catch it, it may be out of the normal reading order and that may cause confusion. So really the solution is to not use text boxes and word. I think that that was a feature that was added and because somebody wanted it to be there and now people are using it now, Microsoft can't take it out of there because people use it, but it really is kind of a barrier to accessibility. I still see some document creators using tabs and spaces to format text to make it look like columns and this causes very unpredictable results when using a screen reader. It doesn't flow like a column that will read a line from column one then a line from column two, then back to column one and back to column two. So it's really important to use the columns if you want to reflow that information into that kind of a style. Non-printing characters like hard character terms and spaces and tabs, those are also announced by screen readers and so you don't wanna use that as a way to bump information. You actually want to use the format into actually indent your information, however you want it to look. So instead of using hard carriage returns, you can use paragraph spacing to increase the space between your lines and instead of using hard carriage returns to break it to the next page, you wanna use the page break feature instead because if there are multiple carriage returns, the screen reader will announce blank, blank, blank, blank and that's really annoying and some screen readers users will just stop listing after that because they think that's the end of the document, there's nothing else. So it's really important to keep in mind that the more formatting that's included in a Word document, it's gonna make creating an accessible document a little bit more challenging so you wanna keep it simple. Okay, so let's switch gears here and talk about best practices for creating accessible PowerPoint presentations. An important part of making accessible slide decks is to use layout templates that are built into PowerPoint and this is important because screen readers may jump over or ignore items like text boxes that were added from slides that exist outside of the content that's provided. So you wanna choose the template from the proper layout for your slide content and really avoid selecting a blank slide and then adding the text boxes to populate the information. You wanna make sure that you're using titles for your slides, titles really act as the headings in a PowerPoint presentation and you wanna make sure that each slide title is unique. If you have duplicate slide titles, you probably want to number them if you have spillover information so you could number them like slide one of two and two of two. Let's see, adding alt text in PowerPoint is very similar to what we saw in Microsoft Word but if you have multiple images on a PowerPoint slide, it may save you some time to group those images as one and then add alt text to that group image rather than each one of those single images. If you group an image, it kind of flattens it and the screen reader does recognize that as a group and it images and will read the alt text of that group. Reviewing the order of slide contents is perhaps the single most important step in making slide decks accessible. Screen readers and other assistive technologies read the slide content in the order that it was added to the slide. So this makes it really important to check the reading order of your slides. As sometimes authors take old slide projects and then create new ones by pulling slides from this presentation and that presentation and then they're gonna add something here and something there so by the time you put it all together you might not know what the reading order is so it's really critical to look at that. Okay, giving an accessible presentation, it's important to keep in mind that the presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience and that's supported by these kinds of visual materials. So you wanna keep the content simple. The slides are not the presentation. The person is the presenter of the presentation. The slides should compliment the information that you are announcing. You wanna make sure that the text and important visuals are big enough to read from either the back of the room if you're given a presentation in person or if you're giving a Zoom presentation on the small screens you wanna make sure that that text is big enough to read. And you also wanna verbally describe the content of the slides as well. You probably wanna assume that some participants are unable to see it. Sometimes people join Zoom presentation as they're going on a walk or as they're driving somewhere so you can't assume that everyone can see your presentation as well. And most importantly, you wanna give people time to process the information. A lot of times we're talking about some really high concept things and so you wanna give them time to digest that information before talking about another really important point. Okay, with that I'm gonna pause here and see if there are any questions before going on to the demo. Hey, this is Andrea and there was a question in chat when you were talking about going into metadata and adding a title. Is that different than naming your document? And I took a stab at responding and so I'd like you to double check my work that adding the title in the properties or the metadata is different than naming the document. So the title could be general accessibility document or the document name might be accessdoc.docx. Right, yeah, no, that's actually, that's accurate Andrea. So there is in the styles pane there is a title style and if you utilize that title style that's not the same as going into the properties of the document and adding the title in there. It's just a style in the styles panel itself. It doesn't automatically populate the metadata. In fact, if you use title as a style it just maps as a paragraph. It doesn't map as anything else. So that's why it's really important to actually go into the document properties. It's self and change the document title in there instead of using the title style from the styles pane. So hopefully that clears that up a little bit more. Okay, so I'm gonna move on to demonstration of power point. Oh, okay, let's go ahead with the other question. Any thoughts on animations in PowerPoint where accessibility is concerned? Yeah, that's a great question. Many animations can be detrimental for those folks that have a seizure disorder. So use them sparingly. We actually don't recommend that you use them at all but you may see some of us in some of our presentations that have animations. They can be really kind of challenging for screen reader users too if they're consuming a PowerPoint presentation in presentation mode and there are animations in there. It's really difficult for the screen reader to understand what's happening during those animations. So we don't recommend using them. So great questions. Okay, so back to PowerPoint presentations. I wanted to show you, oops, it's not the right one. Here we go. I wanted to show you, not the right one either. Here we go. We have a UW branding that has templates that you can use. And Annemarie, can you put that link in the chat there? So this is from UMAC, University of Marketing and Communications and they have accessible PowerPoint presentations. And so I actually worked on these so they should be accessible with one caveat. I forgot to check the color contrast between link text and the background. So there might be one area that you may need to address if you are using these PowerPoint templates. The color contrast for those links. But other than that, the layout for these templates are accessible so you can download them and use them. Let's see where to go. Here it goes. Otherwise, if you're using just the generic PowerPoint application on your desktop, you can use the built-in layouts. And I'm gonna pop this layout panel out because this is really important. You can see here that the different layouts actually have titles here. So this is for your slide title, title and content, section header, two content comparison, title only, content with caption, picture with caption. Notice that I skipped over the one that says blank and you should too. Don't use that one because there's no formatting using those blank layout templates. Make sure that you're choosing the correct layout that corresponds with the content that you wanna share. So grouping images, I'm gonna show you really quickly how to group images. I can select each one of these images altogether. So I just pressed shift click and so all three of these images are selected. Then I can go to the arrange dropdown menu from the home ribbon and select group. And from here, I can add alt text to the entire group. And the screen reader will recognize that. The other thing that I wanted to show you, I'm gonna do that. The other thing that I wanted to show you is how to check the reading order. And in order to do that back on the home ribbon, you would go back to the arrange tab and select the selection pane. And the selection pane works across all applications, Mac, Windows, desktop and online version. And the selection pane presents the elements of a slide deck in reverse order. So it's kind of similar if you were using a Photoshop and you have layers, those layers are in reverse order. So it's the same thing in PowerPoint as well. And I can just click on each one of these elements and you can see that they're highlighted in the main window as they appear. So, and I can just move these things around if they're out of order. So I can just really easily move them out of, back into the proper order. And then I can check the reading order by going from the bottom and then arrowing up. So really, really quick way to check that. Okay, let's go back to our presentation. What makes a PDF accessible? Well, for a PDF to be considered accessible, it must have tags and those tags must be semantically correct and in a logical reading order. Essentially tags are XML based coding inside of the PDF document and that provides structure and necessary semantic information that allows screen reader users to navigate a document successfully. So if a document is not tagged, Acrobat will infer structure based on the reading order preference setting and that results in text being read probably in the wrong order or sometimes not at all. Let's see here. PDF does support complex tables that have merged or split cells but in order to do that, in order to make those complex tables understandable, you have to give each table cell an ID so that you can specify which headers go with which data cells. And tables created in Word or PowerPoint, they won't generate or export IDs when they're converted to PDF. So any tables created in those native format are going to need to be remediated using Adobe Acrobat Pro or another PDF editor to add those IDs and to get that relationship. Tagging a table in a PDF editor requires a lot of training and skill to be able to associate headers with that data. So the more complex the table is, the more challenging it's gonna be to remediate. Similar to Word or PowerPoint, meaningful images must have alt text and decorative images must be marked as such. I'll show you how to do that. PDF forms do have some accessibility limitations compared to web-based forms such as Google forms or Microsoft soft forms. And we recommend that you use web-based forms as a more accessible solution. But the process for creating PDF forms is incredibly daunting for the content creator and it's also equally daunting for screen reader users to consume that. So when a screen reader user navigates from form field to form field, the contents must be described to the user and each form control in the PDF needs to be explained using the tool tips. And you wanna make sure that the reading order of those form controls is accurate. And at this point, math and STEM content that require scientific notation, they're not supported in PDF. What we recommend instead is MathML or Mathematical Market Language or Math Type for Word and those should be used to make sure that math equation and symbols are announced accurately. Okay, so there are three types of PDF documents. The first type is just an image of a PDF and those are an image rather of the content and those are usually created when an article from a book is scanned on a flatbed scanner and the output is selected as PDF. And this type of PDF is totally inaccessible to screen reader as the document is just an image of text without any actual real text there. So on the slide of an example of a scan document and you might notice that it's kind of hard to read in areas and there's underlining and even as somebody who just uses glasses it's very kind of difficult to read that because there's just a lot of stuff on there. So it is possible to convert an image PDF to selectable or machine readable text using optical character recognition. But with all this visual noise on this page it's gonna cause errors when converting it to text and that's gonna require a lot of editing during the OCR process. The second type of PDF is one that has text and the text can be selected by a mouse and it's machine readable but there's no structure. So it just announces the text without any context or semantic structure. And structure is what allows screen readers to navigate and jump from section to section and that also provides reliability and consistent of the content as well. The third type of PDF document is one that has selectable text and the text is tagged and has appropriate heading levels, list markup and other stuff that allows screen readers to search a document and consume the information in a more predictable way. We use Adobe Acrobat to check for accessibility errors and to fix them as well. Acrobat's not really used to create PDF documents it's not really made for that. It's mostly made to edit PDFs and to remediate PDF documents. But the more accessibility work you do in your native application when you create your document before exporting to PDF then the less you'll have to use Acrobat to touch up in the errors. When to use PDFs just wanted to remind folks that PDF is really well supported in the Windows environment when it comes to navigation and semantics but Mac users have a very different experience when navigator or consuming a tagged PDF. Essentially PDFs not really well supported well in the Mac OS environment. Text to speeches but navigation is not and that's kind of a shortcoming on the Mac side. So whenever possible we recommend authoring in HTML or distributing the native office file instead of PDF because that has far more accessibility formats than PDF. But PDFs are a huge part of digital communication and some users they like to download and print documents instead of reading information online. And there are a few cases when folks might want to choose to use PDFs over other formats including publishing secure documents that can't be edited although Adobe Acrobat Pro is a PDF editor and there are other free PDF editors out there so that seems to be a popular misconception. But what PDF does do well is it preserves the layout of a document for printing including images and typeface and that's really the predominant use for PDF. So wanted to do a quick demo of PDF and hopefully we'll have enough time to talk about Google so let me go to my, here's my PDF document here and I wanted to show you the tag tree and in order to do that in Acrobat I'm gonna go to the view menu, show hide navigation panes and accessibility tags. So this is the tag tree and when I click on the very top there the document that highlights all of the information in the tag tree and I can just arrow down and I can see each individual element within that tag tree and I can expand it and I can see the contents in that tag tree as well. So I can see h1, h2, I've got a paragraph with link information there. So really easy to look at the content and also confirm the reading order of information as well. I can also adjust the reading order if things are not in the correct order I can just click and drag them, which is kinda nice. But beware if you make any changes in the tag tree it could have unpredictable results. So if you're not, if you haven't been trained on how to remediate a tag PDF document just be very cautious about that. Okay, let's talk a little bit about accessibility of other formats. InDesign is a popular document layout program and it is possible to create an InDesign document that exports to a mostly accessible PDF but there's a very specific workflow that needs to be followed when creating that. And I've actually included a link here on this slide that talks a little bit more about that the steps to get you started in creating accessible InDesign documents and accessible PDF. So we really recommend additional training to learn how to and to practice using the proper workflow for creating accessible InDesign. And we recommend pubcom.com as a vendor. We've worked with them before. And if there are any graphic designers or if you know any graphic designers in the audience today that are using InDesign and you're interested in the training from PubCom please reach out to me. We are sponsoring a training that's coming up in a couple of weeks and we may have a Cedar tool available if you wanna clear your calendar for four half days then you can learn that workflow. Google Workspace, Google Docs is an online word processor where authors can create documents and Google Slides is used for creating slide decks. Google uses a rich text editor to create that content and you wanna use a similar kind of methods such as using headings and lists for that. And really quickly I'm gonna show you, I can find it. Show you how that looks. So I've got our syllabus here and this is the rich text editor here. So you can choose the styles drop down and this is where you're gonna get those those different types of styles to create your PDF document. Okay, so we are at two o'clock and I haven't gotten into, well, on the slide deck there is a review of some formats and which ones are better to use and others. Again, we recommend that use HTML for most applications. If you do have digital documents we recommend using the native word or PowerPoint presentation to distribute. You can use PDFs but there are some limitations as outlined here in this table. And then here's some additional resources for you as well. A link to our documents page to the branded templates from UMAC. Also included a link here for describing figures if you needed help with creating alt text. And then if you are creating PDF documents there is a third party checker called the PAC 2021 and that checks against PDF you way which is the standard for PDF, accessible PDF documents. So that's all I have for you today. My email is gayvd at uw.edu. If you have any additional questions I kind of rushed at the end there so I wasn't able to get to all the information. But if you do have additional questions or something that I didn't cover during this time or you'd like to help with consulting on making sure that your document or your PowerPoint presentation is accessible please reach out to me. Thank you.