[Lecturer] Alright So I wanted to start out by playing
back a video that was put together by someone who works in our
disability resource services area. And he uses a piece of software for
navigating his computing environment and it's called Jaws, and you might have
seen him walking around campus. He's completely blind and he has a seeing stick
And he's a real bright individual, and I'm going to go ahead - and this is off
of the College home page - I'm going to click on this and he's going to demonstrate
how he uses his technology to get around canvas. And I'm only
going to play a few minutes of it, okay? Let me just make this a little bit bigger.
And you're going to see the old version of Canvas being played back here and I
just want to do this for a little bit of effect. We're not going to watch the
whole thing. If you wanted to go back and watch it, it's on the College homepage
[recorded voice] Hello my name is Ken Specter and today I'll be giving you
a brief glimpse in what's involved in having the Canvas environment hooked up
to a site. To do this I will be using Jaws for Windows the screenreader program
that used Texas Speech technology in order to verbalize the text thats on the screen.
My objective today will be to find the Canvas link, go there, log in, and find
my courses; within my courses, locate Disability Resources or Services,
go to that page, find recent changes, and in recent changes locate
Holly's Resource Page, go to Holly's Resource Page and find the content
specific to Holly's Resource Page, and log out once more from Canvas.
The first step again is to locate the link titled Canvas. There are many ways
to do this. The fastest of which is the Jaws Find Dialogue.The Jaws Find Dialogue
allows the user to enter a word or string of text, and then leave the search to Jaws
To launch the Jaws Find Dialogue I will now press control + [inaudible].
[Jaws] Jaws find dialogue combo descent of mountian the arrow keys or type
[Ken] From here I type in the word I am seeking
which is Canvas and press enter to launch the search query.
Jaws has gone ahead and moved the cursor to the link
titled Canvas which I will now activate by pressing the space bar.
[Lecturer} Okay, so I'm going to pause it there.
So that robotic voice that you heard was his screen reader software and
I get the sense that he was slowing down for the benefit of people who
have had sight their entire lives to be able to see what he was doing with that.
So the reason JAWS is able to do what it does is because it goes into the code that
describes the markup on these websites.
And if you're a web person that has that knowledge and has the ability
to put that together, it makes a website accessible to people who rely on that
technology. We're not asking people to become experts in that, so we're going to
empower you with a few tips and trainings on how to make your materials more
accessible than they may already be. And that's one of the outcomes of this
training. We're going to talk about four major areas: electronic documents,
Microsoft Office format, PDF documents, your Canvas course materials, and video.
Once we get through all of that we will have covered everything and you'll be done
So I'm going to start out by , and all of these examples are on the very simple
basis, just for the purposes of training, I'm going to minimize my web browser,
and I'm going to open up an example syllabus document in Microsoft Word
format. So first of all, a little disclaimer. I'm using the Microsoft
Windows version of Office. If you're a Mac person, you may or may not
be able to do 100% everything that I'm going to demonstrate for you,
although I believe that the Mac versions of Office are coming up to par, I was
shown a little bit of someone able to kind of do what I was doing, in another
training session, but everything that you're seeing now is going to be more
readily available to you in the Windows version. So if you're a Mac person, which
I know a lot of you in cultural science are, you'll probably want to find a
computer on campus that has Windows to do any of this type of work.
Person in the audience: "The new version of office Mac is nearly identical,
and it's available free for any employee"
Presenter: And that's the great thing about Office, we all have access to it.
So what I have here is an example syllabus and I'm going to stay behind the computer
I wish I could get up and point to this so I'm gonna use my mouse
I'm gonna show you a couple of things that you may not already be aware of
This interface that you see up here is called the ribbon,
I'm gonna click on the view tab, then I'm gonna check a box called navigation pane
and it's gonna expose a little navigation area, and this is kinda like
an interactive table of contents. Now the reason I expose that to you is because
I want to show you some things that you may not already be aware of
this other part of the ribbon under the home tab, does anybody use these guys?
someone in the audience: "yeah, I have" Okay, Why have you used them in the past?
audience member: "just formatting" Okay, general formatting,
The one thing I wanted to point out is they do change the visual style of
something that's on the page but there's also what's known as a semantic
structural meaning to them, so they provide structure to a document.
Now this particular document is a simple two page syllabus, and the screenreader
software that we were kind of giving a highlight into a little moment ago
would probably be able to read this document from top to bottom
Without any issue. Now if you're the type of person that has a lot of these in your
online course content, or you provide them electronically, they may be a little bit
longer than one or two pages. So what I am going to describe here is more or less
best practices, and if you have a student who is relying on assistive technology
they will probably still be able to read everything, but you can make it more
accessible by using these guys.