Accessibility Training Session Friday October 21 2016

[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.