 Words appear over a blue-purple background, creating accessible documents. Cheryl Burgstahler, IT Director, University of Washington. I'm Cheryl Burgstahler at the University of Washington in Seattle. We on our campus, like other campuses, produce tons of documents to share with our students. Copies of PowerPoint presentations, of journal articles, of book chapters, you name it. Krista Greer. If we extrapolate heavily, UW offered about 13,000 courses in fall quarters. And doing the math of 600 pages per each of those classes. University of Washington. It was about 7.8 million pages of content. Melinda McCray. This is a course pack for one of our courses, so these are all the collected readings that the students have for the quarter. It can be a massive amount of reading for any student. It's even more of a challenge for students with disabilities. Terrell Thompson, Technology Accessibility Specialist, University of Washington. Everybody creates documents and most people don't realize that all documents are not equal, that some are more accessible than others. Students who are blind use screen readers and speech synthesis to read the content allowed to them that appears on the screen. Students with dyslexia and other conditions that impact their reading, they use screen readers too. Even though they can see the content on the screen, the voice output helps them comprehend that content. But assistive technology benefits many other students as well. Perhaps they have arthritis where they can't manipulate a physical book or they can't carry the weight of their books on their back. So they're really just looking for an electronic only version. Perhaps the student might also have low vision where they need to have an electronic version that can be enlarged. Say you have a class with a hundred students and you give out the course materials to ninety of those students and the other ten students you just say, oh, too bad, you know, you can't read these materials and that's really how bad it can be in some of classes if the materials haven't been made accessible. Words appear, scanned or photocopied pages. The light bar of a scanner moves across a page. A copy machine expels one. The most inaccessible documents are scanned in or photocopied. Perhaps they're essentially images, screen readers can't access the text. Here's an example of a really bad photocopy and you can see it's got underlines. There's been notations made on it. Our Disability Services Office provides accommodations for students with disabilities, but some departments and colleges like our School of Social Work have stepped up to being proactive in providing accessibility design documents to their students. It's actually converting this, which is technically an image, into a piece of text. A scanner, accompanied by optical character recognition or OCR, can turn a document into one that is accessible to a screen reader. It also benefits other students. For instance, somebody using a mobile device to access the content or someone who wants to search through the content to find the content that they're interested in. The one, I think, really good thing that's coming out of this is as we're developing these old image files into text files, I think it actually helps all the students because some of these things were pretty unreadable, just as they were. Shelby, student. My name is Shelby Keith. This is my senior year at the University of Washington. I have dyslexia, dysgraphia, and I was diagnosed at the age of seven. So I've always had a challenge with it, but I've learned to overcome it. Shelby uses a screen reader to access documents in her courses, even a Turkish language course. When I'm just reading it myself, it takes me a lot longer. I get lost in the text. I don't have trouble like paying attention, so it really does help and it makes it so that I can complete the task at hand. This isn't a program that requires a lot of reading. Like every quarter she's reading 10 books on average, a ton of reading. So for her volume is huge. And so she really utilizes the audio components where she has a file, pulls it up on her computer, says computer, read this part of the file or read the whole thing, and then the computer will speak the words to her. So for that, that helps her to have access to the content, and it also helps her to get through the amount of content that she needs to read. There is another quarter where actually all of the documents that I needed to use were inaccessible. And it was to the point where I would OCR them, but then they wouldn't be OCRed correctly because there was some kind of lock on the file. So then it was like I had to either go online, figure out something, or talk to some of the support staff here and figure out how do I unlock this file so that it's ineligible format where all of the paragraphs are in tasks. Previously in my career I studied public health at the master's level, and that's when I was diagnosed with ADHD. Even after obtaining her a physician's assistant degree, Glynis Weaver continues to use accessible documents. Chris DeGreer early on was the one to help to find assistive technology to do so. And what about using electronic books like on a Kindle? Are there additional benefits from that? There are additional benefits. The fact that you can highlight a word that you are unclear on the definition or the context, and it populates the information right there, it prevents you from going on a fruitless search for that definition. Posting inaccessible documents can create a real challenge to students who are blind. A young woman with a white cane walks a hall with Cheryl, Cynthia, graduate student. It's very frustrating when I need to read an article for a class or for my research, and I'm trying three or four different methods to make a PDF accessible, and sometimes it just doesn't work. Additional steps are needed to make documents accessible to people who are blind. For example, you need text alternatives for graphic images, and you need to format the headings. This would be in PowerPoint presentations, in documents created in Microsoft Word, etc. Words appear, headings. In order for a document to be accessible to a person who's blind and using a screen reader, it's important that the heading structure be used. For example, in Microsoft Word, you should use the heading styles. Headings serve a couple of important functions for a screen reader user. One is that they can navigate through a document by its headings, so they can jump from heading to heading to heading, and their assistive technology will inform them that they're on a heading of a particular level. So they know this is a heading level two. That then is a subheading underneath a heading level one, and so that helps them to develop a kind of a mental outline of the structure of the document. With most screen readers, they can do that just by pressing the H key to jump to the first heading. And if I press H again, text book heading level two, and again, course objectives heading level two, class schedule heading level two, grades heading level two. My name is Hadi Rangin. I am the Information Technology Accessibility Specialist at the University of Washington. Hadi's an expert, but he's also a user of accessible technology. For a few seconds, you skim through the document. You just want to know that what is in this document? It is built. What are the major components of this article that you are reading? This helps you to focus on the desired section that you would like to study further. Without that, you have to read from top to bottom because everything has the same weight. Sided users use visual cues like bold headings to navigate a document. But for someone using a screen reader, if the heading structure is not used, they will just get a big string of text. Text without line breaks or headings. Nothing stands out. Words appear, making graphics accessible. Diagrams and photos can be made accessible in a variety of ways. Alternative text actually tells a person who can't see the image exactly what is in the image. Nearly all authoring tools provide options for providing alternative text. If that's not provided, then a person who's blind and using a screen reader will not be able to access the content presented in that image. Here's what we hear. Graphic photo. So it identifies it as a graphic, and then the only alt text is photo, which obviously doesn't communicate the essence of this image. A sided user gets a lot more out of this than a screen reader user does. An example of a way to do this in Microsoft Word is to right-click on the image and then select Format, Picture, and then under Alternative Text to type in the text that would fully describe that image for someone who can't actually see it. Now I press Arrow to go to the image. Graphic side-by-side comparison of two photos of McCarthy Glacier in Alaska in 1909, a massive glacier stretched to the horizon. Making a document accessible does not affect its visual appeal or its integrity. Anybody who's creating a document really needs to do that legwork up front to be sure the document is accessible. The percentage of students who actually request an accommodation is much, much, much lower than the actual number of students who have a disability of some sort. And so if we may have a request from one student for a class, and you can almost guess that there's probably two other students in that class who will benefit from the accommodation. It's easier to build inaccessibility when a document is being created than waiting until after the fact. And if you build inaccessibility, it will diminish the need for accommodations for students with disabilities. Words appear. For more information about IT accessibility, consult www.uw.edu.accessibility. This video presentation was created with funding from UW Information Technology, Copyright 2016, University of Washington. Described by Audio Eyes. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.