Chapter 2 – Introduction from
Daniel Hubbell, Microsoft
10:37 mins
13.06.2012
(PowerPoint slide titled: Creating Accessible Documents)
Daniel:
Hello. Good morning everybody. This is going to be a participatory
event, because if I fall asleep halfway through it’s because of the 28
hour flight I took yesterday to get here, so thank you for being so
welcoming; great remarks from Andrew.
As he mentioned, my name is Daniel Hubbell, and I am the Technical
Evangelist for the accessibility group at Microsoft. My job is
awesome; I get to come and talk to people like you – that’s OK, you
can laugh – because you’re awesome.
What I’m going to do today, we’re going to go through a number of
things. I’m going to set some high level, just you know how do we
think about what accessibility is in Microsoft briefly, and then I’m
going to go through and really reinforce what Andrew’s mentioned,
which is the basic tenets that you need to know when you’re creating
documents, these are just best practices.
I’m going to be demoing today in Office 2010. I’m well aware that
many of you aren’t, but you know what, these techniques apply to any
document you create. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it in Office
2003, Office 2007; this is all technique that you should just know
about. There may be some minor nuances on how you go about doing
that, and we have some resources that can point you to learning about
some of those nuances, but the techniques themselves are really applied
to any document that you create.
And I want to set the stage with the idea of this world of multiple
formats, and how do we do that, and why do we want to do that, and
why is Word such a good place to start. One of the great things about
Microsoft Word is you can out-put in almost every one of these file
formats that was mentioned. I can create HTML files, I can export
PDF, I can create MP3 files – did you know that? We’re going to
demo that later. We can actually create an audio file of a document out
of Word.
So having the centre point of a Word document that has all of the
content in it for a person who might be using alternative access tools is
the key point, that if you start with something good, anything else that
you produce from it is going to also hopefully be good.
[Presenter clicks on the mouse and moves to the next PowerPoint slide]
[PowerPoint slide titled: A Spectrum of Abilities]
I want to build a little bit on what are we talking about when we talk
about disabilities? I’m going to start at the bottom of this pyramid-ish
thing. Most people think of someone who’s deaf, someone who’s
blind, someone’s in a wheelchair, all traditional disabilities, all valid,
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Chapter 2 – Introduction from
Daniel Hubbell, Microsoft
10:37 mins
13.06.2012
and representative of a smaller portion than that 20% that was
mentioned earlier.
But then there’s people that move into temporary conditions, and these
can both be physical conditions or environmental conditions. How
many people have been to a nightclub recently? Don’t be shy. Come
on. Nightclub people – I know there’s a couple. Alright, I have at least
once, and the first thing you probably do when you go to the nightclub
so that you can hear from your friends, is you put your phone on
vibrate mode, right, because you can’t really hear, you’re text
messaging a lot because you can’t talk on the phone because of the
loud music – that’s an environmental condition that basically simulates
the fact that you’re deaf.
So you in essence at that point in time have a disability, and there are a
lot of people in the workforce that work in those sorts of environments.
They could be in a machine shop, they could be somewhere where they
maybe don’t have all of the use of the senses that they might normally
have. So that’s one environmental condition.
The second would be just temporary disabilities. So you’re out playing
rugby, break your arm, come to work on Monday and how do you
type? You know, that might be hard if you’ve got one arm in a sling,
or one arm in a cast, so how do you do that? So that’s a person who
has a temporary condition.
And then the third really is just for preference, some people just find it
easier to read text that’s a little bit bigger, or maybe have some audio
that helps reinforce the text that they’re reading, so for them their
preference is just sometimes a bit different than what the default setting
might be in a product.
[Presenter moves to the next PowerPoint slide]
[PowerPoint slide titled: What is Accessible Technology?]
So why is that important? Well of those bottom two groups primarily,
when we talk about people with disabilities needing to access our
documents, they’re typically doing that through something that’s called
assisted technology. This is some sort of software application, or
maybe a hardware device that’s been added to the PC, that gives them
an alternate way to interact with the information that’s typically
provided through a screen and keyboard that most folks would use to
interact with a computer.
So a person who is blind might be using something called a screen
reader, which will actually read everything on the screen to them that
you and I might take for granted if we can see with our eyes on the
screen. And so this is just technology that enables individuals to adjust
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Chapter 2 – Introduction from
Daniel Hubbell, Microsoft
10:37 mins
13.06.2012
their experience in a way that meets their unique visual, hearing,
dexterity, cognitive, and speech needs.
There’s a long laundry list, I mean there are hundreds, probably
thousands of different products that fall in this category, but when
we’re talking about created documents that can assist people with
disabilities, what we’re actually doing is providing the information
necessary and in a way that is easily used by these assisted
technologies in order to provide that information in a different way.
Does that make sense? An overwhelming yes, from the crowd.
Excellent. Good.
So what I’m going to go through today is I’m going to show you two
lists of best practices, and I’m going to have these charts up here.
[Presenter demonstrating]
And I’m just going to walk through them first just to describe sort of
the outline of what we’re going to do, and then what I’m going to do is
walk through each of these in a Word document and show you actually
how to do that, so that by the end of the next hour – we’re going to take
a break at 10:30 – at the end of the next hour you’ll be able to say gosh,
OK I understand this technique, so seeing how it’s been used, and you
can apply those techniques to the documents that you create. After the
break we’ll come back and I’m going to show you some tools, some
additional tools that we have for doing a couple of other kind of nifty
and fun things within Office.
So with that, are there any questions before I get started? Like I said,
I’m interactive, so please feel free to interrupt me if you need. Yes,
Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Ma’am? I’m sorry. I’m like I’m half blinded by the light here.
[Question being asked from the audience]
Was it the flyers that are going to be available, or?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Oh, the examples? We’ll make sure that they’re provided to you. The
charts that I have are something I actually created on my plane flight
over here, so these are available in sort of a longer form, and we can
definitely give you those links, and in fact on the brochure that you
were handed when you came in, there’s a link on there that actually
will take you to much of the information that I’m telling you. It’s in a
much longer form with step-by-step instructions. I’ve just consolidated
that as all our charts.
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Chapter 2 – Introduction from
Daniel Hubbell, Microsoft
10:37 mins
13.06.2012
[Presenter clicks on the mouse and moves to the next PowerPoint slide]
[PowerPoint slide titled: Document Best Practices]
So let’s get started. The first round is document best practices. What
I’ve done here is I just took a handful, and I sort of created a graph
which shows what products they apply to. So with the alternate text
being added to images and objects – does anybody here know what
alternative text is? Awesome. OK.
So for those that don’t know what alternative text is, essentially think
of it like a caption. I’ve embedded some text information about an
object, whether that’s a graph, a chart, or an image, to describe what it
is and what information that it’s trying to convey, so that if I can’t see
that chart, that information can be delivered to me via text. And I’ll
explain how that’s different than a caption – alternative text is different
to a caption.
Specifying column header rows in tables, we’re going to talk about that
briefly, and that applies to all three Office documents. Using styles in
documents is very important, we’ll talk about that and show you why
that’s relevant. Ensuring heading styles are in correct order. Using
hyperlink text that is meaningful – this is probably one of the most
egregious errors that I see in documents by everyone across the board,
whether that’s in HTML, on websites or whatnot, we’ll talk about best
practices there. And then using simple table structures, I’ll go over a
little bit about how and why you don’t want to do a lot of merging of
form cells and things like that.
[Presenter clicks on the mouse and moves to the next PowerPoint slide]
[PowerPoint slide titled: Document Best Practices]
And then the second half of what we’re going to go over is avoiding
blank cells for formatting; making sure that you name all your sheets in
an Excel document instead of just having Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3.
Obviously slides need to have unique titles. Avoid floating objects –
this could be images and graphics, titles that just happen quite
frequently. Image watermarks also are something that we see quite a
bit, which can’t be read by some assisted technology. And then finally
we’ll talk briefly about PowerPoint and about how we want to increase
the visibility for users who might be colour blind, which you said 12%
I think is the male population. So there’s a significant number of
people that are colour blind that we need...
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