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Speakers:
Amanda: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's session of the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Amanda Hurford and I am the Scholarly Communications Director for PALNI. And I'll be your host and facilitator for today. Just a little background about why I'm here and why I wanted to host today. I attended Pub101 for the first time back in 2019 when our OER publishing program was in its infancy. And we were trying to figure out if we could publish. And if so, how were we going to do that?
And I learned so much from attending these sessions and from reviewing all the modules. So now I'm serving on the Pub101 committee with Carla Myers and Amanda Larson and Karen and others. And it's really great to be on the other side today and helping out by facilitating this session. So soon I'll be handing it off to Jacque Frank from Montana State University to talk about accessibility and inclusion and OER. But a few comments just to kind of get us started.
As always we're going to leave time for your questions and lots of conversation hopefully at the end of today's session. And there may be lots of you who actually have experience with this topic, so we definitely invite you to share your experience and just sort of be part of the conversation and let us know what resources you use and how you have approached this topic in the past.
So a few housekeeping details, this webinar is being recorded and it's going to be added to the Pub101 YouTube list for the spring 2022 cohort. And we are committed to providing a friendly and safe and welcoming environment for everyone that is in line with our community norms. So if you could join us in creating a safe and constructive space, that would be wonderful. So that's it for me for now, I'm going to go ahead and hand things over to Jacque to talk about the topic for today, Accessibility and Inclusion in OER.
Jacqueline: Great. Thank you. And hello everyone. I am Jacque Frank, the Instruction and Accessibility Librarian at the Montana State University library in Bozeman, Montana. And I am really happy to be here with you to talk about accessibility today. And as a reminder, these slides will be linked from the course orientation after today's presentation, as well as it being recorded.
Okay. Today we are going to first acknowledge that there are lots of accessibility challenges, and then we're going to share some talking points about why accessibility matters so that we can promote the idea of just having an accessibility mindset. And then we're going to cover some of the specific best practices and how to use them as well as a few accessibility checkers that you might want to use. Then we'll briefly touch on some accessibility considerations for different types of different OER documents, such as PDF and EPUBs.
Finally, we'll share some resources and training options and include any that you might be aware of as well that you want to share with the group. Throughout this, if you want to unmute yourself or type in the chat box to share any information, ask questions, or respond to any of the other group questions that might come through, please feel free to do so along the way. I have just a couple good different questions. I'd like you to answer this in the chat, but first I'd like to ask you, what type of institution are you from, university, college, community college or other? And if it's other, maybe go ahead and throw it in there.
I'm seeing lots of universities, a consortium, state university, colleges, community colleges. I'll have to add consortia for next time, because that definitely tends to be one. We definitely have a mix for sure and from people from all over, so that's kind of what I expected. Great. Well, feel free to keep adding in the chat if you haven't yet. But we are going to talk about some of the challenges that no matter where you're at or what type of institution you're at, it can be a challenge to get authors to create accessible materials sometimes.
And Christina will talk a little bit more next week about some other challenges as well, but it can be more challenging to get people to create accessible materials than it can be to get them thinking about creating more diverse materials. So for what it's worth, accessibility is just something that in my experience it's often because people think of it as kind of an add-on or something to do with the end. That's why I like to talk about having an accessibility mindset from the beginning.
And another one of the biggest challenges that I see is time. I'm sure you're all aware of that. Both having time to learn about accessibility on the front end and then the time it takes to ensure that your materials are accessible. And then it also never ends because there isn't really such thing as being 100% accessible. And so there are always updates that you can make. But for our purposes, we're going to be talking about having that mindset, knowing some of the best practices and then some resources to help ensure that the content you're getting from different people meets those guidelines.
I will say that the extra time it takes to make the documents accessible decreases over time. The more you get used to doing it as an integral part of the process. So that's definitely something that you can also share with different instructors or different people creating OER and know that yourself if you are creating open educational resources yourself. Lastly, I see many folks fall into a trap of thinking it doesn't have a big impact and therefore it might not be worth the extra time it takes. But we're going to debunk that shortly, just a minute.
But first, I think I went backwards on my slides. Oh no, I didn't. Sorry, I thought I was showing this slide first. As you can see, these were some of the challenges that we just talked about. Okay. First I want to briefly outline what we mean by accessibility and how that is different from universal design and inclusive design. And that's going to be situated within the context of what's covered within your unit one in Pub101. So to review the definitions of universal design and inclusive design that are included, universal design is the process of creating products that are usable by people with the widest range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations.
Inclusive design then means that you're creating a lot of different ways for people to participate, so that as many people as possible feel as though they can belong. However, inclusive design doesn't mean designing one thing for all people. Sorry, at first accessibility then often refers to the design of products, devices, services, and environments to be usable by people with disabilities. So while they do have some differences, really they have a shared goal. And that if we think about accessibility, universal design, inclusive design from the beginning, it can help design content in a way the users can access more easily, which is ultimately the goal of all three mindsets.
Let's talk about how to have an accessibility mindset, which does come with an understanding of why accessibility matters and how many people actually benefit from it. But first, next, I want you to answer again in the chat. Are you mostly supporting other textbook authors or are you authoring content yourself? Both, supporting others. I see mostly supporting others. Some both, definitely some authoring content though, a bit of both, actually supporting. So again, a mix. Great. Thank you. Ultimately, one of the goals of creating open textbooks is so that they can be accessed by more people with fewer barriers.
Sorry. It turns out that one in five are about 19% of undergrad students report having a disability. And about one in four or 26% of people in the US live with a disability. However, if you really think about it, 100% of people will experience a disability at some time in their life. And that's according to Access Lab and that's likely sometimes during their education and that's because disability can be permanent, temporary or situational. So even having a bad ear infection can limit someone's hearing temporarily and situational disabilities can range from just being in a loud environment or even to being extremely sleepy, which can impair your focus and performance.
And we must also acknowledge and understand that accessibility is a spectrum. There's a huge variety of assistive technologies, even down to classes and contacts. It's all the way up to screen readers and mobility and hearing aids. We obviously cannot cover them all. But if you have interesting examples of assistive technology, feel free to share them in the chat as well.
And because accessibility is a spectrum, what works for one person, it doesn't for another person. And that again is a challenge. Ultimately when we're thinking about OER and publishing, providing as many formats as possible is a best practice that allows users to choose what works for them. We'll see some differences between different documents. But for example, there can be different ways that a user would use an EPUB versus a PDF. So offering both options allows the user to choose again what works best for them.
And that option is an option when you go to publish a textbook, it can be done from Google Docs or Word and Pressbooks. You can just save it in different formats. And ultimately accessibility benefits everyone in the end. While certain things are designed specifically for people with disabilities. For example, curb cuts and automatic door openers were designed for people with mobility aids. But many people use those on a daily basis when we're pushing a shopping cart or a stroller. And another example, using headers helps structure a document so that users can navigate by section. If someone is using a screen reader, they can jump between the headings, but it also helps visual users just by breaking up the content as well.
Captions help people who have hearing impairments, but also allow people to follow along better or watch a video in a noisy environment if they don't have headphones. Transcripts is another one that allows users to read the content without seeing a video. And that could be helpful for some people who don't have really good internet connection or bandwidth, and could also be read using glasses, magnification, a screen reader, braille, or other assistive technology. By doing these things, it allows all of us and all users to benefit.
Okay. Let's dig into a few specific accessibility best practices. But first I have our last poll. I want to ask you how much accessibility and/or experience do you have? Zero, low, moderate or advanced. It's moderate, low, moderate, couple zeros in there. No one's saying advanced yet. I feel like people are scared to say they have advanced knowledge, I'm even scared to say I have advanced knowledge sometimes. Well, great.
Well, even for those of you who have moderate knowledge, hopefully you will learn something new and also put some of these talking points in your back pocket, if you are helping other people who are publishing. Because ultimately who's responsible? Generally the creator or the author of the content is responsible for meeting accessibility guidelines. However, publishers also want to make sure that the content that they publish is accessible. That requires knowing at least what to look for and then providing that knowledge and resources back to authors if needed.
If you have more support than that for accessibility, great, that's awesome. But I'm guessing that a lot of you might not. So a lot of it is, again, knowing what to look for, knowing these standards and then sharing this information back with the creator or the author. And then working through that process so that you can get an accessible product that then you can publish. We can't cover them all, but we're going to talk about a lot of the most common best practices from WCAG. Oops, and I thought I updated that, it's 2.1 now, the web content accessibility guidelines from W3C. And this is the industry standard and we are going to start with headings. We're going to start by talking about headings, hyperlinks, color contrast, captions, transcripts, and alt-text.
First let's take a look at headings. Heading styles are a formatting tool. They are used to separate sections of a document or a textbook so that users and screen readers can navigate through the sections quickly. And it helps organize the document as well. The importance of having a well structured textbook is also covered in your unit one and headings help provide the structure of that textbook. They should be applied in outline format. And so the title of the textbook would be a heading one. Then the next would be like the chapter titles and then any sub chapters or subsections of each chapter would be heading three and so on.
Usually you only have one heading one, but you can have multiple heading twos. And then under heading two, you could also have multiple heading threes for example. To do this in Word, you simply highlight the information and then you can choose the heading style from the top ribbon. Yes. Also, and in Google docs, I'm looking at the chat, there's also headings, no matter where you're creating it, there will be an option to apply the heading. Usually you just select the text that you want. And then in both Word and in Google Docs, it's up on the menu, up at the top. And if anyone has other options for other software videos, please feel free to add it in the chat like you are doing.
For hyperlinks, you want the users to know where the link is going to take them and avoid pasting the entire long URL, which is just string of special characters. And you also want to avoid using click here as a link. And instead you want the link to be the title of the content itself or what the user is going to do. If you would say, go to the Huffington Post, or then the Huffington Post would be the name of the hyperlink or the text that appears as hyperlink. Or another example is to contact us or to email us, have email us actually be the link rather than email us from and then giving the link.
And again, so for hyperlinks, usually write out the text you want to appear, highlight that text, right click on it. And then there's usually an option to choose a link or a hyperlink. And then you get to put in the URL behind it. And I see it down there, does the size of the hyperlink matter? The size of the actual URL that's going behind the text does not matter. The text that you link, so the text that appears as the link, you want that to be as short as possible but that is still descriptive. It can be a few words definitely.
But what you want to avoid is probably more than one line being a hyperlink, because if it crosses over and is more than one line and there's show right next to each other, it can just get really hard to read with an underline. But if it's a couple words and it crosses a line, it wraps the text to the next line, but it's still only a couple words, that's okay. I hope that answers your question. If it confused it more, just let me know.
And so when thinking about color, we want to ensure that high color contrast of text and diagrams and charts, we just want to ensure that the color contrast is high enough. And also you don't want to use color alone to convey meaning. So for example, if you wanted to highlight an important part of the text, don't just make it a different color of text. You would also want to make it bold and so that if someone was color blind and would also see that emphasis.
For color contrast, there are some accessibility checkers that can be used to check this. And I have those included at the end. If you're just using straight black and white text or navy blue and white, really something that you know is really high contrast, then that's okay to start with. But then as you start using more colors, then there are some checkers that you can use.
Captions benefit people with hearing impairments, and also people who don't have access to audio, or people who use English as a second language, or in noisy environments or quiet environments, and we can generate automatic captions for videos using YouTube. And there are now many other software programs that are catching on and integrating transcripts. We have live transcription as an option through Zoom that users can choose to turn on if they want to, PowerPoint is now offering options. But generally you're going to be publishing content, so the video content will already be created. And you just need to ensure that that content has the captions as well.
And I saw just a question here about color contract. Is there a standard color used for links and then seeing more white text on dark backgrounds. Is this an accessibility concern? I'm going to jump back and answer those couple questions about color real quick. Standard color used for links. Yes, it is usually blue. The color of blue will sometimes change, but generally you want to leave it as blue. If you click on a hyperlink, it will sometimes then change the color to denote to a user that you have clicked on it, that I have found less standardization of what color it changes to. But the main standard color for hyperlink to appear first is blue.
And then seeing more white text on dark backgrounds. While this still passes the color contrast, some users have said that it is hard for them to read. I would say while it still passes accessibility guidelines, I would probably avoid using a dark colored background if possible. Users generally have the option, if they're looking at it on a screen, then there's an option to usually toggle to a dark mode. If that is helpful for someone, it's usually an option for them, but it doesn't toggle back as easily from my understanding, so good question.
And while it still technically passes accessibility guidelines, I would avoid it. But that's just my personal recommendation based on some feedback I've heard directly from a small number of users. If other people have comments on that, I would love to hear. And then another comment, if you use standard red color against a white background in a regular size font, like size 11 or 12, it normally doesn't meet color contrast guidelines. I didn't mention this, but if text is bigger, it doesn't need to have as dark of color contrast and according to the checkers. So when text is smaller and it has a different color, it means a higher contrast. And so when, yeah, it's just a regular size that standard red doesn't often need it. So using a darker color or increasing the text size would be two ways to help fix that. Okey-dokey. And do I have the RGB for the blue color? I do not actually. Well, I could look that up. I will try to do that.
Amanda: It looks like later in the chat that was available, Leanne put it.
Jacqueline: Perfect. Okay. I'm trying to scroll through pretty quickly. Let me know if I am missing any questions, but I think I have covered most of them.
Amanda: There's one more at the end here, doesn't bolding rather than using a heading make a difference for screen readers?
Jacqueline: Yes, so you can. A lot of people kind of fake headers. And so they will make the text a bigger size and bold it so that to a visual user it appears like a heading. But if you don't actually select the text and then choose the heading style either in Word or Google Docs, then it doesn't select it, doesn't designate it as a heading to a screen reader. So you do need to specifically designate it as a header. And if you're inward or even Google Docs, it defaults to what's called normal format. And you just need to change that to a header.
I didn't want to show all of these little examples just for time. And a lot of you probably know how to do it somewhat already, but I can try to share some of these specific steps and show an example at the end. And yes, designated emphasis for a screen reader to bold. When you bold a text, it does designate that to a screen reader and it makes sure that the user knows that it is emphasized text. So yes, thank you for clarifying, if I misunderstood your original question.
Okay. Other questions, I'll try to keep an eye on the chat. Coming back to captions, we kind of went through a lot of these, but I also saw that there was a tool placed in the chat as well for captions. Just a couple tips about captions. If you are creating the content yourself speaking clearly, slowly and close to the microphone will really help your captions so that you don't have to edit them as much later.
If you are creating your own captions, you do want to go through and edit them afterwards and just make sure that they are accurate. They are getting much more accurate and are doing a really good job, but sometimes punctuation or especially names sometimes and capitalization can be off or spelling of names specifically.
And going on my transcripts are separate from captions. And they benefit people with vision impairments or people who don't have access to video. They are a separate written document and they do not have to necessarily be verbatim accounts of the spoken word. They're usually very, very close, but they can be written out beforehand. So they may not be the exact same as the captions of a recorded video. But the transcripts are searchable by all users. And so that can be really helpful especially in educational materials, if you have something and you want to search for a term or a specific part in a video, that can be really helpful as well.
Alt-text is a written description of an image and it serves several functions. It is read by screen readers in place of images. And it's also displayed in browsers if the image file doesn't load properly. Or if the user has chosen not to view images, and that might be because they have limited internet or a bandwidth. And to add alt-text, most often you add the image, right click, and then there's an option to add alternative text. When you're adding your descriptions, try to consider the context. Is it purely decorative? You may want to market as decorative depending... or sorry, you may be able to specifically market as decorative depending on what software you're using or you can put in an option, which is a quote space quote, put that in a text and you'll put that in the placeholder of the alt-text. And that would essentially skip the image. That is only if it's decorative and it doesn't provide any context.
So oftentimes that's like a logo or something. If a logo is repeated on every single page, a user would not want alt-text to be read out every single page for that logo, so you could skip that. If it does add context or information, then you want to actually put in useful alt-text, you want to be concise. Usually it's about one or two sentences, that's for a normal image. Charts need to be longer often. But you don't want to repeat information that's provided elsewhere. So if it's talking about the image and the text and it shares some information, you don't need to repeat that ever.
You also want to try to be objective. You don't want to interpret or analyze the image. You just want to be as kind of objective as possible, that can help with being concise as well. And then trying to apply the same writing style as well as the surrounding text. If it's a really scientific document, your alt-text might be more scientific. If it is writing textbook and it's more creative writing, for example, and then there's an image, you can be maybe a little bit more creative with your writing style. And then describing charts and graphs, this one gets a little bit more complicated. There are a couple different options. If it's pretty simple, try to just share the information that is in the chart or the graph that is trying to be shared with the user.
Another option, if it's just really complicated and too much, you can describe it and then link to the full data tables from the text or in an appendix as well. There may be some questions about alt-text, but you guys already did. You had the option to do a homework assignment, to write all tags for one of the images in the open textbook. And so I'm going to try to come back at the end, just look at some of those comments and share some feedback and look at those together, but I don't want to get derailed for time. And so yes, that was linked in the chat as well.
If you want to test your hand and you haven't yet, there are a couple different options where you can go and then I will go through and try to give you specific feedback by writing a comment back to you. If you would like to and haven't yet, feel free to do that. Okay. Now I want to quickly note that there are many different formats of open textbooks. And they can include PDF, EPUBs, audiobooks, Pressbooks, many, many more. They all have different accessibility considerations. Some have the ability to enlarge text, reflow content based on screen width size and whether multiple columns are supported.
But ultimately, one of the things I mentioned earlier, one of the main takeaways is that you can usually save the textbook in multiple formats from the original document. And that's best to provide as many options as possible. For example, EPUB, which is short for electronic publication and online or HTML versions have certain advantages over PDFs. They can increase in or resize the text size. The text content will be reflowed if the text is changed. And it will also change based on the browser or window width, whether you're on a mobile device or on a laptop. And it can also allow users to change even font colors for contrast. And they both support vector images. Again, that get resized.
PDFs is one of the most common formats and it's created for the benefit of working universally across software and hardware. It stands for portable document format, if you didn't know that. And while it's hard to make PDFs fully accessible to screen readers, you can definitely. But PDFs do still have different advantages, including that they can maintain the original visual layout, which can be helpful for cited users or good for printing. And sometimes they can also sometimes reduce the file size as well. If someone is trying to load a document with lower bandwidth. And then they can be available offline as well.
Like I said, the takeaway, try to offer as many formats as possible. And here is, try to share one example of one within the open textbook library. And you can see that there are many different formats available. This is a really good option. And now I am no longer in full screen. Ah, there it goes. Okay. I'm also going to just speed through really quickly, some basic info on accessibility checkers. Because I want to make you aware of your existence of their existence and rather than fully understand each one, but they are really great resources. And then there are tons of resources on how to use each one out there as well.
Word and Adobe Pro both have built in accessibility checkers. In Word, you can open your document, click file, check for issues, and then check accessibility. And a sidebar pops up. It gives you kind of instructions on how to walk through everything. And those instructions are actually pretty easy to use most of the time. I've been pretty impressed with how they tell people to try to fix things. Adobe Pro also has a built in sensibility checker. And again, this is Adobe Pro, so not the free version. But you would open your document. If needed, you could add the action wizard to the toolbar and then you just click action wizard and make accessible. And it walks you through all of these different prompts. And again then a sidebar will pop up, will tell you different errors.
The PDF instructions I will say aren't always as useful as the Word instructions have been. But I've had pretty good luck either using the instructions that they send me directly to, or just going and doing a general web search for using the part of the accessibility checker that I'm using in Adobe.
And there are also checkers for online resources and HTML. So if it is an online document, the WAVE accessibility checker is my favorite. You have two options. You can either go directly to wave.webaim.org and paste in the URL that you want to evaluate. Or you can get a plugin and then you just pull up the page and then on your web browser there would be a little button where the plugin and you click it and it brings up again a sidebar showing you all the different errors. And it bears all considerations as well.
Tota11y is also a browser extension. This one I really like tota11y, I think it's great. And again, either on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, whatever browser you're using, just go and search for tota11y extension, and then you'll add it to your browser. And then again, any page that you're on, you just go up and click the little button in your browser and it brings up a menu at the bottom that then brings up a sidebar. If anyone has used those, or if you have other accessibility checkers that you really like or have worked really well, please put them in.
And while these are helpful tools, they don't always check everything. So the color contrast, more tools are starting to try to add color contrast into their checkers, but not all of them. I think Word is trying to now, but it depends on the version of Word that you have. And sometimes it will flag if you're using headers and maybe you skipped a heading level, so you have a heading two and then you have a heading four. Under heading two, it'll tell you that there's no heading three there. But if you just have a really long document and no headers are used, it won't always flag that.
Again, these are great tools, but you still need to know kind of what to look for yourself. And I would recommend looking through the document yourself first, just with your knowledge and then using a checker at the end kind of as a final step. I meant to put on this slide another, specifically a color contrast checker. I do have a link to a specific color contrast checker. It's one that you download as a software, but then it does work really well. I will try to share that with you guys as well. But if you have other suggestions, let me know.
Okay. Lastly, we only have just a couple more slides, but I wanted to end by really kind of just talking about self care. We have covered a ton of information in a small amount of time. You may or may not have already known a lot of this information, but it's still a lot to just think about and be aware of on top of all of the other work that you guys are doing. We can't be perfect at everything. And honestly, perfection is not really the goal. We know that 100% accessible doesn't really even exist.
Thinking about accessibility as a great first step and then learning and incorporating new skills always takes time. So just try to be kind to yourself, practice self-compassion and also just share that with others along the way. So if you help supporting others through that content or through the publishing side, just trying to share that compassion as well. It is a learning process.
We do have some resources here. These slides will be shared. So we wanted to compile some of the resources for you. A lot of the resources are already linked in your Pub101 unit one, including some really good information on creating alt-text descriptions and a checklist for accessibility. And then there are also some resources for me. I have one kind of main lib guide that these instructions for creating accessible documents are on that lib guide that has other resources for you as well.
This is a very long URL. I had it in a Bitly, but it wasn't working. I don't know what I did wrong. I'm going to try to copy and paste that into the chat. But if you could give me some feedback, I would love it. And this is under creative commons license, the slides are. So I had included that at the end. What questions do you have?
Amanda: Jacque, there is a question in the chat, and by the way thank you so much for all of that great content. You give us some great background information and some really great tools. And I know that personally it's going to be really helpful for me, so thanks again. Melissa's asking, "Am I correct that when saving from Word to PDF using the free version of Adobe can result in not all accessibility features coming over to the PDF, and is it crucial to use the save as Adobe PDF and not other options for saving as PDF, so kind of the process from going Word to PDF?"
Jacqueline: Yes, that is a good question. And I'll first preface this by I'm not an expert on this. I could learn more and dive into the nuances. But my understanding is that that is correct. I have seen sometimes very frustratingly, even PDFs that people have tried to make accessible. And then if someone opens them with just like the free version of Adobe, not all of those tags and different things, the accessibility features don't always come along with it, so that is, I have seen that.
I honestly don't understand all of the nuances why, but yes, I believe whenever you see ... so in Word, there are kind of two options. You can just do a file save and then manually change the file format to PDF and do that. That I believe is what often does not transfer some of the accessibility backend content. If you do ever see an option that is saved as Adobe PDF, as you referred to in the question, that is generally the best option to use. Because generally that has been something where they have worked specifically with Adobe to offer that option.
And then Adobe has tried to make sure that as much as possible comes through. I don't want to say that at 100% works. But it is a better option. If anyone else has more information on that, it actually is something that I've been meaning to look into a little bit. If I find anything different, I will certainly pass on that information and let you know. But if anyone else has more information on that.
Amanda: I think Leanne might have something to pass along or another question.
Leanne Urasaki: Actually, yes. I just wanted to chime in on the PDF conversation because I'm an instructional designer, so I work with this. I try to stay away from PDFs because they're the bane of my existence. But as I put in the chat, the big tip is if you're working with Word or Google as your source stock. If you're going to create a PDF from that, you definitely want to run the checkers and try to make your document as accessible as possible before you do that conversion. Because once it's in PDF form to remediate anything, it's very tedious and complicated and I try to stay far, far away from it.
But when you're working in Word especially, there's a couple different ways. If you do have the pro or the paid version of Adobe, you can install the Adobe ribbon into Word and that's going to create the best possible source stock for you. Now, if you're working with the free version of Adobe, still run the checker in Word first and everything, but when you go to convert it, you want to make sure you're using the save as PDF option, not the print to PDF option.
If you use the print to PDF option and it kind of... that's basically the printer that you're choosing, then it basically creates a scanned copy, kind of like you took it to your Xerox machine and scanned it in as a PDF and it's basically an image and Adobe will pick up nothing of any of the accessible features that you embedded into that document. So save to PDF or save as PDF is going to be your best option. There are some additional menu choices that talks about the tags and whatnot. I think I put in chat a couple bubbles up about there's the resource page from Word that walks you through that save as PDF process. But that's what I know about it, but as far as remitting PDFs, I know very, very little.
Jacqueline: Yeah, that is such helpful comment. I should have mentioned that first, make sure that your Word document is as accessible as possible and then save it to PDF, that's great advice. And then also coming back to the multiple formats thing, you still want your PDFs to be as accessible as possible. So still following all those guidelines, running the checkers. But if you do also have a secondary option, a PDF and an EPUB for example, then if someone really needs all of those different tags and things, then they can choose a different format. Yes, thank you very much Leanne for that answer to that question.
Amanda: We've got another question in the chat. Do you have any examples of how to deal with complex images like an actual textbook with a complex chart and how the author dealt with alt-text for that, or a website with a complex image, a faculty PowerPoint with complex tabular data, et cetera?
Jacqueline: Good question. I think the best is probably still to be in slideshow mode. But I'm going to go backwards to ... Sorry for the flashing. Close your eyes if you don't like flashing. Really quick, and I'm going to go back to the alt-text homework page and bring up the homework. Granted, because this has a range of images, including a chart. And so it's not the most complex chart, but it's still a pretty good example. I'm going to scroll through this document here. And here, let's see, can I make my screen a little bit bigger? Making it a little bit bigger, but kind of doing some weird formatting things.
Here is a chart, for example. This is kind of a good one that it can get kind of complex. And so I actually tried my hand and then I looked at the suggested alt-text of this. They were surprisingly similar. I was actually quite happy about that from my perspective, because alt-text, I will just say, it's a challenge and it can be subjective. But here is one. And so the example alt-text, if I right click and pull up the alt-text is, I'll try to show it even though it's grayed out in the background.
At the top here, it says college attendance demographics, only a fraction of the nation's 18 million undergraduates are traditional students. That to me is saying that's the main takeaway that they want you to get from this chart. They put it in the title, so the alt-text here starts with that. Only a fraction of the nation's 18 million are traditional students. And then it tries to be as concise, but as specific as possible to give the rest of the information. 7.5 million two year students, 2.4 million part-time students at four year schools, 0.9 million for profit students, 2.2 over the age of 21 and 5.2 million traditional students.
That's basically just listing then the specific numbers and the legend entries. I've heard that was a pretty good one and a pretty good example of how there's a lot visually going on, but it can still be condensed to a fairly short alt-text. That was a good one.
Sorry, go ahead.
Amanda: Is it important to also have a title for the chart?
Jacqueline: It depends. For example, the title of this chart is actually in the text above it. Because of that, we don't need to repeat it in the alt-text. If the title wasn't there, I would probably include it. I put pie chart showing only a fraction. It doesn't actually need, maybe they don't need to care that it's a pie chart. It's just a chart showing that only a fraction of that is. But some of these other ones were interesting I thought, some of them said, less than a third of the nation's known undergrads are traditional students, that I think it could be still useful.
Again, it's kind of that subjective part of it. But that could help show again kind of the main point of the chart. And then the other ones were a little bit simpler. But here's one that you could go really in depth or you could just say something like students learning in the classroom. I think I put something like students in a classroom looking at the teacher. But in some of these, while it might be useful, you definitely might not need to share the perspective, unless that was part of the context of the image. And it is 12:59, so I need to stop talking right now. But please let me know if you have more questions, I will do my best to answer them after or follow up with you.
Amanda: There are a few kind of remaining questions in the chat, and I think we can follow up with those after. But I hope you all will join me in thanking Jacque so much for sharing her expertise with us. And thank you all for joining us. It's really nice to know that we're not alone in learning about open text with publishing. We have each other to rely on.
One thing I wanted to pass long is that we do have homework for next week. We're hoping that you will review the anti-racist documents in digital publishing YouTube video before the next time we meet. Again, thank you all so much and we look forward to seeing you next week. Bye.
Jacqueline: Thank you. Bye.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This April 13, 2022, session is hosted by Amanda Hurford of the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI). Amanda is joined by guest speaker Jacqueline Frank of Montana State University for a discussion of accessibility and inclusion in OER.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Amanda Hurford (Scholarly Communications Director, PALNI)
- Jacqueline Frank (Instruction & Accessibility Librarian, Montana State University)
Amanda: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's session of the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Amanda Hurford and I am the Scholarly Communications Director for PALNI. And I'll be your host and facilitator for today. Just a little background about why I'm here and why I wanted to host today. I attended Pub101 for the first time back in 2019 when our OER publishing program was in its infancy. And we were trying to figure out if we could publish. And if so, how were we going to do that?
And I learned so much from attending these sessions and from reviewing all the modules. So now I'm serving on the Pub101 committee with Carla Myers and Amanda Larson and Karen and others. And it's really great to be on the other side today and helping out by facilitating this session. So soon I'll be handing it off to Jacque Frank from Montana State University to talk about accessibility and inclusion and OER. But a few comments just to kind of get us started.
As always we're going to leave time for your questions and lots of conversation hopefully at the end of today's session. And there may be lots of you who actually have experience with this topic, so we definitely invite you to share your experience and just sort of be part of the conversation and let us know what resources you use and how you have approached this topic in the past.
So a few housekeeping details, this webinar is being recorded and it's going to be added to the Pub101 YouTube list for the spring 2022 cohort. And we are committed to providing a friendly and safe and welcoming environment for everyone that is in line with our community norms. So if you could join us in creating a safe and constructive space, that would be wonderful. So that's it for me for now, I'm going to go ahead and hand things over to Jacque to talk about the topic for today, Accessibility and Inclusion in OER.
Jacqueline: Great. Thank you. And hello everyone. I am Jacque Frank, the Instruction and Accessibility Librarian at the Montana State University library in Bozeman, Montana. And I am really happy to be here with you to talk about accessibility today. And as a reminder, these slides will be linked from the course orientation after today's presentation, as well as it being recorded.
Okay. Today we are going to first acknowledge that there are lots of accessibility challenges, and then we're going to share some talking points about why accessibility matters so that we can promote the idea of just having an accessibility mindset. And then we're going to cover some of the specific best practices and how to use them as well as a few accessibility checkers that you might want to use. Then we'll briefly touch on some accessibility considerations for different types of different OER documents, such as PDF and EPUBs.
Finally, we'll share some resources and training options and include any that you might be aware of as well that you want to share with the group. Throughout this, if you want to unmute yourself or type in the chat box to share any information, ask questions, or respond to any of the other group questions that might come through, please feel free to do so along the way. I have just a couple good different questions. I'd like you to answer this in the chat, but first I'd like to ask you, what type of institution are you from, university, college, community college or other? And if it's other, maybe go ahead and throw it in there.
I'm seeing lots of universities, a consortium, state university, colleges, community colleges. I'll have to add consortia for next time, because that definitely tends to be one. We definitely have a mix for sure and from people from all over, so that's kind of what I expected. Great. Well, feel free to keep adding in the chat if you haven't yet. But we are going to talk about some of the challenges that no matter where you're at or what type of institution you're at, it can be a challenge to get authors to create accessible materials sometimes.
And Christina will talk a little bit more next week about some other challenges as well, but it can be more challenging to get people to create accessible materials than it can be to get them thinking about creating more diverse materials. So for what it's worth, accessibility is just something that in my experience it's often because people think of it as kind of an add-on or something to do with the end. That's why I like to talk about having an accessibility mindset from the beginning.
And another one of the biggest challenges that I see is time. I'm sure you're all aware of that. Both having time to learn about accessibility on the front end and then the time it takes to ensure that your materials are accessible. And then it also never ends because there isn't really such thing as being 100% accessible. And so there are always updates that you can make. But for our purposes, we're going to be talking about having that mindset, knowing some of the best practices and then some resources to help ensure that the content you're getting from different people meets those guidelines.
I will say that the extra time it takes to make the documents accessible decreases over time. The more you get used to doing it as an integral part of the process. So that's definitely something that you can also share with different instructors or different people creating OER and know that yourself if you are creating open educational resources yourself. Lastly, I see many folks fall into a trap of thinking it doesn't have a big impact and therefore it might not be worth the extra time it takes. But we're going to debunk that shortly, just a minute.
But first, I think I went backwards on my slides. Oh no, I didn't. Sorry, I thought I was showing this slide first. As you can see, these were some of the challenges that we just talked about. Okay. First I want to briefly outline what we mean by accessibility and how that is different from universal design and inclusive design. And that's going to be situated within the context of what's covered within your unit one in Pub101. So to review the definitions of universal design and inclusive design that are included, universal design is the process of creating products that are usable by people with the widest range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations.
Inclusive design then means that you're creating a lot of different ways for people to participate, so that as many people as possible feel as though they can belong. However, inclusive design doesn't mean designing one thing for all people. Sorry, at first accessibility then often refers to the design of products, devices, services, and environments to be usable by people with disabilities. So while they do have some differences, really they have a shared goal. And that if we think about accessibility, universal design, inclusive design from the beginning, it can help design content in a way the users can access more easily, which is ultimately the goal of all three mindsets.
Let's talk about how to have an accessibility mindset, which does come with an understanding of why accessibility matters and how many people actually benefit from it. But first, next, I want you to answer again in the chat. Are you mostly supporting other textbook authors or are you authoring content yourself? Both, supporting others. I see mostly supporting others. Some both, definitely some authoring content though, a bit of both, actually supporting. So again, a mix. Great. Thank you. Ultimately, one of the goals of creating open textbooks is so that they can be accessed by more people with fewer barriers.
Sorry. It turns out that one in five are about 19% of undergrad students report having a disability. And about one in four or 26% of people in the US live with a disability. However, if you really think about it, 100% of people will experience a disability at some time in their life. And that's according to Access Lab and that's likely sometimes during their education and that's because disability can be permanent, temporary or situational. So even having a bad ear infection can limit someone's hearing temporarily and situational disabilities can range from just being in a loud environment or even to being extremely sleepy, which can impair your focus and performance.
And we must also acknowledge and understand that accessibility is a spectrum. There's a huge variety of assistive technologies, even down to classes and contacts. It's all the way up to screen readers and mobility and hearing aids. We obviously cannot cover them all. But if you have interesting examples of assistive technology, feel free to share them in the chat as well.
And because accessibility is a spectrum, what works for one person, it doesn't for another person. And that again is a challenge. Ultimately when we're thinking about OER and publishing, providing as many formats as possible is a best practice that allows users to choose what works for them. We'll see some differences between different documents. But for example, there can be different ways that a user would use an EPUB versus a PDF. So offering both options allows the user to choose again what works best for them.
And that option is an option when you go to publish a textbook, it can be done from Google Docs or Word and Pressbooks. You can just save it in different formats. And ultimately accessibility benefits everyone in the end. While certain things are designed specifically for people with disabilities. For example, curb cuts and automatic door openers were designed for people with mobility aids. But many people use those on a daily basis when we're pushing a shopping cart or a stroller. And another example, using headers helps structure a document so that users can navigate by section. If someone is using a screen reader, they can jump between the headings, but it also helps visual users just by breaking up the content as well.
Captions help people who have hearing impairments, but also allow people to follow along better or watch a video in a noisy environment if they don't have headphones. Transcripts is another one that allows users to read the content without seeing a video. And that could be helpful for some people who don't have really good internet connection or bandwidth, and could also be read using glasses, magnification, a screen reader, braille, or other assistive technology. By doing these things, it allows all of us and all users to benefit.
Okay. Let's dig into a few specific accessibility best practices. But first I have our last poll. I want to ask you how much accessibility and/or experience do you have? Zero, low, moderate or advanced. It's moderate, low, moderate, couple zeros in there. No one's saying advanced yet. I feel like people are scared to say they have advanced knowledge, I'm even scared to say I have advanced knowledge sometimes. Well, great.
Well, even for those of you who have moderate knowledge, hopefully you will learn something new and also put some of these talking points in your back pocket, if you are helping other people who are publishing. Because ultimately who's responsible? Generally the creator or the author of the content is responsible for meeting accessibility guidelines. However, publishers also want to make sure that the content that they publish is accessible. That requires knowing at least what to look for and then providing that knowledge and resources back to authors if needed.
If you have more support than that for accessibility, great, that's awesome. But I'm guessing that a lot of you might not. So a lot of it is, again, knowing what to look for, knowing these standards and then sharing this information back with the creator or the author. And then working through that process so that you can get an accessible product that then you can publish. We can't cover them all, but we're going to talk about a lot of the most common best practices from WCAG. Oops, and I thought I updated that, it's 2.1 now, the web content accessibility guidelines from W3C. And this is the industry standard and we are going to start with headings. We're going to start by talking about headings, hyperlinks, color contrast, captions, transcripts, and alt-text.
First let's take a look at headings. Heading styles are a formatting tool. They are used to separate sections of a document or a textbook so that users and screen readers can navigate through the sections quickly. And it helps organize the document as well. The importance of having a well structured textbook is also covered in your unit one and headings help provide the structure of that textbook. They should be applied in outline format. And so the title of the textbook would be a heading one. Then the next would be like the chapter titles and then any sub chapters or subsections of each chapter would be heading three and so on.
Usually you only have one heading one, but you can have multiple heading twos. And then under heading two, you could also have multiple heading threes for example. To do this in Word, you simply highlight the information and then you can choose the heading style from the top ribbon. Yes. Also, and in Google docs, I'm looking at the chat, there's also headings, no matter where you're creating it, there will be an option to apply the heading. Usually you just select the text that you want. And then in both Word and in Google Docs, it's up on the menu, up at the top. And if anyone has other options for other software videos, please feel free to add it in the chat like you are doing.
For hyperlinks, you want the users to know where the link is going to take them and avoid pasting the entire long URL, which is just string of special characters. And you also want to avoid using click here as a link. And instead you want the link to be the title of the content itself or what the user is going to do. If you would say, go to the Huffington Post, or then the Huffington Post would be the name of the hyperlink or the text that appears as hyperlink. Or another example is to contact us or to email us, have email us actually be the link rather than email us from and then giving the link.
And again, so for hyperlinks, usually write out the text you want to appear, highlight that text, right click on it. And then there's usually an option to choose a link or a hyperlink. And then you get to put in the URL behind it. And I see it down there, does the size of the hyperlink matter? The size of the actual URL that's going behind the text does not matter. The text that you link, so the text that appears as the link, you want that to be as short as possible but that is still descriptive. It can be a few words definitely.
But what you want to avoid is probably more than one line being a hyperlink, because if it crosses over and is more than one line and there's show right next to each other, it can just get really hard to read with an underline. But if it's a couple words and it crosses a line, it wraps the text to the next line, but it's still only a couple words, that's okay. I hope that answers your question. If it confused it more, just let me know.
And so when thinking about color, we want to ensure that high color contrast of text and diagrams and charts, we just want to ensure that the color contrast is high enough. And also you don't want to use color alone to convey meaning. So for example, if you wanted to highlight an important part of the text, don't just make it a different color of text. You would also want to make it bold and so that if someone was color blind and would also see that emphasis.
For color contrast, there are some accessibility checkers that can be used to check this. And I have those included at the end. If you're just using straight black and white text or navy blue and white, really something that you know is really high contrast, then that's okay to start with. But then as you start using more colors, then there are some checkers that you can use.
Captions benefit people with hearing impairments, and also people who don't have access to audio, or people who use English as a second language, or in noisy environments or quiet environments, and we can generate automatic captions for videos using YouTube. And there are now many other software programs that are catching on and integrating transcripts. We have live transcription as an option through Zoom that users can choose to turn on if they want to, PowerPoint is now offering options. But generally you're going to be publishing content, so the video content will already be created. And you just need to ensure that that content has the captions as well.
And I saw just a question here about color contract. Is there a standard color used for links and then seeing more white text on dark backgrounds. Is this an accessibility concern? I'm going to jump back and answer those couple questions about color real quick. Standard color used for links. Yes, it is usually blue. The color of blue will sometimes change, but generally you want to leave it as blue. If you click on a hyperlink, it will sometimes then change the color to denote to a user that you have clicked on it, that I have found less standardization of what color it changes to. But the main standard color for hyperlink to appear first is blue.
And then seeing more white text on dark backgrounds. While this still passes the color contrast, some users have said that it is hard for them to read. I would say while it still passes accessibility guidelines, I would probably avoid using a dark colored background if possible. Users generally have the option, if they're looking at it on a screen, then there's an option to usually toggle to a dark mode. If that is helpful for someone, it's usually an option for them, but it doesn't toggle back as easily from my understanding, so good question.
And while it still technically passes accessibility guidelines, I would avoid it. But that's just my personal recommendation based on some feedback I've heard directly from a small number of users. If other people have comments on that, I would love to hear. And then another comment, if you use standard red color against a white background in a regular size font, like size 11 or 12, it normally doesn't meet color contrast guidelines. I didn't mention this, but if text is bigger, it doesn't need to have as dark of color contrast and according to the checkers. So when text is smaller and it has a different color, it means a higher contrast. And so when, yeah, it's just a regular size that standard red doesn't often need it. So using a darker color or increasing the text size would be two ways to help fix that. Okey-dokey. And do I have the RGB for the blue color? I do not actually. Well, I could look that up. I will try to do that.
Amanda: It looks like later in the chat that was available, Leanne put it.
Jacqueline: Perfect. Okay. I'm trying to scroll through pretty quickly. Let me know if I am missing any questions, but I think I have covered most of them.
Amanda: There's one more at the end here, doesn't bolding rather than using a heading make a difference for screen readers?
Jacqueline: Yes, so you can. A lot of people kind of fake headers. And so they will make the text a bigger size and bold it so that to a visual user it appears like a heading. But if you don't actually select the text and then choose the heading style either in Word or Google Docs, then it doesn't select it, doesn't designate it as a heading to a screen reader. So you do need to specifically designate it as a header. And if you're inward or even Google Docs, it defaults to what's called normal format. And you just need to change that to a header.
I didn't want to show all of these little examples just for time. And a lot of you probably know how to do it somewhat already, but I can try to share some of these specific steps and show an example at the end. And yes, designated emphasis for a screen reader to bold. When you bold a text, it does designate that to a screen reader and it makes sure that the user knows that it is emphasized text. So yes, thank you for clarifying, if I misunderstood your original question.
Okay. Other questions, I'll try to keep an eye on the chat. Coming back to captions, we kind of went through a lot of these, but I also saw that there was a tool placed in the chat as well for captions. Just a couple tips about captions. If you are creating the content yourself speaking clearly, slowly and close to the microphone will really help your captions so that you don't have to edit them as much later.
If you are creating your own captions, you do want to go through and edit them afterwards and just make sure that they are accurate. They are getting much more accurate and are doing a really good job, but sometimes punctuation or especially names sometimes and capitalization can be off or spelling of names specifically.
And going on my transcripts are separate from captions. And they benefit people with vision impairments or people who don't have access to video. They are a separate written document and they do not have to necessarily be verbatim accounts of the spoken word. They're usually very, very close, but they can be written out beforehand. So they may not be the exact same as the captions of a recorded video. But the transcripts are searchable by all users. And so that can be really helpful especially in educational materials, if you have something and you want to search for a term or a specific part in a video, that can be really helpful as well.
Alt-text is a written description of an image and it serves several functions. It is read by screen readers in place of images. And it's also displayed in browsers if the image file doesn't load properly. Or if the user has chosen not to view images, and that might be because they have limited internet or a bandwidth. And to add alt-text, most often you add the image, right click, and then there's an option to add alternative text. When you're adding your descriptions, try to consider the context. Is it purely decorative? You may want to market as decorative depending... or sorry, you may be able to specifically market as decorative depending on what software you're using or you can put in an option, which is a quote space quote, put that in a text and you'll put that in the placeholder of the alt-text. And that would essentially skip the image. That is only if it's decorative and it doesn't provide any context.
So oftentimes that's like a logo or something. If a logo is repeated on every single page, a user would not want alt-text to be read out every single page for that logo, so you could skip that. If it does add context or information, then you want to actually put in useful alt-text, you want to be concise. Usually it's about one or two sentences, that's for a normal image. Charts need to be longer often. But you don't want to repeat information that's provided elsewhere. So if it's talking about the image and the text and it shares some information, you don't need to repeat that ever.
You also want to try to be objective. You don't want to interpret or analyze the image. You just want to be as kind of objective as possible, that can help with being concise as well. And then trying to apply the same writing style as well as the surrounding text. If it's a really scientific document, your alt-text might be more scientific. If it is writing textbook and it's more creative writing, for example, and then there's an image, you can be maybe a little bit more creative with your writing style. And then describing charts and graphs, this one gets a little bit more complicated. There are a couple different options. If it's pretty simple, try to just share the information that is in the chart or the graph that is trying to be shared with the user.
Another option, if it's just really complicated and too much, you can describe it and then link to the full data tables from the text or in an appendix as well. There may be some questions about alt-text, but you guys already did. You had the option to do a homework assignment, to write all tags for one of the images in the open textbook. And so I'm going to try to come back at the end, just look at some of those comments and share some feedback and look at those together, but I don't want to get derailed for time. And so yes, that was linked in the chat as well.
If you want to test your hand and you haven't yet, there are a couple different options where you can go and then I will go through and try to give you specific feedback by writing a comment back to you. If you would like to and haven't yet, feel free to do that. Okay. Now I want to quickly note that there are many different formats of open textbooks. And they can include PDF, EPUBs, audiobooks, Pressbooks, many, many more. They all have different accessibility considerations. Some have the ability to enlarge text, reflow content based on screen width size and whether multiple columns are supported.
But ultimately, one of the things I mentioned earlier, one of the main takeaways is that you can usually save the textbook in multiple formats from the original document. And that's best to provide as many options as possible. For example, EPUB, which is short for electronic publication and online or HTML versions have certain advantages over PDFs. They can increase in or resize the text size. The text content will be reflowed if the text is changed. And it will also change based on the browser or window width, whether you're on a mobile device or on a laptop. And it can also allow users to change even font colors for contrast. And they both support vector images. Again, that get resized.
PDFs is one of the most common formats and it's created for the benefit of working universally across software and hardware. It stands for portable document format, if you didn't know that. And while it's hard to make PDFs fully accessible to screen readers, you can definitely. But PDFs do still have different advantages, including that they can maintain the original visual layout, which can be helpful for cited users or good for printing. And sometimes they can also sometimes reduce the file size as well. If someone is trying to load a document with lower bandwidth. And then they can be available offline as well.
Like I said, the takeaway, try to offer as many formats as possible. And here is, try to share one example of one within the open textbook library. And you can see that there are many different formats available. This is a really good option. And now I am no longer in full screen. Ah, there it goes. Okay. I'm also going to just speed through really quickly, some basic info on accessibility checkers. Because I want to make you aware of your existence of their existence and rather than fully understand each one, but they are really great resources. And then there are tons of resources on how to use each one out there as well.
Word and Adobe Pro both have built in accessibility checkers. In Word, you can open your document, click file, check for issues, and then check accessibility. And a sidebar pops up. It gives you kind of instructions on how to walk through everything. And those instructions are actually pretty easy to use most of the time. I've been pretty impressed with how they tell people to try to fix things. Adobe Pro also has a built in sensibility checker. And again, this is Adobe Pro, so not the free version. But you would open your document. If needed, you could add the action wizard to the toolbar and then you just click action wizard and make accessible. And it walks you through all of these different prompts. And again then a sidebar will pop up, will tell you different errors.
The PDF instructions I will say aren't always as useful as the Word instructions have been. But I've had pretty good luck either using the instructions that they send me directly to, or just going and doing a general web search for using the part of the accessibility checker that I'm using in Adobe.
And there are also checkers for online resources and HTML. So if it is an online document, the WAVE accessibility checker is my favorite. You have two options. You can either go directly to wave.webaim.org and paste in the URL that you want to evaluate. Or you can get a plugin and then you just pull up the page and then on your web browser there would be a little button where the plugin and you click it and it brings up again a sidebar showing you all the different errors. And it bears all considerations as well.
Tota11y is also a browser extension. This one I really like tota11y, I think it's great. And again, either on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, whatever browser you're using, just go and search for tota11y extension, and then you'll add it to your browser. And then again, any page that you're on, you just go up and click the little button in your browser and it brings up a menu at the bottom that then brings up a sidebar. If anyone has used those, or if you have other accessibility checkers that you really like or have worked really well, please put them in.
And while these are helpful tools, they don't always check everything. So the color contrast, more tools are starting to try to add color contrast into their checkers, but not all of them. I think Word is trying to now, but it depends on the version of Word that you have. And sometimes it will flag if you're using headers and maybe you skipped a heading level, so you have a heading two and then you have a heading four. Under heading two, it'll tell you that there's no heading three there. But if you just have a really long document and no headers are used, it won't always flag that.
Again, these are great tools, but you still need to know kind of what to look for yourself. And I would recommend looking through the document yourself first, just with your knowledge and then using a checker at the end kind of as a final step. I meant to put on this slide another, specifically a color contrast checker. I do have a link to a specific color contrast checker. It's one that you download as a software, but then it does work really well. I will try to share that with you guys as well. But if you have other suggestions, let me know.
Okay. Lastly, we only have just a couple more slides, but I wanted to end by really kind of just talking about self care. We have covered a ton of information in a small amount of time. You may or may not have already known a lot of this information, but it's still a lot to just think about and be aware of on top of all of the other work that you guys are doing. We can't be perfect at everything. And honestly, perfection is not really the goal. We know that 100% accessible doesn't really even exist.
Thinking about accessibility as a great first step and then learning and incorporating new skills always takes time. So just try to be kind to yourself, practice self-compassion and also just share that with others along the way. So if you help supporting others through that content or through the publishing side, just trying to share that compassion as well. It is a learning process.
We do have some resources here. These slides will be shared. So we wanted to compile some of the resources for you. A lot of the resources are already linked in your Pub101 unit one, including some really good information on creating alt-text descriptions and a checklist for accessibility. And then there are also some resources for me. I have one kind of main lib guide that these instructions for creating accessible documents are on that lib guide that has other resources for you as well.
This is a very long URL. I had it in a Bitly, but it wasn't working. I don't know what I did wrong. I'm going to try to copy and paste that into the chat. But if you could give me some feedback, I would love it. And this is under creative commons license, the slides are. So I had included that at the end. What questions do you have?
Amanda: Jacque, there is a question in the chat, and by the way thank you so much for all of that great content. You give us some great background information and some really great tools. And I know that personally it's going to be really helpful for me, so thanks again. Melissa's asking, "Am I correct that when saving from Word to PDF using the free version of Adobe can result in not all accessibility features coming over to the PDF, and is it crucial to use the save as Adobe PDF and not other options for saving as PDF, so kind of the process from going Word to PDF?"
Jacqueline: Yes, that is a good question. And I'll first preface this by I'm not an expert on this. I could learn more and dive into the nuances. But my understanding is that that is correct. I have seen sometimes very frustratingly, even PDFs that people have tried to make accessible. And then if someone opens them with just like the free version of Adobe, not all of those tags and different things, the accessibility features don't always come along with it, so that is, I have seen that.
I honestly don't understand all of the nuances why, but yes, I believe whenever you see ... so in Word, there are kind of two options. You can just do a file save and then manually change the file format to PDF and do that. That I believe is what often does not transfer some of the accessibility backend content. If you do ever see an option that is saved as Adobe PDF, as you referred to in the question, that is generally the best option to use. Because generally that has been something where they have worked specifically with Adobe to offer that option.
And then Adobe has tried to make sure that as much as possible comes through. I don't want to say that at 100% works. But it is a better option. If anyone else has more information on that, it actually is something that I've been meaning to look into a little bit. If I find anything different, I will certainly pass on that information and let you know. But if anyone else has more information on that.
Amanda: I think Leanne might have something to pass along or another question.
Leanne Urasaki: Actually, yes. I just wanted to chime in on the PDF conversation because I'm an instructional designer, so I work with this. I try to stay away from PDFs because they're the bane of my existence. But as I put in the chat, the big tip is if you're working with Word or Google as your source stock. If you're going to create a PDF from that, you definitely want to run the checkers and try to make your document as accessible as possible before you do that conversion. Because once it's in PDF form to remediate anything, it's very tedious and complicated and I try to stay far, far away from it.
But when you're working in Word especially, there's a couple different ways. If you do have the pro or the paid version of Adobe, you can install the Adobe ribbon into Word and that's going to create the best possible source stock for you. Now, if you're working with the free version of Adobe, still run the checker in Word first and everything, but when you go to convert it, you want to make sure you're using the save as PDF option, not the print to PDF option.
If you use the print to PDF option and it kind of... that's basically the printer that you're choosing, then it basically creates a scanned copy, kind of like you took it to your Xerox machine and scanned it in as a PDF and it's basically an image and Adobe will pick up nothing of any of the accessible features that you embedded into that document. So save to PDF or save as PDF is going to be your best option. There are some additional menu choices that talks about the tags and whatnot. I think I put in chat a couple bubbles up about there's the resource page from Word that walks you through that save as PDF process. But that's what I know about it, but as far as remitting PDFs, I know very, very little.
Jacqueline: Yeah, that is such helpful comment. I should have mentioned that first, make sure that your Word document is as accessible as possible and then save it to PDF, that's great advice. And then also coming back to the multiple formats thing, you still want your PDFs to be as accessible as possible. So still following all those guidelines, running the checkers. But if you do also have a secondary option, a PDF and an EPUB for example, then if someone really needs all of those different tags and things, then they can choose a different format. Yes, thank you very much Leanne for that answer to that question.
Amanda: We've got another question in the chat. Do you have any examples of how to deal with complex images like an actual textbook with a complex chart and how the author dealt with alt-text for that, or a website with a complex image, a faculty PowerPoint with complex tabular data, et cetera?
Jacqueline: Good question. I think the best is probably still to be in slideshow mode. But I'm going to go backwards to ... Sorry for the flashing. Close your eyes if you don't like flashing. Really quick, and I'm going to go back to the alt-text homework page and bring up the homework. Granted, because this has a range of images, including a chart. And so it's not the most complex chart, but it's still a pretty good example. I'm going to scroll through this document here. And here, let's see, can I make my screen a little bit bigger? Making it a little bit bigger, but kind of doing some weird formatting things.
Here is a chart, for example. This is kind of a good one that it can get kind of complex. And so I actually tried my hand and then I looked at the suggested alt-text of this. They were surprisingly similar. I was actually quite happy about that from my perspective, because alt-text, I will just say, it's a challenge and it can be subjective. But here is one. And so the example alt-text, if I right click and pull up the alt-text is, I'll try to show it even though it's grayed out in the background.
At the top here, it says college attendance demographics, only a fraction of the nation's 18 million undergraduates are traditional students. That to me is saying that's the main takeaway that they want you to get from this chart. They put it in the title, so the alt-text here starts with that. Only a fraction of the nation's 18 million are traditional students. And then it tries to be as concise, but as specific as possible to give the rest of the information. 7.5 million two year students, 2.4 million part-time students at four year schools, 0.9 million for profit students, 2.2 over the age of 21 and 5.2 million traditional students.
That's basically just listing then the specific numbers and the legend entries. I've heard that was a pretty good one and a pretty good example of how there's a lot visually going on, but it can still be condensed to a fairly short alt-text. That was a good one.
Sorry, go ahead.
Amanda: Is it important to also have a title for the chart?
Jacqueline: It depends. For example, the title of this chart is actually in the text above it. Because of that, we don't need to repeat it in the alt-text. If the title wasn't there, I would probably include it. I put pie chart showing only a fraction. It doesn't actually need, maybe they don't need to care that it's a pie chart. It's just a chart showing that only a fraction of that is. But some of these other ones were interesting I thought, some of them said, less than a third of the nation's known undergrads are traditional students, that I think it could be still useful.
Again, it's kind of that subjective part of it. But that could help show again kind of the main point of the chart. And then the other ones were a little bit simpler. But here's one that you could go really in depth or you could just say something like students learning in the classroom. I think I put something like students in a classroom looking at the teacher. But in some of these, while it might be useful, you definitely might not need to share the perspective, unless that was part of the context of the image. And it is 12:59, so I need to stop talking right now. But please let me know if you have more questions, I will do my best to answer them after or follow up with you.
Amanda: There are a few kind of remaining questions in the chat, and I think we can follow up with those after. But I hope you all will join me in thanking Jacque so much for sharing her expertise with us. And thank you all for joining us. It's really nice to know that we're not alone in learning about open text with publishing. We have each other to rely on.
One thing I wanted to pass long is that we do have homework for next week. We're hoping that you will review the anti-racist documents in digital publishing YouTube video before the next time we meet. Again, thank you all so much and we look forward to seeing you next week. Bye.
Jacqueline: Thank you. Bye.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:13:34 Karen Lauritsen: Thanks Amanda!
00:15:07 Karen Lauritsen: Hello and welcome! Here's our Pub101 community list. Please add your name if you haven't yet ?: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.d9qzygxqhap9
00:15:33 Karen Lauritsen: Links to slides, videos and all the things are in our "one stop doc”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#
00:17:34 Kelly Smith: University
00:17:35 Heidi Winkler: University
00:17:35 ARIANA BAKER: university
00:17:36 Leanne Urasaki: Community College
00:17:36 Frances Andreu: university
00:17:36 Amanda Larson: University
00:17:37 Heather Myers: University
00:17:37 Jim Marquardson: University
00:17:38 Jessica Dai: University
00:17:38 Annelise Doll: University
00:17:39 Cindy Philpot: University
00:17:39 Jennifer Quinlan (she/her): University
00:17:39 Frances Whaley: comm coll
00:17:40 Michele Leigh: consortium
00:17:40 Laura Edwards: university
00:17:41 Mary Rausch: University
00:17:41 Marisa Petrich: University
00:17:41 Alessandro Cesarano: state college
00:17:41 Kristin Henrich: university
00:17:42 Regina Hierholzer: Community College
00:17:42 Louise Feldmann: community college
00:17:42 Anne Marie Gruber: university
00:17:42 Sherry Serdikoff: Univ
00:17:43 Lauren Ray: university
00:17:43 Lori Seawel: university
00:17:43 Raya Samet: University
00:17:44 Jason Yamashita: Community College
00:17:44 Amanda Hurford: Other: Consortium
00:17:44 Barbara Lynn: Community College
00:17:44 Debra Carney: Community college
00:17:44 Jane Scott: UNiversity
00:17:46 Arenthia Herren: Community College
00:17:46 Angelique Carson: Consortia
00:17:47 Elizabeth Clarage: Other (consortium)
00:17:47 Michele Pratt: community college
00:17:48 Lori-Beth Larsen: Community College
00:17:48 Sara Dustin: Community college
00:17:48 Ellan Jenkinson: Other - academic library comsortium
00:17:49 Susan Whitmer: University
00:17:51 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: University
00:17:52 Sumali Pandey: University
00:17:52 Jodie Morin: college
00:17:54 Stefanie Buck: university
00:17:54 Meghan Kowalski: public university
00:17:58 Daniela Elliott: Community College
00:18:00 Amanda Hurford: go consortia!
00:18:04 Cathy Germano: College moving to University
00:23:11 Kelly Smith: Supporting textbook authors
00:23:14 Kristin Henrich: supporting other authors
00:23:14 Frances Andreu: supporting
00:23:14 Michele Leigh: both
00:23:15 Frances Whaley: supporting
00:23:16 Arenthia Herren: supporting
00:23:16 Lori-Beth Larsen: Both
00:23:16 Leanne Urasaki: both
00:23:16 Angie Balius: others
00:23:17 Louise Feldmann: supporting
00:23:17 Amanda Hurford: suporting
00:23:17 Ariana Baker: supporting others
00:23:17 Lauren Ray: Supporting other authors
00:23:18 Sherry Serdikoff: both
00:23:18 Melissa Williams: Others
00:23:18 Annelise Doll: supporting others
00:23:19 Laura Edwards: supporting
00:23:19 Sumali Pandey: Both
00:23:19 Raya Samet: supporting
00:23:19 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: supporting others
00:23:19 Daniela Elliott: Authoring
00:23:19 Heidi Winkler: Supporting authors
00:23:19 Phoebe Daurio: supporting
00:23:19 Jason Yamashita: Mostly supporting others
00:23:19 Debra Carney: Others
00:23:20 Jim Marquardson: Authoring it myself
00:23:20 Stefanie Buck: Supporting others
00:23:20 Jennifer Quinlan (she/her): supporting
00:23:21 Cathy Germano: Supporting others
00:23:21 Martha Yancey: supporting others
00:23:23 Anne Marie Gruber: both
00:23:23 Jane Scott: supporting others
00:23:23 Barbara Lynn: Abit of both
00:23:24 Alessandro Cesarano: others
00:23:26 Susan Whitmer: supporting others
00:23:26 Jodie Morin: eventually supporting
00:23:36 Sara Dustin: Supporting
00:23:36 Genzeb Jan Terchino: support, nor experimenting to author using pressbooks
00:24:43 Amanda Hurford: Wow, those stats are striking
00:28:21 Kelly Smith: Moderate
00:28:22 Ariana Baker: moderate
00:28:23 Jason Yamashita: Moderate
00:28:23 Phoebe Daurio: low
00:28:23 Stefanie Buck: low
00:28:24 Leanne Urasaki: Moderate
00:28:24 Arenthia Herren: Moderate
00:28:24 Kristin Henrich: moderate
00:28:25 Michele Leigh: moderate
00:28:25 Lori-Beth Larsen: low
00:28:26 Annelise Doll: low
00:28:26 Angie Balius: low
00:28:26 Raya Samet: Moderate
00:28:26 Susan Whitmer: low
00:28:27 Louise Feldmann: moderate
00:28:27 Cathy Germano: moderate
00:28:28 Jodie Morin: low
00:28:28 Genzeb Jan Terchino: moderate
00:28:29 Amanda Hurford: low- mod
00:28:30 Michele Behr: low / moderate
00:28:30 Debra Carney: Moderate
00:28:31 Jessica Dai: Moderate
00:28:31 Lauren Ray: Low
00:28:31 Frances Whaley: low
00:28:31 Anne Marie Gruber: low
00:28:32 Jane Scott: low
00:28:32 Elizabeth Clarage: moderate
00:28:34 Sara Dustin: low/moderate
00:28:34 Barbara Lynn: zero
00:28:35 Heather Myers: low/moderate
00:28:35 Amanda Larson: moderate
00:28:39 Martha Yancey: low
00:28:39 Sumali Pandey: moderate
00:28:40 Laura Edwards: moderate. i'm deaf/hard of hearing
00:28:40 Alessandro Cesarano: moderate
00:28:40 Jim Marquardson: low
00:28:40 Mary Rausch: between low and moderate
00:28:40 Sherry Serdikoff: moderate
00:28:55 Michele Pratt: moderate
00:31:43 Leanne Urasaki: I still struggle with Title vs. Heading 1 in Google Docs.
00:31:59 Kelly Smith: +1 leanne
00:32:00 Laura Edwards: +1 Leanne
00:32:09 Laura Edwards: also in Microsoft word
00:32:26 Leanne Urasaki: I normally choose Heading 1 rather than Title in GDocs so that I have just 1 heading 1, but then Grackle Docs dings me for not having a title.
00:32:46 Jay Fulgencio: Thank you for the info
00:32:49 Karen Lauritsen: Related to headings, the OEN is developing a textbook building tool to help authors with creating consistent structure. We're working on it with the Editoria team, and it should be ready later this year.
00:33:46 Raya Samet: Karen, that's great news! Looking forward to having that as a resource.
00:33:54 Cathy Germano: Does the size of the hyperlink matter?
00:35:24 Cathy Germano: Yes that was good
00:36:50 Cathy Germano: Is there a standard color used for links?
00:37:30 Jodie Morin: I'm seeing more white text on dark backgrounds, such as in slide decks. Is this an accessibility concern?
00:37:30 Leanne Urasaki: Interestingly, the if you use the "standard red" color against white background in size 11 or 12 font, it normally does not meet contrast standards. This is a hard one for faculty. I'm always asking them to select a darker shade of red.
00:37:50 Cathy Germano: That is what I thought
00:38:00 Karen Lauritsen: Here's a tool I've used for captions in the past: https://otter.ai/
00:38:25 Cathy Germano: Do you have the RGB?
00:38:35 Cathy Germano: For the blue color
00:39:35 Kelly Smith: cathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Link_color
00:39:45 Leanne Urasaki: @Cathy - in Google Doc, the default blue used for links is "Cornflower Blue" RGB: 17-85-204
00:39:54 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: If you have to use white text on a dark background, making it bold can improve readability.
00:40:04 Kelly Smith: So it depends on the standard of the site. The color palette.
00:40:05 Cathy Germano: Thanks all!
00:40:13 Karen Lauritsen: Mozilla has a deep dive on why blue: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/deep-dives/why-are-hyperlinks-blue/
00:40:41 Mary Rausch: Doesn't bolding rather than using a heading level can make a difference for screen readers?
00:42:30 Kelly Smith: Does it designate it as *emphasized* for a screen reader to bold?
00:43:10 Leanne Urasaki: @Mary - Screen readers will differentiate between bold (emphasis) and heading styles. Headings are important because people using screen readers can skip from heading to heading.
00:43:10 Kelly Smith: thank you
00:46:01 Karen Lauritsen: We use rev.com for Pub101 transcripts: https://open.umn.edu/blog/categories/pub101
00:46:49 Jacqueline Frank: " "
00:49:36 Karen Lauritsen: Here's the homework doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1elFu0df3xaDXczoXrn4RXqE9VJWmW-Ls1dvR2jk_5mI/edit#
00:53:53 Barbara Lynn: This is such good content...will the presentation be sent to our registration emails?
00:55:17 Karen Lauritsen: Barbara, you can access the slides, recording and transcripts from our "one stop doc”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#heading=h.d89ulxay3q4x
00:55:43 Karen Lauritsen: The slides will be linked to the presenter name
00:55:46 Barbara Lynn: THANKS!
00:55:47 Leanne Urasaki: Tip - If creating PDF from Word/Google Doc, check and make your source doc as accessible before converting. Remediating PDFs can be complicated.
00:56:08 Laura Edwards: +1 Leanne. I've learned that the hard way
00:56:17 Leanne Urasaki: Me too!
00:59:29 Melissa Williams: Am I correct that, when saving from Word to PDF, using the FREE version of Adobe can result in not all accessibility features coming over to the PDF? Further, that it's crucial to use "Save as Adobe PDF" and not other options for saving as a PDF?
01:00:28 Leanne Urasaki: Resource page from Word: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-accessible-pdfs-064625e0-56ea-4e16-ad71-3aa33bb4b7ed
01:02:11 Amanda Hurford: Please feel free to share your questions and comments in the chat, or raise your hand and I can call on you to unmute and share them that way.
01:02:52 Melissa Williams: I know things are constantly improving, so although this was my understanding a few years back, I wanted to check. Thank you!
01:04:51 Melissa Williams: WORD, Leanne. I loathe PDFs.
01:05:07 Karen Lauritsen: Here's Jacquie’s feedback link: https://montana.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_diBIqo756IyIE0C
01:05:49 Lauren Ray: This was so helpful! I appreciate how specific and practical all of the best practices you covered are.
01:06:46 Laura Edwards: do you have any examples of how to deal with complex images? like an actual textbook with a complex chart and how the author dealt with alt-text for that? A website with a complex image. A faculty powerpoint with complex tabular data, etc.
01:06:48 Arenthia Herren: Instructional Designers, the OER Librarian's best friend! Love the IDs at my college :)
01:07:23 Kelly Smith: Charts and graph images yes
01:07:40 Melissa Williams: @Arenthia ❤️
01:08:11 Karen Lauritsen: Here’s the homework: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1elFu0df3xaDXczoXrn4RXqE9VJWmW-Ls1dvR2jk_5mI/edit#
01:09:28 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Thank you!!
01:09:52 Melissa Williams: And is it important to ALSO have a title or no?
01:10:30 Leanne Urasaki: Thanks, Jacquie for a great presentation. I have another meeting at the top of the hour. Have a great day everyone.
01:10:42 Cathy Germano: Isn't it too many characters in the alt text?
01:11:04 Karen Lauritsen: Before we wrap... We noticed that some of you were chatting about Pub101 on Twitter last week. Cool! #Pub101 if you'd like to continue the convo. You can also communicate with us and one another between sessions via Class Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.wwkyvlmzvx66
01:11:21 Melissa Williams: And also, the model doesn't name the style of the graphic (pie chart). I do know that the screen reader will speak, "image," but perhaps it's helpful to know it's a pie chart in case the image is later referenced as "the pie chart" in a verbal discussion?
01:12:20 Laura Edwards: yes - the subjectivity of describing complex images is what throws me off
01:12:23 Melissa Williams: Wonderful, thank you!
01:12:24 Cathy Germano: Thank you very much!
01:12:25 Louise Feldmann: Thank you! That was great!
01:12:25 Laura Edwards: thank you!
01:12:26 Jodie Morin: Good presentation!
01:12:29 Arenthia Herren: Thank you so much! Great presentation!
01:12:30 Amanda Larson: Thank you!
01:12:30 Angie Balius: Thanks everyone.
01:12:31 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you! Followups will be in the Class Notes
01:12:31 Ellan Jenkinson: Thank you! Great presentation!
01:12:32 Debra Carney: Thank you. Excellent presentation!
01:12:32 Raya Samet: Thanks so much
01:12:35 Barbara Lynn: So informative!
01:12:40 Amanda Hurford: Homework: Homework: Anti-Racist Documents in Digital Publishing >>> https://youtu.be/rh2wgezevBw
01:12:55 Sherry Serdikoff: thanks
00:15:07 Karen Lauritsen: Hello and welcome! Here's our Pub101 community list. Please add your name if you haven't yet ?: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.d9qzygxqhap9
00:15:33 Karen Lauritsen: Links to slides, videos and all the things are in our "one stop doc”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#
00:17:34 Kelly Smith: University
00:17:35 Heidi Winkler: University
00:17:35 ARIANA BAKER: university
00:17:36 Leanne Urasaki: Community College
00:17:36 Frances Andreu: university
00:17:36 Amanda Larson: University
00:17:37 Heather Myers: University
00:17:37 Jim Marquardson: University
00:17:38 Jessica Dai: University
00:17:38 Annelise Doll: University
00:17:39 Cindy Philpot: University
00:17:39 Jennifer Quinlan (she/her): University
00:17:39 Frances Whaley: comm coll
00:17:40 Michele Leigh: consortium
00:17:40 Laura Edwards: university
00:17:41 Mary Rausch: University
00:17:41 Marisa Petrich: University
00:17:41 Alessandro Cesarano: state college
00:17:41 Kristin Henrich: university
00:17:42 Regina Hierholzer: Community College
00:17:42 Louise Feldmann: community college
00:17:42 Anne Marie Gruber: university
00:17:42 Sherry Serdikoff: Univ
00:17:43 Lauren Ray: university
00:17:43 Lori Seawel: university
00:17:43 Raya Samet: University
00:17:44 Jason Yamashita: Community College
00:17:44 Amanda Hurford: Other: Consortium
00:17:44 Barbara Lynn: Community College
00:17:44 Debra Carney: Community college
00:17:44 Jane Scott: UNiversity
00:17:46 Arenthia Herren: Community College
00:17:46 Angelique Carson: Consortia
00:17:47 Elizabeth Clarage: Other (consortium)
00:17:47 Michele Pratt: community college
00:17:48 Lori-Beth Larsen: Community College
00:17:48 Sara Dustin: Community college
00:17:48 Ellan Jenkinson: Other - academic library comsortium
00:17:49 Susan Whitmer: University
00:17:51 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: University
00:17:52 Sumali Pandey: University
00:17:52 Jodie Morin: college
00:17:54 Stefanie Buck: university
00:17:54 Meghan Kowalski: public university
00:17:58 Daniela Elliott: Community College
00:18:00 Amanda Hurford: go consortia!
00:18:04 Cathy Germano: College moving to University
00:23:11 Kelly Smith: Supporting textbook authors
00:23:14 Kristin Henrich: supporting other authors
00:23:14 Frances Andreu: supporting
00:23:14 Michele Leigh: both
00:23:15 Frances Whaley: supporting
00:23:16 Arenthia Herren: supporting
00:23:16 Lori-Beth Larsen: Both
00:23:16 Leanne Urasaki: both
00:23:16 Angie Balius: others
00:23:17 Louise Feldmann: supporting
00:23:17 Amanda Hurford: suporting
00:23:17 Ariana Baker: supporting others
00:23:17 Lauren Ray: Supporting other authors
00:23:18 Sherry Serdikoff: both
00:23:18 Melissa Williams: Others
00:23:18 Annelise Doll: supporting others
00:23:19 Laura Edwards: supporting
00:23:19 Sumali Pandey: Both
00:23:19 Raya Samet: supporting
00:23:19 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: supporting others
00:23:19 Daniela Elliott: Authoring
00:23:19 Heidi Winkler: Supporting authors
00:23:19 Phoebe Daurio: supporting
00:23:19 Jason Yamashita: Mostly supporting others
00:23:19 Debra Carney: Others
00:23:20 Jim Marquardson: Authoring it myself
00:23:20 Stefanie Buck: Supporting others
00:23:20 Jennifer Quinlan (she/her): supporting
00:23:21 Cathy Germano: Supporting others
00:23:21 Martha Yancey: supporting others
00:23:23 Anne Marie Gruber: both
00:23:23 Jane Scott: supporting others
00:23:23 Barbara Lynn: Abit of both
00:23:24 Alessandro Cesarano: others
00:23:26 Susan Whitmer: supporting others
00:23:26 Jodie Morin: eventually supporting
00:23:36 Sara Dustin: Supporting
00:23:36 Genzeb Jan Terchino: support, nor experimenting to author using pressbooks
00:24:43 Amanda Hurford: Wow, those stats are striking
00:28:21 Kelly Smith: Moderate
00:28:22 Ariana Baker: moderate
00:28:23 Jason Yamashita: Moderate
00:28:23 Phoebe Daurio: low
00:28:23 Stefanie Buck: low
00:28:24 Leanne Urasaki: Moderate
00:28:24 Arenthia Herren: Moderate
00:28:24 Kristin Henrich: moderate
00:28:25 Michele Leigh: moderate
00:28:25 Lori-Beth Larsen: low
00:28:26 Annelise Doll: low
00:28:26 Angie Balius: low
00:28:26 Raya Samet: Moderate
00:28:26 Susan Whitmer: low
00:28:27 Louise Feldmann: moderate
00:28:27 Cathy Germano: moderate
00:28:28 Jodie Morin: low
00:28:28 Genzeb Jan Terchino: moderate
00:28:29 Amanda Hurford: low- mod
00:28:30 Michele Behr: low / moderate
00:28:30 Debra Carney: Moderate
00:28:31 Jessica Dai: Moderate
00:28:31 Lauren Ray: Low
00:28:31 Frances Whaley: low
00:28:31 Anne Marie Gruber: low
00:28:32 Jane Scott: low
00:28:32 Elizabeth Clarage: moderate
00:28:34 Sara Dustin: low/moderate
00:28:34 Barbara Lynn: zero
00:28:35 Heather Myers: low/moderate
00:28:35 Amanda Larson: moderate
00:28:39 Martha Yancey: low
00:28:39 Sumali Pandey: moderate
00:28:40 Laura Edwards: moderate. i'm deaf/hard of hearing
00:28:40 Alessandro Cesarano: moderate
00:28:40 Jim Marquardson: low
00:28:40 Mary Rausch: between low and moderate
00:28:40 Sherry Serdikoff: moderate
00:28:55 Michele Pratt: moderate
00:31:43 Leanne Urasaki: I still struggle with Title vs. Heading 1 in Google Docs.
00:31:59 Kelly Smith: +1 leanne
00:32:00 Laura Edwards: +1 Leanne
00:32:09 Laura Edwards: also in Microsoft word
00:32:26 Leanne Urasaki: I normally choose Heading 1 rather than Title in GDocs so that I have just 1 heading 1, but then Grackle Docs dings me for not having a title.
00:32:46 Jay Fulgencio: Thank you for the info
00:32:49 Karen Lauritsen: Related to headings, the OEN is developing a textbook building tool to help authors with creating consistent structure. We're working on it with the Editoria team, and it should be ready later this year.
00:33:46 Raya Samet: Karen, that's great news! Looking forward to having that as a resource.
00:33:54 Cathy Germano: Does the size of the hyperlink matter?
00:35:24 Cathy Germano: Yes that was good
00:36:50 Cathy Germano: Is there a standard color used for links?
00:37:30 Jodie Morin: I'm seeing more white text on dark backgrounds, such as in slide decks. Is this an accessibility concern?
00:37:30 Leanne Urasaki: Interestingly, the if you use the "standard red" color against white background in size 11 or 12 font, it normally does not meet contrast standards. This is a hard one for faculty. I'm always asking them to select a darker shade of red.
00:37:50 Cathy Germano: That is what I thought
00:38:00 Karen Lauritsen: Here's a tool I've used for captions in the past: https://otter.ai/
00:38:25 Cathy Germano: Do you have the RGB?
00:38:35 Cathy Germano: For the blue color
00:39:35 Kelly Smith: cathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Link_color
00:39:45 Leanne Urasaki: @Cathy - in Google Doc, the default blue used for links is "Cornflower Blue" RGB: 17-85-204
00:39:54 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: If you have to use white text on a dark background, making it bold can improve readability.
00:40:04 Kelly Smith: So it depends on the standard of the site. The color palette.
00:40:05 Cathy Germano: Thanks all!
00:40:13 Karen Lauritsen: Mozilla has a deep dive on why blue: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/deep-dives/why-are-hyperlinks-blue/
00:40:41 Mary Rausch: Doesn't bolding rather than using a heading level can make a difference for screen readers?
00:42:30 Kelly Smith: Does it designate it as *emphasized* for a screen reader to bold?
00:43:10 Leanne Urasaki: @Mary - Screen readers will differentiate between bold (emphasis) and heading styles. Headings are important because people using screen readers can skip from heading to heading.
00:43:10 Kelly Smith: thank you
00:46:01 Karen Lauritsen: We use rev.com for Pub101 transcripts: https://open.umn.edu/blog/categories/pub101
00:46:49 Jacqueline Frank: " "
00:49:36 Karen Lauritsen: Here's the homework doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1elFu0df3xaDXczoXrn4RXqE9VJWmW-Ls1dvR2jk_5mI/edit#
00:53:53 Barbara Lynn: This is such good content...will the presentation be sent to our registration emails?
00:55:17 Karen Lauritsen: Barbara, you can access the slides, recording and transcripts from our "one stop doc”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#heading=h.d89ulxay3q4x
00:55:43 Karen Lauritsen: The slides will be linked to the presenter name
00:55:46 Barbara Lynn: THANKS!
00:55:47 Leanne Urasaki: Tip - If creating PDF from Word/Google Doc, check and make your source doc as accessible before converting. Remediating PDFs can be complicated.
00:56:08 Laura Edwards: +1 Leanne. I've learned that the hard way
00:56:17 Leanne Urasaki: Me too!
00:59:29 Melissa Williams: Am I correct that, when saving from Word to PDF, using the FREE version of Adobe can result in not all accessibility features coming over to the PDF? Further, that it's crucial to use "Save as Adobe PDF" and not other options for saving as a PDF?
01:00:28 Leanne Urasaki: Resource page from Word: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-accessible-pdfs-064625e0-56ea-4e16-ad71-3aa33bb4b7ed
01:02:11 Amanda Hurford: Please feel free to share your questions and comments in the chat, or raise your hand and I can call on you to unmute and share them that way.
01:02:52 Melissa Williams: I know things are constantly improving, so although this was my understanding a few years back, I wanted to check. Thank you!
01:04:51 Melissa Williams: WORD, Leanne. I loathe PDFs.
01:05:07 Karen Lauritsen: Here's Jacquie’s feedback link: https://montana.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_diBIqo756IyIE0C
01:05:49 Lauren Ray: This was so helpful! I appreciate how specific and practical all of the best practices you covered are.
01:06:46 Laura Edwards: do you have any examples of how to deal with complex images? like an actual textbook with a complex chart and how the author dealt with alt-text for that? A website with a complex image. A faculty powerpoint with complex tabular data, etc.
01:06:48 Arenthia Herren: Instructional Designers, the OER Librarian's best friend! Love the IDs at my college :)
01:07:23 Kelly Smith: Charts and graph images yes
01:07:40 Melissa Williams: @Arenthia ❤️
01:08:11 Karen Lauritsen: Here’s the homework: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1elFu0df3xaDXczoXrn4RXqE9VJWmW-Ls1dvR2jk_5mI/edit#
01:09:28 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Thank you!!
01:09:52 Melissa Williams: And is it important to ALSO have a title or no?
01:10:30 Leanne Urasaki: Thanks, Jacquie for a great presentation. I have another meeting at the top of the hour. Have a great day everyone.
01:10:42 Cathy Germano: Isn't it too many characters in the alt text?
01:11:04 Karen Lauritsen: Before we wrap... We noticed that some of you were chatting about Pub101 on Twitter last week. Cool! #Pub101 if you'd like to continue the convo. You can also communicate with us and one another between sessions via Class Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.wwkyvlmzvx66
01:11:21 Melissa Williams: And also, the model doesn't name the style of the graphic (pie chart). I do know that the screen reader will speak, "image," but perhaps it's helpful to know it's a pie chart in case the image is later referenced as "the pie chart" in a verbal discussion?
01:12:20 Laura Edwards: yes - the subjectivity of describing complex images is what throws me off
01:12:23 Melissa Williams: Wonderful, thank you!
01:12:24 Cathy Germano: Thank you very much!
01:12:25 Louise Feldmann: Thank you! That was great!
01:12:25 Laura Edwards: thank you!
01:12:26 Jodie Morin: Good presentation!
01:12:29 Arenthia Herren: Thank you so much! Great presentation!
01:12:30 Amanda Larson: Thank you!
01:12:30 Angie Balius: Thanks everyone.
01:12:31 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you! Followups will be in the Class Notes
01:12:31 Ellan Jenkinson: Thank you! Great presentation!
01:12:32 Debra Carney: Thank you. Excellent presentation!
01:12:32 Raya Samet: Thanks so much
01:12:35 Barbara Lynn: So informative!
01:12:40 Amanda Hurford: Homework: Homework: Anti-Racist Documents in Digital Publishing >>> https://youtu.be/rh2wgezevBw
01:12:55 Sherry Serdikoff: thanks
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