Chapter 4 – Microsoft Word,
Creating Tables8:59 mins13.06.2012
[Screen shot of a Word document]
Daniel:Great. Well let’s move along, and we’ll move to Creating Tables.
Now again, this is not going to be hard Creating Tables. If you’re familiar with Office 2007, it works very similar as it does here in Office 2010. On the Insert tab at the top of my Word window here, if I click Insert, there is a mode here that is labelled Table, and this is for inserting a table.
[Presenter clicks on Insert - Table]
And it gives me a grid, and I can choose how many columns, or how many rows I want to insert.
[Presenter moves the mouse down and across the grid to show columns and rows in the table]
In older versions of Office, when you go to create a new table it just asks you for this in a dialogue prompt that says how many rows, and you say three, and how many columns, four, and then you can insert that. This is just an easier way that we’ve implemented, but essentially it’s the same. So I’m going to create my table.
[Presenter clicks on the grid and accepts the table size]
And what happens is that in Office, now this will be in a separate dialogue box when you right click on this table.
[Presenter demonstrates by right clicking on the table]
In Office 2007 you actually go to the table properties to find this same information. But in Office 2010 we have this design pad that appears, in Office 2007 as well, and it allows you to specify a number of items, and two of these are labelled Header Row and First Column.
[Presenter moves the mouse to indicate the Header Row and First Column checkboxes]
And by default these are checked. And what does that mean? Well it means that as I type in something here; let’s go to this row here.
[Presenter demonstrates on the table on the screen]
So I’m going to say, let’s say this.
[Presenter enters data into the table on the screen]
Let’s say we’re going to have a chart here with different types of animals, and in this case we’re just going to have a chart that has a count – actually we’ll remove this, and here this will be maybe the number, maybe we’re a veterinarian clinic and we’re going to say how many licences were issued for each quarter.
[Presenter enters more data into the table]
So that’s quarter one, this is quarter two, quarter three, quarter four, and then you can put in numbers that relate to each of these.
[Presenter enters numbers into columns of the table]
And what we’re doing is creating just a simple table. Now, why is this important? Well specifying, if I go back to what’s in the table, and I have Header Row, and First Column, if I’m using the screen reader, and I can’t visually see this, there are special commands that allow you to navigate across horizontally the columns, and vertically amongst the rows, and those quick commands are driven by the fact that both the column, the first column and the header have been identified, so it knows what to read to you, or what those columns are.
So if I’m using a screen reader, and I’m down here in this column labelled dogs, and there’s a number nine there, and I move to the next column, if there’s no column header specified and I want to input text there, it would say column two, or column B, and I would have no idea what the value is that was created for that.
[Presenter moves the mouse and points to the respective columns]
So I would have to scroll back up and say, “Oh gosh, what number am I supposed to put into this column?” What a Header Row specifies, the screen reader will actually say as I move across, it’ll say you’re in the first column. It doesn’t say it quite like that, but that’s the information that it conveys, that it’s birds.
So I know now what column I’m in, and it’s been given a description, because if you’re using a complex chart, you may not be able to remember what column B was, or column G was, and so without having to navigate all the way back to the beginning you can have that information available by specifying what the Header Row and what the First Column are, so that when you’re moving through the data of a document the screen reader with the hot key will always be able to reveal what the name of the row and what the name of the column is for you.
Yes, Ma’am?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Sure. The question is if you have any values like Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4, is that accessible? The answer is maybe. If it’s relevant to, and if it’s a nomenclature that is familiar with your job role, or what you’re doing, of course that would be acceptable, you would know what Q1 means. But it might not, and so that’s where sort of the usability of content comes in.
All of these techniques are really driven by making sure that information is there, but it doesn’t place any value on whether or not that information is usable by the person, and that goes to the comment that was made about knowing your audience, and knowing what type of documents you’re creating, and for whom. You can create a PDF with all the images in the world, but if it doesn’t have the correct information in there it won’t be useable. So it’s a good question. Technically, yes it’s accessible, but it may not be the most helpful if the information isn’t descriptive enough.
[Question being asked from the audience]
I’m demonstrating this in Microsoft Word. Obviously this applies to Excel, so you would do the same thing in Excel, you can specify a Header Row, space by row, and as well as columns, so you can do the same thing there. And one thing that’s nice about Office is you can move a worksheet from Excel into Word, and into PowerPoint, and it will retain all of that information for you.
Any other questions about Header Rows?
[Question being asked from the audience]
You know, that’s a really good question. The question was that sometimes we get documents that have multiple Header Rows. My understanding how that works is that it will look to the Header Row that is its immediate parent, so maybe there’s one Header Row at the top, and another Header Row about halfway down, maybe ten columns down, and so depending on if you’re above the second Header Row, it would then assume that the parent to that cell is the one that’s above it. If you had two Header Rows that were immediately adjacent to each other, my understanding again – don’t take this as gospel – but my understanding is that it would only read the first adjacent Header Row or header field. Great question. Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
It’s not going to confuse the screen reader; it may confuse the user.
[Daniel chuckles]
In this case because we’ve constructed that header, you may want to put a title in there or some other information so that you know what this row, the value of this row is.
[Presenter moves the mouse and points to the row in the table]
So if I were in this row and asked to describe this row, it would tell me nothing. So maybe I could put in a value here of number of licences.
[Presenter enters data into the table]
Something like that. But again that goes to the other question around making sure that the information is there. It’s more of a usability issue, it’s not going to confuse the screen reader because it’s going to look across and up from the data cells.