Chapter 14 – Question and
Answer Time9:55mins15.06.2012
[Screen shot of a WordPad document]
Daniel:So the question was, I was mentioning about blank spaces, and similarly not using tabs to tab across a page. So the way that you could do that is with Styles, so you could Style a piece of text. Let’s say you have two words, an example that happens frequently is let’s say like a business letter, where you have an address on one side and maybe a salutation on the other side, or a date that goes on one side of the page and the address information on the left side. Using tabs, basically a person has to navigate through each of those pieces, so you can create a character Style that only would apply to the words we highlight, instead of a paragraph Style, and that character Style you could say it justify, and so you would finish the first word and it would immediately jump you to the next word, even though visually there may be a lot of spacing between the two, a person listening, so the screen reader would see them as just data, text.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yeah. If you justify them using Styles in Word you can do that. In PowerPoint you could just create separate text blocks, it could be read separately.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yeah. That question was does the Accessibility Checker also check document metadata, and is that sort of like the authored by and last key words. I would have to double check. I’m not aware that it does. I believe it only checks stuff that is in the actual document, the rich text field, and not the metadata. But I would have to double check to make sure that there weren’t maybe a couple of those that it’s checking for. But I’m not aware of any.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yes. Tables and merged cells.
[Presenter closes the WordPad document on the screen, and the Narrator begins to speak]
There we go.
[Daniel laughs]
She has a mind of her own sometimes.
[Presenter clicks on Word and opens a document, then searches through the document]
So merged cells. The problem with merged cells is that once they do get merged a screen reader will lose the context of the span that it crosses, and it will see it as one. So for example if you’re navigating through a document and you have four merged cells, and let’s say in a Column there are four Rows that have been merged into one, it’ll skip that and then move to the next one, and it doesn’t communicate to you that you’ve just skips over four data cells to the next Row over, so you can completely skip over chunks of data and information when those cells are merged because a screen reader sees them as one, as one data point. And so I don’t know if there’s a best practice on how to get around that, because there’s obviously times when you need to have merged data cells.
But, you know possibly what you can do is actually just with merging cells, just leave the blank cells there, or duplicate the data in some way. Not as elegant looking, but from an accessibility point of view in, let’s say we have a single – this is where I see merged data cells happen the most frequently – so you’ve got ten pieces of data and there’s five and five, one is for morning, and one for afternoon, say maybe it’s a bus timetable, and you might collapse that into one data cell that says, “morning schedule/afternoon schedule,” and the next Column over, so you’ve got five points merged there, is that the screen reader gets just confused because it scrolls through the Column and thinks there’s only one cell there, and it’s not going to go through each of the accompanying cells next to it.
So another way to do it is just key in ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’ but have these individuals cells just have the data.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Sure.
[Question being asked from the audience]
[Presenter clicks on File – Check for Issues]
So the question is about backwards compatibility, creating a document in Office 2007, but being standardised on a format of Office 2003 .doc file for distribution. So we know that we can Save As the previous version, but it does some compatibility, and it does some work to actually have to make some changes in the report to be compatible to the format.
So one of the other options that I did mention earlier, if you click on the File tab from a Word document, and you go to the Check for Issues button again that we mentioned, to get to the Accessibility Checker.
[Presenter clicks on File – Check for Issues – Check Capability]
The third option here is Check Capability, and this will actually give you a report of things that it knows will be changed or broken if you were to save it in an earlier file format.
[Microsoft Word Compatibility Checker menu box appears on the screen]
So this is not going to prevent all of the things that you’ve mentioned, but it’s a great place to start, and saying, “Oh OK, I know now that the text boxes will be converted into a effects, rather than being standard text boxes. So something is going to happen there, maybe I want to rethink how I’ve created by text boxes.”
If there were other items like art graphics, sometimes charts and graphs will not be converted properly, so this is the first place I would start. Regarding the speaking issue, I don’t know if some of the speaking issue is caused by incompatible Styles, and whether or not that would be picked up by this tool or not, but my guess would be that that’s probably where it stems from, particularly as we were talking earlier about creating custom Styles, that that could be problematic when converting, because then the Styles were handled different in earlier versions of Word. So that’s where I would start.
Yes?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yes. The question is will the Accessibility Checker check for blank lines, and I’m going to go here and I’m going to open the Accessibility Checker again.
[Presenter clicks on File – Check for Issues – Check Accessibility]
And what I’m going to do is up here in the beginning; let’s say I wanted to move this paragraph down a little bit more.
[Presenter moves to a paragraph in the document on the screen]
And if I added several lines in order to do that.
[Presenter hits Enter several times to space out the document on the screen]
Move it down to the next page. On the Accessibility Checker now it shows under the Warnings section, you’ll see Repeated Blank Characters.
[Presenter moves the arrow to the Inspection Results on the right hand side of the screen, and selects Repeated Blank Characters, and then moves the arrow up and down to demonstrate]
And you can see all the places where we have Repeated Blank Characters. So if I click on this, there’s some there.
[Presenter clicks on 4 Characters and the document on the left side of the screen goes to the relevant point in the document]
There’s some at the end of that document, actually at the Title someone used blank characters to move the Title paragraph down, following the Title paragraph.
[Presenter clicks on various items to show the Repeated Blank Characters in the document on the screen]
So Styles should be used here, because as you are reading this with a screen reader it would say blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, as you were reading through it. And that basically you’d have to navigate through ten lines of nothingness, rather than just actually be able to read the Title and hit the down button.