Hello everybody, and welcome to today’s training styles. My name is Deanna Forsman and I’m going to introduce you to why styles are important.
Now here on your screen you should see a copy of a recent agenda that was used for our duty day this past February and it looks pretty nice. It’s very attractive. It has nice fonts. It has nice spacing, the flow is pretty clear. And this is viewing a document that was created in Microsoft Word basically on a computer using Microsoft Word.
Now, if I were to view this document say, for example, on my cell phone: an Android phone, we’re pretty good. This is still very readable, it’s still pretty clear. I’m still in able to pretty much follow the flow of this document.
Here’s what it looks like on an iPad. And this is where things start to get very bizarre. You’ll notice that the heading photo that basically said NHCC Professional Development is gone. We have colors that are overlapping, so here are in the middle it says, “Building Campus Community” but it is overlapping with something that says, “Presenters Leslie Hook and Anna Kniebel.” So, you can also see a little bit lower right here we have “Coffee and Hot Chocolate” in the CBT Grand Hall, and apparently this is being presented by Emilie Anderson.
So the iPad view is not displaying the same way as our Word document was viewing and the reason for this can be seen when we turn the typographical marks on. Now in any Word program, you can do this. Basically what we’re looking for is this button right up here. It’s a paragraph mark and when I turn that on, suddenly this document no longer looks as neat and tidy as it did before.
We can see here that we have at the very back a photograph that has the text embedded in it, so “Professional Development at North Hennepin Community College” here is a part of this particular photo. On top of that photo we have a text box, and inside that text box we have a table. And this table is actually being used to separate the lines so that we can have a nice darker color cell here, and a lighter color cell here. So it’s providing some space and it is it definitely controlling the layout, but this table is not using cells to separate out the time, and the title, and the people who are presenting, and then the location. It’s actually including everything in a single table cell. And this makes it very very difficult—this is the the primary reason why Word on the iPad—or I should say why the iPad was having so much trouble actually rendering the text properly.
I did open this file in a document reader. Basically software that would read the document to me so if I was blind and could not actually see, or if I just needed to have the document read to me as opposed to seeing it visually, the screen reader basically would not even render this first page. It basically ignores everything up here and it starts right here with “Applied Computer Skills for All Degrees on Campus.” It reads this section quite nicely. You can also see that the section does not have a lot of extraneous typographical marks as the section does up here.
I believe that’s one of the primary reasons that the screenwriter gave up is because this is a table inside of a text box of that is laying on top of the photograph.
So part of this training is going to focus on the value of universal design. This is something that is important for making our text based documents accessible so that they meet ADA compliance—which is a legal obligation that the campus has. But this is more than just making sure that people who are blind can read the documents that we provide. This is about making it a document available to our staff, our students, our employees regardless of how they choose to look at the document. So many people on our campus like to use iPhones and iPads, and this document as it was sent out is not going to display properly for people who are trying to see the schedule on their phone or on their iPad. Android users are a little bit luckier in that sense, but most of our people are using iPhones. The people who are blind are really going to have an impossible time trying to figure out where they need to be, when they need to be there.
So one of the things to keep in mind when looking at a document with typographical marks on, is we want to minimize as much as possible the number of typographical marks. So right here, we have three tabs right here we have one, two, three, four, five, six tabs. And every time a screen reader comes across a tab it will basically pause. And if I cannot actually see this page and I am listening to a screen reader read the page if it pauses for long enough, I might think that it is at the end of the document and I’ll stop listening. And this could be a problem if you are listening to this document and you hear “Building Campus Community, February—Friday, February twenty-fourth 8:00 am, Coffee and Hot Chocolate.” Then you might not wait around to hear that this is in CBT Grand Hall. Or you might get quite frustrated waiting for the screen reader to get to the next part of the document.
The other thing that makes this particular document a problem in terms of accessibility, particularly for screen readers but also for our iPads, is how page breaks are—sorry not page breaks—how information is being presented that looks good visually but is it problematic for a screen reader. So if we look at this section right here. A screen reader basically is going to read this all the way across. It’s going to read this as, “Conversations about Supporting our International. Olamide Coker and Scott Johnson. CBT 174. And Immigrant Students.” Visually we can see that this is supposed to read as “Conversations about Supporting our International and Immigrant Students,” presented by Olamide Coker and Scott Johnson in CBT 174. But that information is not going to be conveyed as clearly to somebody who is listening to a screen reader present this document. Assuming of course that the screen reader even makes the attempt. As I mentioned when I tried, the screen reader completely skipped this particular page.
Accessibility is important, again, not just because we want people—we want to make sure that we’re supporting people who have disabilities, but because we want to ensure that people can access documents however they want, however it is actually going to fit their lifestyle. Take documents that we put up into D2L Brightspace, for example. D2L Brightspace comes with a screen reader installed, and many of our students who are not visually impaired are using the screen reader to listen to their assignments maybe while they’re taking care of their kids or while they’re making dinner. Some of them just prefer the oral quality as opposed to the visual reading the text onscreen. So for these students, making sure that we create documents that are friendly for screen readers is really really important to help support their learning.
So hopefully now you have a bit of an understanding of why accessibility is important. It is not just about helping our people who are visually impaired or who need an accommodation. It’s about creating a document that is going to be accessible to everybody, regardless of how they choose to view the document.