 Welcome to our webinar, Creating Accessible Online Resources for People with Disabilities. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am Alicia Kidd, the Online Learning Specialist for TechSoot. Now let's make sure everyone is comfortable using our webinar platform. Now you will see here on the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, anytime you have any problems with viewing or hearing the presenters or myself, please chat to us and we will send you guys instructions on how you can call into the webinar. And again, if you are hearing an echo through your computer speakers or having any issues with audio, you can dial in using the toll-free line and listing your registration email. Susan Hope Barr who is assisting us with the chat, she will be presenting that throughout the entire live webinar. Also, the chat box is also for your questions. We will be flagging your questions and hearing your questions for later reviews during our Q&A session towards the end of the live webinar. 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And TechSoot is proud to introduce our presenters Sharon Rush and Jane Cravens from Nobility. And again, my name is Alicia Kidd. I'm the online learning specialist. And here to assist us with the chat is Susan Hope-Bark, the online learning education manager. Now here's a few highlights about TechSoot. TechSoot is located here, our headquarters in San Francisco, California. So what I want to know from our audience is where are all of you all from? So please take a few seconds to chat where you guys are all from. Arizona, Cleveland, Oregon, Great, San Francisco, local Maryland, Washington, Louisiana, Iowa, Great. So we have everyone from all over the United States. Hopefully we have some people. Oh, Argentina, we have an international audience as well. Now a little bit more details about TechSoot. We have helped organizations get billions of dollars in technology projects and grants to NGOs all around the world. These tech products and grants come for more than 100 corporate and foundation partners. So now let's get started with our amazing presentation. And now I'm going to turn it over to our presenters. Well, hello. I'm Jane Cravens. I'm one of your presenters today. I'm in Oregon. I've worked with Nobility for a million years. And with me is Sharon Rush who is the founder of Nobility. Sharon, do you want to introduce yourself? No, you keep going. I just said howdy. Okay, she's the founder of Nobility and one of my very best friends. And we love talking about accessibility. So first we'd like to do a little polling and find out who you are. We'd like to know what your role is in ensuring an accessible website at your organization. So are you the person that updates the content on the site? Are you the webmaster, the producer, the designer? Are you an accessibility pro? So why aren't you presenting with us? Do you advise others on the site? Decision maker, perhaps your legal counsel, and you're hoping to comply with U.S. law. You have no web role. You're just here to learn more. Or perhaps you have another reason for being here and we hope you'll comment in the chat. So we're going to give it just a few more seconds for you to respond. Please pick one of these options. I would love to get to 100 people. We're at 85. And I'm going to close the results in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay, we're going to skip to the results. And interesting, so most of you are updating content on the site. Quite a few webmasters out there, welcome. And we have some decision makers. We love that. And we have someone who has another reason, or a few folks who have other reasons looking forward to finding out what those are. So I'm going to close the poll. Somebody said I like that. Checkboxes. So the options would not be mutually exclusive. So maybe we'll do that next time. But now we just have these one choices. So you have to pick the one that most applies to you. So speaking from your own experience and your own website, what do you think is the biggest barrier to equal access that you have to address? So is the biggest problem, the biggest barrier actually meeting the technical requirements? Getting your developers to understand the issues? The fact that you feel like maybe you would be necessary for you to build a whole new website? Do you need to get buy-in from your leadership board? Is it a funding problem? Do you need money to implement, improve, and rebuild? Do you have legacy software that limits your ability to offer accessible alternatives? For a lot of people this one is probably going to be, I don't even know where to begin and we're hoping to address that today. All of the above so you can choose all of them or you can say there's another reason and again put your comment in the chat box. So choosing the most important one of those, we're going to close the polling in five, four, two, one. These are the results. It looks like funding is the biggest barrier. Well hopefully some of the things we're going to look at today are going to show you some economical ways to address that. So let's do one more poll question. Ready? And it's a yes or no, are you aware or do you understand your legal responsibility around accessibility? I know some of you are in countries other than the U.S. So I have to be honest, I'm not sure what those legal responsibilities are outside the U.S. But by all means please answer. And you're all going very quickly, yay. Once again trying very much to get to 100 but I need to close the poll. So five, four, three, two, one. Okay. That's pretty good though. You know I think that's better than when we talked about last year. I think we've got more people who feel like they are aware of their legal responsibility which is awesome. So there we go. I think we're ready to go with this presentation. So today we're talking about creating accessible online resources for people with disabilities and that means everyone. That means all people. We want to welcome everyone. Our goals today, we're going to talk about accessibility and why it matters, not just what it is and how to do it. We're going to review the basics even if you're not a web designer. And I am not a web designer just so you know. We're going to cover some basics that you can understand and help promote accessibility in your organization. And we're going to talk about an amazing event, Open Air which will be an opportunity for nonprofits and GOs and others in the U.S. and abroad to achieve web accessibility. And of course we're going to answer your questions. And just again I'm Jane Cravens and I've worked with Nobility for a million years. I just really want to emphasize that. And I've worked with TechSoup. This is probably my 10th webinar for them on a various topic. And I'm author of the last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. And my partner in crime is Sharon Rush. Sharon Rush. And just so you guys get to know my voice and distinguish between when I'm talking and when Jane is talking I'll tell you once again I'm the co-founder, executive director of Nobility. And since 2006 I've been an invited expert for the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. We're going to be showing you some resources from that. And I currently serve as co-chair of the Education and Outreach Working Group. So a lot of the resources that we are going to point you to that are free and easy to use. And we really encourage you to share them. Come from that resource. Back to you Jane. And by her book. Okay, so what are we saying when we say accessible? And it's actually very simple. We start with people. People with disabilities can acquire the same information, participate in the same activities, and actively produce as well as consume online content. And I think the reason that we like to emphasize this part about people is that as we saw in the poll a lot of people I think after funding the one was meeting the technical requirements are going to be the most difficult thing. But it's always good to remember that what we're really talking about here is making sure that people with disabilities are able to use the site, get information from the site, and contribute in the same way as people without disabilities. Sorry about that. So next we're going to talk about universal design if I can get back to that slide. And universal design is a design that supports all people, supports all technology, improves experience for everyone. To quote Dr. John Slaton who was a wonderful nobility supporter and contributor, good design is accessible design. So just to emphasize we're talking about good design, not just design for one group but something that's universal for everyone. And I mentioned the W3C. They're really the group that decides how accessibility is defined. And they make the standards. The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and they make all the standards for all web technologies. They tell you what's valid, JavaScript, HTML, all the different codes that are used, all the different languages that are used on the web and in other technologies. So they are the standards makers and they have an initiative called the Web Accessibility Initiative. So you've got the way at W3C if you don't have enough alphabets in your soup. There's the more. And they really try to support people who are new to accessibility and make them good because what you don't want to do is just open up this page of technical specifications and try to meet them. So there are a lot of resources, sort of the on ramp, how to get started. And this is a link to some of those, for designers, for writers, for developers. We're both doing it at the same time. Oh, sorry. Okay. I should let you do the controls. We have a lot of reasons why we advocate for accessibility. There are the legal reasons which tend to be a real motivator for, that tends to be a really strong motivator for management and leadership. They want to stay out of any legal risk. So it's good to know that stuff. There are some market reasons that we're going to look at. The technical reasons are pretty clear because when you think about accessibility across all these different devices and platforms and mobile and tablets and different browsers, you find that you solve technical problems that you may not have even anticipated. Which is why we say accessible, yes, for people with disabilities, but easier to use for everyone. And then I'm going to let Jane talk about the humanitarian and human rights reasons because it makes her heart beat faster. Okay, so next slide. I'll talk about the humanitarian reasons. So let's talk about why implement accessibility. Why do it? And this is pretty text heavy, but I want to pound home the fact that people with disabilities, they want to donate, they want to volunteer, they want to otherwise support causes they care about. They support animal shelters, they support arts organizations, they love environmental organizations because they're people and people do that. But if your website isn't accessible to them, they can't be your donors, they can't be your volunteers, they can't be your clients, and you lose out on their ideas and their talent and their contributions and so much more. So when we talk about accessibility, once again, we want to say we're making a website useful for everyone. And I challenge you with this question, would you rent a space, a meeting space in an organization that prohibited certain people from entering? Of course not. So that's what we're talking about. We are advocating for you to view online accessibility the same way. Disability is a market force, and what we mean by that is nearly 20% of the U.S. population has a disability, and that probably translates to all the people you're targeting as volunteers, clients, donors. And the number is growing as the population ages. So you have a large representation of people with disabilities among your constituents, even if you don't think you do. You do. And you want to include them. You want to welcome them to your website. So that's another reason to advocate for accessibility. This is a growing constituency. Fortune Magazine calls it a $1 trillion annual market. Those are some pretty powerful statistics there. And again, it just goes more and more as the population ages. Now Sharon is going to talk a little bit about the law. Yes, see Jane talks about the fun people part, and I get to talk about the law. But the fact is the law is really a very powerful incentive for a lot of organizations because they're afraid of legal risk. And now during the last administration the Department of Justice was very active in enforcing as a civil right enforcing accessibility laws on the web. And in fact they even passed a new 21st century accessible technology law that said if you put video on the website as an outreach message you have to have captioning and in some cases audio description. So even though a lot of there's a perception that section 508 that's just for federal government agencies which is true but the ADA the Americans with Disabilities Act has increasingly been interpreted by the courts to apply to the web because the courts say well look when they passed the ADA they didn't even know how the internet was going to be used but the intent clearly for public space includes the internet which is our most public space these days. So US federal law is used more and more and some of you may have heard recently about Winn Dixie stores grocery store chain mostly in the south and they recently fought against a you know they said well you can buy all the same stuff in our physical stores it doesn't matter that our website is not accessible but the judge disagreed at a big fine and now those stores are under federal watch as they redevelop to make sure they meet accessibility needs. So the law really is a powerful tool and as it turns out you know Jane said earlier I don't know what the laws are in other countries but over a hundred nations have now signed the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and that convention is explicit that equal access to technology is a human right and it's been codified by law in many many countries including Japan and many Asian companies, Australia and of course the European Union is a very strong supporter of this convention and has passed very specific laws about digital accessibility. Yay! So they're legal reasons, they're market reasons, they're technical reasons but I think as we advocate, as we as advocates and we really want to make our case we always come back to the fact that it's about people and these are some of the people in our community, Stevie Wonder is a close personal friend, haha I wish but yeah remembering that it's about people and that you don't want to lock people out is really important. The next slide is about, let me see where are those controls, there they are. Again the web accessibility initiative at the W3C, if you need some persuasive tools if you are the advocate in your organization and you're trying to persuade them that you know we really need to make this part of our process and think about accessibility of our digital materials. These videos, there are ten of them, all of them are less than two minutes long and they are just really wonderful persuasive because a lot of people have no experience of someone with a disability trying to use technology and having that frustration so these videos are good for that and I think Jane you wanted to say something about that. We have had events on site in Austin where web designers have seen people with disabilities use assistive technologies and it's the moment they get it. You can see their eyes widen and they finally get it that this beautiful web design that they've created maybe isn't that beautiful for everyone so I really encourage you to use these videos to help have some aha moments in your own organizations. The basic principles of accessible content are pretty clear. They're saying regardless of your ability to see or hear or move your arm or whatever your physical capabilities accessible content will be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust across an entire spectrum of assistive technologies, platforms, browsers, browser combinations and so those principles are what guide the development of all the other specifications that developers and designers can use to guide them to actually achieve that. So we're going to talk about some common barriers and easy fixes and I call these the fixes that even I can understand as a non-web developer. We're going to go through each of these, link text, text alternatives, PDF, color and contrast and media. We're going to touch on these and give you resources to get more in depth into them. So one of my favorite accessibility things and if you walk away with nothing else I hope you walk away with this is you need to get rid of click here and read more on your websites. Links should be specific. Instead of read more it should say list of our board of directors or find out more about our services. And the reason is that people with assistive technologies come to your website and just as I would perhaps just look for the links. I just want to see the links. There's specific information I'm looking for. Someone with assistive technology that's reading it as audio is going to say I just want to hear the links because I'm looking for something specific. And if you only have click here then the links are going to say click here, click here, click here, click here. It's not going to tell them anything, directions to your organization or where you are or list of board of directors. So please make sure your links have descriptive text, aren't just more or click here. And one of the things I learned in putting together this presentation was ARIA described link descriptions. This was new for me and this is one of those cases where the W3C explains to me what this is. And this is a description in the code that informs the user what a button does when it's activated. Does it close a box? Does it close a window? A sighted user such as myself, I'm not going to see it. But a screen reader user is going to hear it. And so I actually grabbed a little graphic off the W3C to show exactly what that looks like in the code. And it's very simple. It just says description closed. It closes the window and it discards the information and returns you back to the main page. That's a really simple fix. And I could understand it even though I'm not a web designer. And there's also text-based alternatives. And this is where users, yeah, Sharon will do this. Well, because this one is funny because we've got this little picture in the corner with the box of chocolate. And you'd think, okay, well that's a graphic of a box of chocolate. I can easily just put that in as the alt text. But the fact is that all visual images have some kind of purpose. Why are they there? And in some cases they really are just eye candy. And in that case, you can leave the alt attribute blank. You can just say alt equals quote, quote, and the screen reader has the permission to stay silent. Now I should tell you that a screen reader is used by blind people to take the text information on a web page and read it out loud in a linear fashion. If it comes to an image that has no alternative text in the code, it will read the source code. And it's a pretty painful experience for someone to be reading along and suddenly hear source code. So you want to be sure that every image has alt text of some kind. If it's really just there for decoration, you can leave an empty alt, as I said. If it has a meaning in the, so maybe this was a product that I'm trying to sell, then the box of chocolate would be very clearly described so that the user would be able to understand, you know, what their choices are. I actually found this image on a bank website where it was a link. And the message was we have several different mortgage options. The choice is yours. So I don't, in that case, I don't even need to know that it's a box of chocolates. What I need to know is that it is a link to the mortgage option choices. So there is a very clear decision process that you need to go through to decide what is proper alt text for your images. And this link to the Way Tutorial Decision Tree is really, really helpful for you to make those kinds of choices. Another, I had to laugh at this when Jane put PDF accessibility is one of the easy fixes because there are times where PDF accessibility is really, really hard. And that's if something has been scanned in and the entire thing is an image or if it's been created with no tagging at all and you have to go back and fix it. The thing that's really easy about making accessible PDF is if your source document, whatever you're starting with, so if you're making a PDF from a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint, if you build those accessibility features into that source document, they're often brought over into the PDF and then it's a very painless process. So there's a free tutorial from the federal government about how to do that. And even if you inherit an inaccessible PDF, how you can fix it and really be sure that you're not leaving people out with those kinds of documents on your website. Color and contrast is one that I think people don't pay enough attention to. The fact is some users have color blindness. There is also low vision. My mother has macular degeneration. She has a lot of trouble seeing things that don't have high contrast. And color blindness is more prevalent than many people know. I bet there are people on this call, several who have color blindness. One in eight men in the United States has color blindness. So you want to avoid using color as the only way to give someone an instruction or provide meaning. So in the example on the screen here, we've got tell us who you are, required fields are in red. Well, if I have red, green color blindness, I'm probably not going to be able to know which one of those fields is red. So you want to add, and it's not that you can't use color as an indicator. You certainly can, but you just want to add something else. So if you had in red with an asterisk or in red with an underline, so there was something that supported the use of color, and color was not the only way to do it. Contrast, again, can be an issue for many, many people. And there's an example of good and bad contrast on this slide. The W3C standard recommends 4.5 to 1 or higher. Again, you just look at the palette of your organization and try to find colors that meet that standard or meet or exceed that standard. Jane's going to talk about media. Before I turn it over to her, I just want to tell a story about last week. We had the LEED conference here in Austin. It's hosted by the Kennedy Center from Washington, D.C., but every other year they go out into the field. And LEED stands for Leadership, Exchange in Arts and Disability. So it's performance organizations, museums, all kinds of arts organizations, and the people who come to the LEED conference are usually the ADA coordinators. They are not the technical people, the web designers, the CTOs, but usually the ADA coordinators. And we did a workshop on accessible media because so many of them post videos to their websites. And we shared a lot of free resources for captioning and ways to make their media accessible. And Jane has actually used some of these herself, so I'm going to turn it over to you, Jane, to continue. Yeah, there are so many great resources out there. Nobility has more information about how to make your videos more accessible. It's important that your video is provided on a keyboard-operable media player so that someone doesn't have to have a mouse, or doesn't have to just use their finger that they can use tabs or other items on their keyboard. And the audio content needs to be captioned and synchronized to on-screen actions. Some of the videos on the Nobility website are great examples of this. And there also needs to be description of key content in an audio description track for someone who might have a site impairment. And again, this is a pretty easy fix to do. There is a free tool on Google for instance, but you will still need to go over their conversion, their interpretation of the audio because some of the words they interpret come out very strangely. So you still need a human to have a look at those. And so aside from the PDF, these are easy fixes for your website. These are things you can do right away. They are easy to learn. They are easy to do. None cost money. They cost time, but they don't really cost money. And really there is something that you can just start doing with your new pages. It's about just setting it as a priority, and then it's not extra time. And remember that volunteers can help. This is a great task for volunteers. Volunteers love doing this. I know because I recruit volunteers to do these kind of things when I'm working on a website. And I usually have to close my recruitment early because I get so many people who want to do these things. And you can learn more at this really great link from the Web Accessibility Initiative on Easy Checks, which can help you just do some really simple things on your website right now that can help you become more accessible to everyone. And the glory of, I think, one of the really strong values of that Easy Checks is that that's a way to kind of take the temperature of your website and that this process will lead you through it step by step. It will tell you what browser tools, what free browser tools you can install, things you can use to just do a quick check. Do I even have alt text on my site? How do I know that? Are my links text proper? How do I know that? Are my forms labeled? Those things that we've been talking about, you say, well, it's great that you tell me that I need to have this, but how do I even know? And this is a really good way to get just a basic sense. You're not going to find all the errors. You're not going to find everything. But the Easy Checks is just meant to be for people who aren't particularly technical to be able to, again, take that temperature. I wanted to, if I can remember how to use this thing, I wanted to see how do I put something in here for everybody, broadcast it all. There's a hilarious video called on YouTube. It's called the Jamaican Vacation Caption Fail. And it's about these guys who use the automated captioning tool on YouTube. And then what the captions said they were saying, it's very, very funny. So I would recommend you do that just as a cautionary tale against using those W3, or using those YouTube tools. You have to often go back and clean up the captions just so you know, just so you don't think it's all going to be completely painless. And there are more difficult online barriers. So some of these will require a more significant redesign effort. You can really minimize the cost of that if you integrate accessibility planning in. So if you know you're going out for an RFP to get a new website, make sure that you include accessibility requirements in that work as it's defined and as it's bid out so that you hire people who understand it. We're going to look real quickly at some of those problems with it could be the structure of your website. And that's, you know, this is, semantic structures are part of the HTML code for a reason. And that is to, it's what search engines rely on. It's what a lot of the hierarchical structure relies on so that you can find things easily. And the assistive technologies understand HTML and can use that as well. So if your site is properly structured it's already going to be much easier for an assistive technology to use and to interact with. And this is some of the ways that you can do that. I would suggest you pass this along to the geeks in your company. You also want to be sure that the reading and focus order match the same, flow in the same way as what's displayed on the page. And that's really a matter of the code order and how those things are created and presented. Again, you want to be able to navigate through the site using your keyboard commands and not, and find the order in the same way that you would if you were reading it. Keyboard is another, is another one of those things that's a little bit, it's more difficult to implement than alt text probably, but it's really, really important because so many assistive technologies rely on keyboard control. You know, if I'm blind I can't use a point and click device like a mouse. So if I use speech input I may be able to rely on, my voice input is going to be feed to the keyboard commands. And so a lot of the different assistive technologies are going to map to the keyboard. So the illustration on this slide shows with a mouse I get this, the change in the color of the link and a whole dropdown happens here, a dropdown menu. You want to be able to have that kind of action whether you're using a mouse or a keyboard. So if I tap to that menu item I want the same color change. I want the same dropdown. And this is a very, very common error. So going forward I know that we have not been able to provide nearly as much detail as you're all probably very hungry for because we only have an hour and we want time for questions. But what we're going to ask you to do is we're giving you an assignment. After this presentation we hope that if you're not already we really want you to be an advocate for accessibility at your organization. Again, I just want to emphasize I am not a web designer. I really don't understand much but I am an advocate for accessibility and I know how to ask questions now of web designers so that I can get an accessible website. We hope we've given you some tools and some resources and links to resources so that you can get buy-in from senior management. Please use this presentation. It's going to be available as you heard from TechSoup and also from the W3 Initiative. That's a great way to advocate for accessibility within your organization. And we encourage you to when you recruit web designers whether they're paid, contract, employees, volunteers, we encourage you to put the line in the description that you need someone who understands accessible design or who commits to learning it and applying accessibility. You have every right to have that requirement of the people that you recruit. That can be a great way to become an advocate for accessibility. And we have an opportunity for those of you who are nonprofits, NGOs, charities, mission-based organizations. We have an event called Open Air and it's a contest for web designers. They all get together and they design websites for nonprofits, NGOs, schools, etc. And they design them to be accessible. They have only five weeks to do it and it's a competition. There are judges. The teams are mentored. But what we need are nonprofits and NGOs and schools and government agencies who need a new website or don't have a website and want one to be a part of this event. And the result is for your fee you get the training and support needed to understand accessibility even more. And you get a website, a beautiful website around February 2018 is the end of the competition and you walk away with a website. And your nonprofit will be promoted by nobility for its participation. We really promote your name and who you are and what you do. The benefits are you're matched with a team of web professionals. And many of these are people that return again and again because they love the event so much. We provide support to help you prepare to be a great client to your web design team. We provide training to you. The design team gets a great deal of training. They get a mentor. There's regular check-ins. And I am your check-in person. I am the person that will be talking to you, supporting you. You can call me, email me, text me. I'm going to be there for you. You control all your content. You control the styles, the images, what it is you want. This is you are the client for these teams. And we provide maintenance and sustainability training once your site launches. We are still there for you to help you with the site. And again, this is a six-week, I said five weeks, sorry, competition. You need to register by November 30th. That seems a long way away, but we would like for you to put it on your calendar and really think about it. The competition kicks off in January, but I will be having webinars next month, the month after. I really want to get a lot of you participating. So this could be something you can have other staff members participate in. If I can interrupt, I would just say that the sooner you register, the sooner you register the better because we are going to start the training and the support activities right away. And the people who are most prepared get the best teams. And so the sooner that you register, the more likely you are to feel like you are really going to be a strong competitor. You are going to have your materials in place. We put a base camp at your disposal to communicate. We had a team a couple of years ago with developers that were all around the globe. They were in London, India, San Francisco, and New York, and they developed a public television station in Nairobi. So it's really a blast. It's so much fun. It is a blast. It's my favorite group volunteering event. And if you know me as a volunteering researcher, you know that's a pretty high bar because I know a lot of events. Please look at the website. We've got FAQs. We've got lots more information. And there's no commitment to just go to the website and have a look at the information and write me and ask more questions. So with that, we'll say thank you. And we're ready to hear from you and go through some of your questions now with TechSoup. Thank you so much for this amazing information. And I'm sure our audience really appreciated this in-depth live webinar with all these great resources. Now we're going to spend a few minutes just answering questions from our audience. And the first question that I have is in regards to webinars and people that are disabled, the first question is where could we find best practices for hosting live events online such as webinars? We want to be as welcoming as possible during these events, but not understanding that the cost is fairly high for live captioning. So can you talk a little bit about webinar software or just accessibility for individuals that are disabled? I think that's for Sharon. I was on mute. I have a cough so I had muted so that you guys didn't have to listen to me cough. You know, that's really, that's probably one of the biggest challenges because we do that with the AIR event. We're global. And so all of our meetings and events and everything, we have to think about that. And I saw earlier in this presentation people were asking about live captioning. And often it is outside the budget. The cost of that has really come down and we work with a place here in Austin called Texas Captioners, and I'm sorry for the commercial broadcast, but their costs have come down so much since we started with them using them for webinars a few years ago that we just, now we just work it into our costs. You know, it's part of our budget. It's part of what we expect to be able to provide captions. And you'd be surprised at how many people really benefit from captions regardless of whether they can hear or not. You know, people who maybe have English as a second language or you know maybe there is an accent in the voice of the speaker. And so captions are really a useful thing as well captions contribute to your search engine results. So they're definitely worth the investment in my opinion. The other thing to be aware of is if you know who's in your audience, so always when you have a registration process ask people because if you don't have anyone who needs it in the live broadcast you can always go back and caption it before you post it which is much more economical. As well if you know that you have blind people in your audience who are dialing into the webinar you can be sure that you explain whatever images are on your screen so that you're not, and that's probably a good practice anyway to be able to say and there's an image of whatever it is that you're showing or this is a graph that indicates this much revenue for this or that. You know, those kinds of things are probably good practice no matter where you present and whether it's online or in person. There is, again I'm going back to the W3C, there is a section, I'll try to find the URL so I can put it in the chat of what to consider when you're doing presentations for accessibility and I think it's appropriate for both live and or in person or posted webinar content. That was a long answer. I hope it was helpful in some way. No, it was very helpful. Thank you so much. We have another, it's more of a comment along with your feedback. One person states, knowing many folks they prefer to be described as having additional needs not labeled disabled. Disabled has a connotation that they are less able or less educated or less intelligent. What is your feedback? That was just a comment made by one of our participants. I understand there is some sensitivity around it. I have a very, you know, we have a very large community of people with disabilities and we continue to use the word because it is easily recognized and sometimes the language is easily translated. We work internationally. I think you have to be sensitive to individual people's needs. If you know that you are in a public forum, I think that's a good thing to be aware of and to watch how the sensitivities might be changing over time. I think the person who asked that question is right to raise it as a question. Right now I think there is not really an agreed upon, you know, when you say differently abled people think that is maybe a little torturous language. If you say, you know, if you push the language too far it can seem affected and strange and not very natural. So I am all with you in finding new vocabulary but I am not sure we have agreed on what that is yet. Jane, did you want to add to that? No, the same thing. And I do this with a lot of groups. I have worked with groups that prefer one way of description and then when I have used that description with what I have interpreted is the same group that has gone, no, no, no, that is not the term to use. I always ask, you know, I usually ask, I will say that, you know, yeah, my language has evolved tremendously from when I started working with Nobility back in the 90s to now to the way I talk and the way the community talks about itself. So yeah, let's just keep learning. Let's keep asking people how they would like to be described and let's just keep remembering we are talking about people. Great. Thank you for that amazing answer. Another question that I have is in regards to images and infographics. One person stated, can you speak to complex images like charts and infographics? Yeah, well, there are many, ARIA described by, ARIA has a lot of features for complex images and complex interactions. And I would recommend that you explore those because those can be very, very helpful in getting to exactly what you need. Complex images, charts, graphs, MathML is coming a long way so that maybe it has a lot of promise. Also, I think a synopsis of what's happening on the graph, even on, you know, visible for sighted users as well, can be really helpful. In my case, I have visual capability, but I am not very good at interpreting visual information. Icons often confuse me. Charts and graphs often confuse me. So to see something that's just a synopsis of the trend over the last 50 years has been this, I think is a useful, hello? Yes, I'm here. Sorry about that. Okay, that's all right. It is a useful thing to think about. I'm going to make a note to add, maybe Alicia, I can send you, I've got a note about the captioning resource, the live presentations that I'm going to send a little, another link that you can add about ways to approach. You know, the W3C again, I mean, I think I'm wearing my Education and Outreach Working Group chair hat today a lot, but these resources, we've been working on them for a decade or more of things to help people do that. There's a tutorial on alt text, and they have an entire section on how to approach this question of graphs and charts. So I'll add that link to the links that you're going to get when the presentation closes. Great. And another question we have is, are there any newer models of laptops for a blind person that you can name? Well, you know, Apple, I'm sorry, Apple does such great work in that field. The Macs have voiceover, the voiceover commands are spectacular. It was Apple's pioneering work to meet the needs of the blind community that led to Siri, which of course you don't have to be blind to appreciate Siri. And so their interaction with voice commands on the Mac products, I think, are just fantastic, phenomenal. So I'm sorry to be a commercial. I don't know if I've violated a TechSoup, but that's really the truth. The Apple products are far and away. They've got a head start over everybody. And you know, Google and the Chrome folks, they're catching up, but I think that Apple products by far are the best for blind users. Another person mentioned, it's like a common question. They stated it would be neat to have a list of screen reader tools or assertive tools to test on pages or some sort of site exercise app which could suggest where certain descriptions could be added. Yeah, that is. That's a great idea. I think there are tools and apps of all kinds now, and there's one app that's called, I think it's called Be My Eyes. And it's a thing where volunteers will say, I'm going to spend this much time online, and the blind person can call in or somehow connect. And like if you're in another city and you can hold up your phone and they look and say, oh, you're at the corner of Fifth and Vine, you know, because you've got a sighted person on the other side and you hold up your phone. As far as screen readers, there is a free screen reader that you can download and learn more about how the commands work. It's called NVDA. I think it stands for something non-visual, something NVDA. And you can download that and use a free screen reader. It's not quite as robust as some of the ones you have to pay for, but it sure does help you to figure out, oh, this is what it means if I'm blind and trying to use the web. This is what it's like to have to listen to the web rather than see it. Great. Thank you so much. Another question is, how do you tell that you're using a 4.5 to 1 contrast? Yeah, that's right. Well, there's another free tool called the Color Contrast Analyzer. And it looks like a little palette, like a little paint palette. And you pull out an eyedropper and you grab a pixel of this color that your text is and a pixel of the one behind. And it will measure and report to you what the contrast is. The Color Contrast Analyzer, if you put it in a search, you'll find it and it's a free download. And that easy check that I told you about, the easy check kind of tells you about a bunch of these different look-free browser tools that you can use to test a lot of this stuff. Okay, great. I think we're done with the question. So I do want to thank everyone for those engaging questions. And before we go, I just want to engage our audience. Chat out one thing that you learned or that you wish to share with a co-worker or a teammate regarding this amazing presentation. So take a few moments to chat out one thing you've learned or you wish to share with a co-worker or a teammate about this presentation. 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So go to our website and that will be in the chat. And you can sign up and hopefully you will enjoy those upcoming webinars. And I want to take time to thank our two amazing presenters from Knowbility. Thank you so much. And also we would like to thank everyone that participated with this webinar. And hopefully you learned some new information. This webinar will be available by the end of the day. If you've registered it will also be uploaded to our YouTube and our website later on today. And if you have any questions please feel free to fill out the survey. Also there will be a post survey as well as I mentioned before. Take time to fill out that survey. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Thank you everyone and have a great rest of your week. And thank you to our Fox already talk.